People in extraordinary situations are vulnerable. As research participants, they are additionally threatened by abuse or exploitation and the possibility of harm through research. To protect people against these threats, informed consent as an instrument of self-determination has been introduced. Self-determination requires autonomous persons, who voluntarily make decisions based on their values and morals. However, in nursing research, this requirement cannot always be met. Advanced age, chronic illness, co-morbidity and frailty are reasons for dependencies. These in turn lead to limited (...) abilities or opportunities for decision-making and self-determination. Exclusion of vulnerable people from research projects would disadvantage them by not covering their needs, which would violate the ethical principles of justice and beneficence. Commonly, vulnerability is attributed to social groups. The consequence for individuals, attributed as belonging to such a vulnerable group, is that the principles of respect for autonomy, justice and beneficence are subordinated to the principle of non-maleficence, understood as avoiding the risk to cause more harm than good. In addition, group-specific attribution could lead to stigmatizing because labelling a person as deviation from a norm violates integrity. For clinical nursing research, the question arises how the protection of vulnerable people could be granted without compromising ethical principles. The concept of relational ethics provides a possible approach. It defines vulnerability as the relation between a person’s health status and the extent to which this person is dependent on the researcher and the research context. Vulnerability is not attributed solely to a person but to a situation, meaning the person is viewed in context. By combining vulnerability as a context-related and situational concept with existing approaches of informed consent, the different ethical principles can be balanced and preserved at every step of the research process. (shrink)

The essay presents an interpretation of Hegel’s speculative sentence that, emphasizing the “counter-thrust” that the modern subject undergoes here, allows us to connect the movement of the Hegelian subject to the negativity recognised by Kant at the bottom of the faculty of judgment with regard to its aesthetic dimension. This way, it aims, first, to put into question the interpretation that sees in Hegel’s philosophy a regression with regard to the consciousness, attained by Kant, of the finitude, or the constitutive (...) split, of the modern subject, and, finally, in line with recent interpretations of Hegel, like those of Žižek or Malabou, to contribute to the questioning of the traditional interpretation of Hegel’s dialectics as the overcoming of negativity into a final reconciling synthesis. (shrink)

Este escrito pretende examinar el papel de la estética en el pensamiento de Schiller y Schelling en 1795 para rastrear el modo en que el pensamiento estético comienza a constituirse como un camino desde el que afrontar la problemática de la libertad planteada por la modernidad y, en especial, por la filosofía práctica de Kant. En el primer apartado se tratará de aclarar el sentido en el que la reflexión estética de ambos autores en 1795 no se puede disociar de (...) la problemática servida por la filosofía kantiana. En primer lugar intentaré mostrar las razones por las que las premisas mismas del sistema crítico hacen necesaria la Crítica del Juicio, cuya primera parte, como es sabido, constituye precisamente una ¿crítica del juicio estético¿ y, desde aquí, defenderé que la obra se hace cargo de cierta ambivalencia inherente al kantismo y que, precisamente por ello, expresa del modo más perspicuo el problema que plantea el concepto kantiano, formal, de libertad. Con ello se insiste evidentemente en la relevancia de esta obra para la primera recepción de Kant en general, esto es, para el primer Idealismo postkantiano en tanto que preocupado por elevarse a la verdad del espíritu kantiano, pero, sobre todo, se comenzarán a iluminar las razones por las que la orientación estética del pensamiento, orientación que en 1795 exploran tanto Schiller como Schelling, podrá considerarse un camino privilegiado de cara tanto a la ¿recuperación¿ de la consistencia del kantismo como a la elaboración de un concepto satisfactorio de libertad. Es decir, se intentará fundamentar así, aun cuando sólo sea indirectamente, que la conexión de la ética, de la filosofía práctica, con la estética resulta prometedora aun desde una óptica estrictamente kantiana. Pero el núcleo de este trabajo se desarrollará en los apartados segundo y tercero donde, partiendo de este suelo común compartido por Schiller y Schelling, se examinarán las diferencias entre los modos en que la reflexión estética de cada uno responde a la problemática planteada por el kantismo. En relación a esto último será fundamental determinar si sus respuestas, en tanto que soluciones, realmente se mantienen fieles a la complejidad que nace de la ambivalencia del espíritu kantiano o si, antes bien, pagan el precio de optar por uno sólo de los hilos que tejen el sistema crítico. (shrink)

Taking the Critique of Judgement for an answer to the problem raised by the kantian dualisms, I offer a reading of this work according to which in the part devoted to the teleological judgement Kant practices a Hegelian way of resolution, whereas, in the “critique of the aesthetic judgement”, he thinks the relation between the opposites of such dualisms in a new way that opens up the possibility of a dialectical thought rid of the absolutness of the Hegelian reason.

