"Thinking a university for the 21st century" is the name of the research group at San Dámaso University (Madrid) that promotes this book. Over the last few years this group has held regular meetings to discuss the raison d'être of the university: what is a university?, what is its purpose?, what episodes of academic life have been most inspiring in the past?, which difficulties does university life face today?, what will be the future of the university?, what do we want (...) it to become? These are some of the questions that have been asked over the years and which now take the form of writing. Several of the contributions contained in this book have a certain historical orientation: the authors examine the highlights of the search for and communication of knowledge, from antiquity to the present day. Great figures such as Socrates, Thomas Aquinas, Vitoria, Newman, Ratzinger and Ortega are featured in these pages. However, this is not a history of university life in the past, but a reflection on the future. The examples of the past set us on the road to the university of the future. Such is the intention of this group of researchers, linked to different Spanish universities and also experienced in other institutions outside our country: they have gathered here to discuss the university we want to build in our present, with an eye to the future. (shrink)

Human reproductive cloning has become the most palpable example of the globalization of science. Throughout the world, events and conjectures in the media, such as the birth and death in the United Kingdom of the cloned sheep Dolly and projects to clone human beings by Korean scientists, by members of the Canadian-based Raelian cult, and by the Italian physician Antinori in an undisclosed country, have galvanized the political will of individual countries to ban human reproductive cloning.Yet, international attempts to harmonize (...) policies in the area of biomedical ethics and human research, such as the 1997 Council of Europe’s Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine, and most recently, the United Nations’ efforts to adopt an international convention against human reproductive cloning, have been insufficient to trigger a substantial global policy design process on issues relating to these new technologies. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the vindicatory/unmasking distinction has so far prevented scholars from grasping a third dimension of genealogical inquiry, one I call possibilising. This dimension has passed unnoticed even though it constitutes a crucial aspect of Foucault’s genealogical project starting from 1978 on. By focusing attention on it, I hope to provide a definitive rebuttal of one of the main criticisms that has been raised against genealogy in general, and Foucauldian genealogy in particular, namely the idea that (...) Foucault’s genealogical project lacks normative grounding and is therefore ultimately incapable of telling us why we should resist and fight against the mechanisms of power it nevertheless reveals in an empirically insightful way. This conclusion, I argue, is mistaken because it conceives of Foucauldian genealogy exclusively as an unmasking or problematising method, whereas I claim that Foucault’s genealogical project possesses a possibilising dimension that provides his work with sui generis normative force. (shrink)

In response to the difficult social, economic and political problems that Colombia faces, such as inequality, discrimination, weak civil society—fuelled by illegality and drug trafficking—the Colombian Ministry of Education has embarked on an ambitious citizenship education program, with the hope of strengthening the role of education by establishing alternative solutions. This innovative program attempts to counteract Colombians' recourse to violence as a means of solving the country's endemic problems by developing the competencies of students, teachers and other participants in education. (...) The competencies include sound reasoning, care for others, communication skills, reflection on action, knowledge and active participation in classroom, school and community matters. This six-and-a-half-year-old project has started to create an educational system that takes into account many of the elements and relationships fundamental to the socio-political and moral behaviour of all involved. The paper indicates the horizons that this program opens up and discusses some of the problematic aspects that still need to be addressed for the program to be sustainable. (shrink)

A groundbreaking examination of Michel Foucault's history of truth. Many blame Michel Foucault for our post-truth and conspiracy-laden society. In this provocative work, Daniele Lorenzini argues that such criticism fundamentally misunderstands the philosopher’s project. Foucault did not question truth itself but what Lorenzini calls “the force of truth,” or how some truth claims are given the power to govern our conduct while others are not. This interest, Lorenzini shows, drove Foucault to articulate a new ethics and politics (...) of truth-telling precisely in order to evade the threat of relativism. The Force of Truth explores this neglected dimension of Foucault’s project by putting his writings on regimes of truth and parrhesia in conversation with early analytic philosophy and by drawing out the “possibilizing” elements of Foucault’s genealogies that remain vital for practicing critique today. (shrink)

In a recent blog post, Joshua Clover rightly notices the swift emergence of a new panoply of “genres of the quarantine.”1 It should not come as a surprise that one of them centers on Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, asking whether or not it is still appropriate to describe the situation that we are currently experiencing. Neither should it come as a surprise that, in virtually all of the contributions that make use of the concept of biopolitics to address the (...) current coronavirus pandemic, the same bunch of rather vague ideas are mentioned over and over again, while other—no doubt more interesting—Foucauldian insights tend to be ignored. In what follows, I discuss two of these insights, and I conclude with some methodological remarks on the issue of what it may mean to “respond” to the current “crisis.”. (shrink)

This chapter surveys essentialist and anti-essentialist theories of sex and gender. It does so by engaging three approaches to sex and gender: externalism, internalism, and contextualism. The chapter also draws attention to two key debates about sex and gender in the feminist literature: the debate about the sex/gender distinction (the distinction debate) and the debate about whether sex and gender have essences (the essentialism/anti-essentialism debate). In addition, it describes three problems that theories of sex and gender tend to face: the (...) Inclusion Problem, the Definition Problem, and the Exclusion Problem. Lastly, the chapter highlights why the division between essentialist and anti-essentialist accounts of sex and gender is not clear. (shrink)

Para Gadamer, «el ser que puede ser comprendido es lenguaje», afirmación que implicaría que toda comprensión se da en la lingüisticidad. Por otra parte, afirma que si hay lingüisticidad, hay interpretación. Ahora bien, la cuestión que queda en entredicho en su obra es si esto implica que dicha lingüisticidad es concomitante con la comprensión, es decir, si en toda comprensión hay una mediación lingüística. El presente artículo busca indagar en el análisis de la palabra poética y la filosófica, para desde (...) tal análisis ver las posibilidades de resolución de la relación entre comprensión e interpretación. (shrink)

We investigate the interaction between the product of invariant types and domination–equivalence. We present a theory where the latter is not a congruence with respect to the former, provide sufficient conditions for it to be, and study the resulting quotient when it is.

In this paper, I argue that the appropriate answer to the question of the form contemporary neoliberalism gives our lives rests on Michel Foucault’s definition of neoliberalism as a particular art of governing human beings. I claim that Foucault’s definition consists in three components: neoliberalism as a set of technologies structuring the ‘milieu’ of individuals in order to obtain specific effects from their behavior; neoliberalism as a governmental rationality transforming individual freedom into the very instrument through which individuals are directed; (...) and neoliberalism as a set of political strategies that constitute a specific, and eminently governable, form of subjectivity. I conclude by emphasising the importance that Foucault’s work on neoliberalism as well as the ancient ‘ethics of the care of the self’ still holds for us today. (shrink)

In this paper, I take issue with the idea that Michel Foucault might be considered a theorist of epistemic injustice, and argue that his philosophical premises are incompatible with Miranda Fricker’s. Their main disagreement rests upon their divergent ways of conceiving the relationship between reason and power, giving rise to the contrasting forms of normativity that characterize their critical projects. This disagreement can be helpfully clarified by addressing the different use they make of the genealogical method. While Fricker’s genealogy of (...) Testimonial Justice aims to ground her claim that reason and power can be neatly pulled apart, thus avoiding the reductionist and relativist conclusions entailed by Foucault’s genealogies, I argue that Foucault’s mature, overlooked definition of genealogy is based on a sophisticated distinction between games and regimes of truth, and is thus not vulnerable to these criticisms. Consequently, Foucault’s genealogical inquiries prove helpful for understanding issues that normally fall under the umbrella of epistemic injustice in a new light, while also allowing us to avoid some of the main objections that threaten Fricker’s project. (shrink)

Remarkably accessible, Affective Intelligence and Political Judgment urges social scientists to move beyond the idealistic notion of the purely rational citizen to form a more complete, realistic model that includes the emotional side of ...