Plural Logic is an extension of First-Order Logic which has, as well as singular terms and quantifiers, their plural counterparts. Analogously, Higher-Level Plural Logic is an extension of Plural Logic which has, as well as plural terms and quantifiers, higher-level plural ones. Roughly speaking, higher-level plurals stand to plurals like plurals stand to singulars; they are pluralised plurals. Allegedly, Higher-Level Plural Logic enjoys the expressive power of a simple type theory while committing us to nothing more than the austere ontology (...) of First-Order Logic. Were this true, Higher-Level Plural Logic would be a useful tool, with various applications in philosophy and linguistics. However, while the notions of plural reference and quantification enjoy widespread acceptance today, their higher-level counterparts have been received with a lot of scepticism. In this paper, I argue for the legitimacy of Higher-Level Plural Logic by providing evidence to the effect that natural languages contain higher-level plural expressions and showing that it is likely that they do so in an indispensable manner. Since the arguments I put forward are of the same sort advocates of Plural Logic have employed to defend their position, I conclude that the commonly held view that Plural Logic is legitimate, but not so its higher-level plural extensions is untenable. (shrink)

The introduction of and the commitment to evidence-based nursing in all care settings have led to a rapid increase of intervention and outcome-based research programs. Yet, the topics of nursing research are not only affected by interventions and outcomes but also affected by the concept of caring derived from humanistic philosophy. Considering this twofold orientation of nursing science, nuanced ethical regulations for nursing research programs are called for. In addition to the different research approaches, further arguments for ethical regulations are (...) as follows: first, the different degrees of contextualization and the variety of participation models regarding the target groups; second, the capacities and opportunities of participants; and third, the caring relationship between nurses and research subjects. To capture these special features of nursing science, four approaches to fill the gaps in existing ethical regulations for nursing research are proposed: (a) process orientation, (b) community orientation, (c) context orientation, and (d) relation orientation. (shrink)

Edited by Ivette Fred-Rivera and Jessica Leech. What is the relationship between ontology and modality: between what there is, and what there could be, must be, or might have been? Throughout a distinguished career, Bob Hale’s work has addressed this question on a number of fronts, through the development of a Fregean approach to ontology, an essentialist theory of modality, and in his work on neo-logicism in the philosophy of mathematics. This collection of new essays engages with these themes (...) in Hale’s work in order to make further progress in our understanding of ontology, modality, and the relations between them. Some essays directly address questions in modal metaphysics, drawing on ontological concerns. Others raise questions in modal epistemology and its links to matters of ontology, such as the challenge to give an epistemology of essence. There are also several essays engaging with questions of what might be called ‘modal ontology’: the study of whether and what things exist necessarily or contingently. Such issues can be raised and addressed directly, but they also have an important bearing on the kinds of semantic commitments engendered in logic and mathematics, e.g., to the existence of sets, or numbers, or properties, and so on. It is thus explored in some chapters to what extent one’s ontology—and indeed, one’s ontology of necessary beings—interacts with other plausible assumptions and commitments. (shrink)

El objetivo de este artículo es ofrecer, al hilo de un análisis del texto de la Fenomenologíadel Espíritu que comenta la Antígona de Sófocles, una interpretación del concepto hegeliano de acciónque pone en cuestión la tesis, defendida habitualmente, según la cual Hegel habría pretendido que elconflicto trágico resulta superado por la acción moderna.Ese texto revela que la acción, que comparece ahí como principio absoluto, posee sin embargo unaestructura quebrada y paradójica: necesariamente presupone y niega una instancia en sí, inmediata ysustantiva (...) que, finalmente, oculta la negatividad de la muerte. En la medida en que esa vinculación ala sustancia se demuestra así consustancial a la acción, el trabajo concluye, frente a otras lecturas, que,aun cuando la historia del espíritu haya dejado atrás la “sustancia ética” antigua, la acción nopuede liberarse para Hegel del carácter trágico. Por último, defiende el sentido en el que precisamenteesta condición trágica la determina a la vez como destructiva y productiva, capaz de abrir la historia. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas aprendió a pensar y a “trabajar en filosofía” gracias a Husserl y, posteriormente, a Heidegger. De ellos alababa la sospecha ante una pretendida objetividad a la que accedería la razón y la exploración de intencionalidades afectivas que caracterizan la experiencia humana. Sin embargo, declarándose abiertamente heredero de la fenomenología, se empeñó en salirse de ella. Levinas consideró que el discurso filosófico allanó el camino a las atrocidades del s. XX, y pretendió reorientarlo atendiendo a un encuentro con la (...) alteridad que suspende el movimiento usual de la conciencia, todo ella representación, dominio y asimilación. Así pues, intentó hablar en el lenguaje de aquello que lo funda y se le escapa, para que el pensamiento dejara de ser un monólogo desorientado e, incluso, un preludio de la violencia. Investigaremos cómo revisa Levinas su herencia fenomenológica e, incluso, filosófica en general, y cómo responde a ella abriéndole nuevos lares. (shrink)