El presente escrito se propone mostrar por qué Heidegger, luego del fracaso de su proyecto inicial, presenta la obra de arte como lugar en el que se esencia la verdad. Más específicamente, propone descubrir por qué el arte permite la superación de la idea de mundo propia de la filosofía moderna y de la ciencia. Para esto, se mostrará por qué la noción de tierra es crucial, como sustracción ocultante, y que es neurálgica para que la verdad se esencie, y (...) posibilite, así, la superación de la idea de mundo como objeto. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI) based clinical decision support systems (CDSS) are becoming ever more widespread in healthcare and could play an important role in diagnostic and treatment processes. For this reason, AI‐based CDSS has an impact on the doctor–patient relationship, shaping their decisions with its suggestions. We may be on the verge of a paradigm shift, where the doctor–patient relationship is no longer a dual relationship, but a triad. This paper analyses the role of AI‐based CDSS for shared decision‐making to better (...) comprehend its promises and associated ethical issues. Moreover, it investigates how certain AI implementations may instead foster the inappropriate paradigm of paternalism. Understanding how AI relates to doctors and influences doctor–patient communication is essential to promote more ethical medical practice. Both doctors' and patients' autonomy need to be considered in the light of AI. (shrink)

This paper presents a new interpretation of Michel Foucault’s critical project. It is well known that Foucault’s genealogical critique does not focus on issues of justification, but instead tackles “aspectival captivity,” that is, apparently inevitable limits of thought that constrain the agent’s freedom but that, in fact, can be transformed. However, it has not been recognized that, according to Foucault, critique can proceed along two distinct paths. In a key passage of “What Is Critique?,” Foucault states that critique is tasked (...) with questioning truth about its effects of power and with questioning power about its discourses of truth. We show that this “double movement” organizes Foucault’s critical project as a whole, giving it a significantly wider scope and a more complex structure than has been previously acknowledged. At the heart of the above-mentioned bifurcation lies an apparent tension between two contrastive roles Foucault assigns to truth-telling in the context of critique: on the one hand, truth-telling (as avowal) is a target of critique; on the other, truth-telling (as parrhesia) is one of critique’s methods. We argue that combining these two dimensions in a unified account is crucial for understanding and re-evaluating Foucault’s critical project as a whole. By showing that truth-telling remains an essential element of Foucauldian critique, this paper also rectifies some influential misinterpretations according to which Foucault’s critical project seeks to eliminate truth from the picture. (shrink)

Background While the theoretical benefits and harms of Artificial Intelligence (AI) have been widely discussed in academic literature, empirical evidence remains elusive regarding the practical ethical challenges of developing AI for healthcare. Bridging the gap between theory and practice is an essential step in understanding how to ethically align AI for healthcare. Therefore, this research examines the concerns and challenges perceived by experts in developing ethical AI that addresses the healthcare context and needs. Methods We conducted semi-structured interviews with 41 (...) AI experts and analyzed the data using reflective thematic analysis. Results We developed three themes that expressed the considerations perceived by experts as essential for ensuring AI aligns with ethical practices within healthcare. The first theme explores the ethical significance of introducing AI with a clear and purposeful objective. The second theme focuses on how experts are concerned about the tension that exists between economic incentives and the importance of prioritizing the interests of doctors and patients. The third theme illustrates the need to develop context-sensitive AI for healthcare that is informed by its underlying theoretical foundations. Conclusions The three themes collectively emphasized that beyond being innovative, AI must genuinely benefit healthcare and its stakeholders, meaning AI also aligns with intricate and context-specific healthcare practices. Our findings signal that instead of narrow product-specific AI guidance, ethical AI development may need a systemic, proactive perspective that includes the ethical considerations (objectives, actors, and context) and focuses on healthcare applications. Ethically developing AI involves a complex interplay between AI, ethics, healthcare, and multiple stakeholders. (shrink)