During the last decades the special literature has paid relatively much attention to the problematic of speech acts. However, in Slovakia it still remains underdeve-loped. Therefore the author decided to examine it from the points of view of its establishment, gradual development and interactional communication. The paper offers a survey of all philosophical-linguistic views on this problematic. Further, it gives a more detailed analysis of the theory of the founders of the speech acts theory , comparing their main ideas with (...) those of other philosophers and linguists. (shrink)

Cuando hablamos de iconos nos referimos a representaciones que producen un cierto impacto en nosotros aunque no sean perfectas; del icono se esperan armonía, belleza, simplicidad. Cuando el icono no es una imagen sino una persona humana, se convierte en referente: observamos aspectos de su personalidad con los que nos identificamos aunque nos coincidan exactamente con los nuestros. A lo largo de la historia de la ciencia, las mujeres han sido iconos referenciales fundamentalmente por dos cosas, su calidad humana y (...) su excelencia científica. (shrink)

Cada vez más, la medida de los estándares educativos está arrojando luz a las Reformas emprendidas en los distintos países. En el caso español, y concretamente en lo relativo a la enseñanza de las Ciencias, el paso a dar está en la transferencia de los aprendizajes hacia situaciones de vida.

abstract The possibility that organ sales by living adults might be made legal is morally distressing to many of us. However, powerful arguments have been provided recently supporting legalisation (I consider two of those arguments: the Consequentialist Argument and the Autonomy Argument). Is our instinctive reaction against a market of organs irrational then? The aim of this paper is not to prove that legalization would be immoral, all things considered, but rather to show, first, that there are some kinds of (...) arguments, offered in favour of legalisation, that are, in an important sense, illegitimate, and second, that even if legalisation might not be wrong all things considered, there are good reasons for our negative moral intuitions. Moreover, identifying these reasons will help highlight some features of moral decisions in non‐ideal situations, which in turn might be relevant to some other moral or policy choices. (shrink)

He aquí una razonada, y razonablemente apasionada, defensa del liberalismo frente a las viejas retóricas que siguen predicando utopías adormecedoras e «ilusionantes», y también frente a las corrientes políticas que, como el nacionalismo y el multiculturalismo, adulteran sus propuestas con constantes apelaciones a la tradición y a lo emocional.Por el contrario, en este magnífico ensayo Juan Antonio Rivera define y defiende un liberalismo «igualitario y fraternalista», según el cual la libertad de los individuos es el bien más sustantivo y (...) sólo cabe renunciar, prudencialmente, a porciones de dicho bien para garantizar mejor la igualdad de todos ante la ley, la igualdad política y el impulso de fraternidad hacia los maltratados por la fortuna. El «liberalismo igualitario» descrito en estas páginas no es el liberalismo egoísta y racional pregonado por la escuela neoclásica de economía; aunque reconoce la legitimidad de buscar y reclamar una mayor igualdad económica y valora los beneficios del altruismo, el autor no deja de llamar la atención sobre los peligros inherentes al hecho de reducir las libertades a costa de una mayor igualdad.Menos utopía y más libertad es sin duda uno de los libros más renovadores y sugerentes en el panorama actual de la teoría política de nuestro país. (shrink)