Science and Homosexualities is the first anthology by historians of science to examine European and American scientific research on sexual orientation since the coining of the word "homosexual" almost 150 years ago. This collection is particularly timely given the enormous scientific and popular interest in biological studies of homosexuality, and the importance given such studies in current legal, legislative and cultural debates concerning gay civil rights. However, scientific and popular literature discussing the biology of sexual orientation have been short-sighted in (...) representing it as objective, new scientific work. This volume demonstrates that the quest for the biological "cause" of homosexuality and other sexualities is as old as the term itself. These essays explore the active role experimental subjects played in shaping scientific theories of homosexuality and cultural perceptions of sexuality and sexual identity. Finally this anthology studies the way in which this doctor-patient interaction shaped not only scientific theories of homosexuality, but also cultural perceptions and self-identities as well. Contributors include: Garland E. Allen, Erin G. Carlston, Julian Carter, Alice D. Dreger, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Margaret Gibson, Stephanie Kenen, Hubert Kennedy, Harry Oosterhuis, James Steakley, Richard Pillard, Jennifer Terry. (shrink)

Informed consent is at the core of the clinical relationship. With the introduction of machine learning in healthcare, the role of informed consent is challenged. This paper addresses the issue of whether patients must be informed about medical ML applications and asked for consent. It aims to expose the discrepancy between ethical and practical considerations, while arguing that this polarization is a false dichotomy: in reality, ethics is applied to specific contexts and situations. Bridging this gap and considering the whole (...) picture is essential for advancing the debate. In the light of the possible future developments of the situation and the technologies, as well as the benefits that informed consent for ML can bring to shared decision-making, the present analysis concludes that it is necessary to prepare the ground for a possible future requirement of informed consent for medical ML. (shrink)

In this article I reconstruct the philosophical conditions for the emergence of the notion of counter-conduct within the framework of Michel Foucault’s study of governmentality, and I explore the reasons for its disappearance after 1978. In particular, I argue that the concept of conduct becomes crucial for Foucault in order to redefine governmental power relations as specific ways to conduct the conduct of individuals: it is initially within this context that, in Security, Territory, Population, he rethinks the problem of resistance (...) in terms of counter-conduct. However, a few months later, in What is Critique?, Foucault replaces the notion of counter-conduct with that of critical attitude, defined as the particular form that counter-conduct takes in modern times. This notion allows him to highlight the role played by the will in resistance to governmental strategies. But since the notion of counter-conduct is conceptually wider than that of critical attitude, I suggest in conclusion that it could be worth reactivating it as a “historical category which, in various forms and with diverse objectives, runs through the whole of Western history.”. (shrink)

Michel Foucault est un philosophe qui, loin de plancher sur d'autres philosophes, avance avec et contre eux - et contre pas moins qu'avec, au vu du caractere distinctement agonistique de sa pensee. Dans ce volume, il dialogue successivement avec douze philosophes et ecrivains de tous les temps - des auteurs dont les oeuvres soutiennent et traversent la sienne, dans une perpetuelle tension. Chacune de ces encontres est mise en scene par un specialiste de Foucault. Tout se joue autour du et: (...) de Foucault et Platon a Foucault et Althusser ou Genet en passant par Machiavel, Hegel, Said et bien d'autres. Le et, ici, rapproche et eloigne a la fois. Selon cette approche, l'oeuvre perd son caractere de forteresse pour devenir un noeud, dans un reseau: celui de la philosophie vivante qui se construit et se poursuit dans d'infinies circulations et interactions. Une toile d'araignee dont le centre provisoire serait ici une pensee nommee Michel Foucault. (shrink)

This volume, published for the first time in English, takes an interdisciplinary approach to exploring how the work of Michel Foucault has influenced studies of Ancient Greece and Rome. Of interest to students and scholars in classical studies, philosophy, gender studies, and ancient history.

Cet ouvrage, à travers une pluralité cohérente d'approches, a pour but de réfléchir sur le rapport que la philosophie entretient avec la littérature, et sur les usages qu'elle en fait. Ce rapport et ces usages, toutefois, ne sont pas envisagés comme de l'ordre de la subordination, ou de la réduction de la littérature à la philosophie, par la philosophie. La littérature apparaît au contraire ici comme un objet qui ne se laisse pas assimiler par la philosophie, mais la travaille, autant (...) qu'elle le travaille : la philosophie traite moins de la littérature qu'elle n'y trouve un lieu à l'intérieur duquel elle s'exerce. Loin de postuler une extériorité entre le matériau littéraire et la production philosophique, il s'agit donc de s'interroger sur la richesse de l'expérience que le texte littéraire offre à la réflexion philosophique. (shrink)

Paru en 1975, Surveiller et punir de Michel Foucault a profondément marqué l'ensemble des sciences humaines et sociales. Plus de quarante ans après, la société de surveillance annoncée par Foucault se manifeste à travers des préoccupations sécuritaires croissantes et la quête fantasmatique d'un risque zéro. Les réformes successives de notre droit pénal traduisent une volonté forte de prévenir, voire de prédire, la réalisation des infractions. La surveillance se déploie non seulement dans l'enceinte carcérale mais au-delà des murs. Il s'avère ainsi (...) crucial de relire l'ouvrage de Foucault à la lumière d'une actualité juridique et politique dense, marquée par une progressive prise de conscience de la nécessité d'appréhender les questions pénales et pénitentiaires d'une manière globale et concertée, mais aussi par le caractère limité des avancées concrètes en ce domaine. Ainsi, en mobilisant une pluralité d'approches disciplinaires (du droit à la philosophie, de la science politique à la sociologie et à la psychiatrie), cet ouvrage se propose de mettre les analyses foucaldiennes de la société punitive, du pouvoir disciplinaire, de l'archipel carcéral, de la surveillance généralisée et de la production de la délinquance à l'épreuve de notre présent, à la fois pour en mesurer la portée réelle et pour élaborer un diagnostic original de notre actualité sociale, juridique et politique. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that a serious philosophical investigation of the domain of the perlocutionary is both possible and desirable, and I show that it possesses a distinctively moral dimension that has so far been overlooked. I start, in Section II, by offering an original characterisation of the distinction between the illocutionary and the perlocutionary derived from the degree of predictability and stability that differentiates their respective effects. In Section III, I argue that, in order to grasp the specificity (...) of the perlocutionary, we must focus on the total speech situation, which I define as conversation. Then, in Section IV, I show that an investigation of the domain of the perlocutionary requires us to draw a conceptual distinction between recognition and acknowledgment. This distinction proves to be crucial, because the success of perlocutions normally depends on something more than what Austin calls the ‘securing of uptake’: the reciprocity condition for illocutions needs to be supplemented, in the case of perlocutions, with an analysis of what I call the ‘grammar of acknowledgment.’ Lastly, in Section V, I elaborate the notion of ‘perlocutionary responsibility,’ a specific form of moral responsibility for the consequences of utterances that are not (entirely) predictable. (shrink)

What is reductionism? -- Who is reading the book of life? -- Genetics : from grammar to meaning making -- A point for thought : why are organisms irreducible? -- A point for thought : does the genetic system include a meta-language? -- Immunology : from soldiers to housewives -- A point for thought : immune specificity and Brancusi's kiss -- A point for thought : reflections on the immune self -- Meaning making in language and biology -- A point (...) for thought : meaning : bridging the gap between physics and semantics -- The rest is silence -- The polysemy of the sign : a quantum lesson -- Recursive-hierarchy : a lesson from the tardigrade -- Context and memory : a lesson from funes the memorious -- Transgradience : a lesson from Bakhtin -- The poetry of living. (shrink)

This article tries to highlight the explicit political aim and the importance for our present of the thought of the «late» Michel Foucault. Through the analysis of the role that truth plays in the pagan and Christian techniques of the self, it opposes a truth that we have to discover in ourselves in order to refuse it (Christianity) or to adhere to it (ethics of authenticity) to a truth conceived as a force of transformation of logos into ethos , of (...) the discourse into a way of life. (shrink)

This article examines the impact of gender on the relative economic success of microentrepreneurs, their contributions to family income, and the impact of gender ideology and income on household decision making. The concept of economic success is problematized by examining how these businesses, even those of limited assets and income generation, offer women increased autonomy in household budgetary matters and decision making. The analysis draws on data from a representative survey of 201 male and female microentrepreneurs in the Dominican Republic. (...) The findings show that household decision making is influenced by variations in economic power but that gender ideologies structure the direction and extent of this influence, reflected in distinct “gender thresholds,” or the point at which income contributions start to matter. (shrink)