In his recent article, ‘A Gift to Theology? Jean-Luc Marion's ‘Saturated Phenomena’ in Christological Perspective’, Brian Robinette has critiqued Marion's phenomenology for confining theology to a one-sided approach to Christology, one that stresses only the passive, mystical reception of Christ. To correct this imbalance, Robinette brings Marion into dialogue with those more active Christologies or ‘prophetical-ethical’ liberation theologies of Gustavo Gutierrez, Johann Baptist Metz and others that stress a life-praxis focused on confronting evil and suffering. In this essay I am (...) arguing that Robinette has not fully developed the ‘logic’ of Marion's phenomenology of the ‘call and the gifted’, in which both a passive and an active element are operative. I explore more fully that very dynamic phenomenological process of the call-and-the-gifted as developed in Marion's work Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness. Once viewed in Christological perspective, and especially in light of Christ's death and resurrection, Marion's phenomenology entails an ethical trope consistent with the mission of Christ as rendered in Scriptural revelation, and thus the gap between Marion's work and the prophetical-ethical theologies of Gutierrez and Baptist Metz becomes narrowed. (shrink)

El mādhyamaka o camino medio, la reformulación de las enseñanzas budistas introducida por Nāgārjuna en el siglo II, causó profundos malentendidos en su contexto de recepción, como ocurre todavía entre los lectores occidentales. La interpretación de que se trata de otra forma más de nihilismo intelectualmente infructuoso y éticamente irresponsable ha acompañado siempre a esta exigente filosofía. Intentaremos responder a dicha objeción recurriendo a algunas herramientas que proporciona la vía media. En particular, comprenderemos a qué se refería Nāgārjuna con la (...) idea de abandonar la discusión filosófica; aclararemos la autocompresión como discurso práctico y útil a pesar de no capturar conceptualmente la verdad; exploraremos la nueva relación que establece este modo de razonamiento con la filosofía dominante; y revisaremos algunas de sus interpretaciones nihilistas erróneas de la actualidad. Como aliados para clarificar las palabras de los mādhyamika más conocidos, Nāgārjuna y Candrakīrti, nos apoyamos en Jeffrey Hopkins, C.W. Huntington, Juan Arnau, Giuseppe Ferraro y Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche y otros. (shrink)

Written in the shape of a letter to a friend and long-time collaborator, this piece focuses on Drucilla Cornell’s most crucial lessons on a critical theory for the future: the intertwinement of aesthetics and politics; the need to figure and reconfigure techniques of liberation; the clarification that the decolonial turn is an ontological turn; the relationship between justice and negotiations; the reformulation of the feminine within sexual difference; and the impact of temporal naturalism. Together, they help us move beyond received (...) views in phenomenology and existentialism, toward gravitational thinking and the priority of imaging over the understanding if we are to rekindle the revolutionary spirit of public imagination. (shrink)

Luisa Capetillo has been heralded as the first feminist writer of Puerto Rico. She authored four books and embodied her emancipatory philosophical commitments, but has received scant philosophical attention. In this paper I recover the philosophy of Capetillo as part of a Latin American and Caribbean philosophical tradition centered on radical praxis places sexuality at the centerfold of class politics. At the intersection between gender equity and class emancipation Capetillo advocated for the liberatory possibilities of education, which served as the (...) key to unlearning the social norms that engendered the marginalization of working people and working women. (shrink)

My hypothesis is that the cognitive challenge posed by death might have had a co-evolutionary role in the development of linguistic faculties. First, I claim that mirror neurons, which enable us to understand others’ actions and emotions, not only activate when we directly observe someone, but can also be triggered by language: words make us feel bodily sensations. Second, I argue that the death of another individual cannot be understood by virtue of the mirror neuron mechanism, since the dead provide (...) no neural pattern for mirroring: this cognitive task requires symbolic thought, which in turn involves emotions. Third, I describe the symbolic leap of the human species as a cognitive detachment from the here and now, allowing displaced reference: through symbols the human mind can refer to what is absent, possible, or even impossible (like the presence of a dead person). Such a detachment has had a huge adaptive impact: adopting a coevolutionary standpoint can help explain why language is as effective as environmental inputs in order to stimulate our bodily experience. In the end I suggest a further coevolutionary reversal : if language is necessary to understand the death of the other, it might also be true that the peculiar cognitive problem posed by the death of the other (the corpse is present, but the other is absent) has contributed to the crucial transition from an indexical sign system to the symbolic level, i.e., the cognitive detachment . Death and language, as Heidegger claimed, have an essential relation for humans, both from an evolutionary and a phenomenological perspective: they have shaped the symbolic consciousness that make us conceive of them. (shrink)

Most research on risk aversion in behavioral science with human subjects has focused on a component of risk aversion that does not adapt itself to context. More recently, studies have explored risk aversion adaptation to changing circumstances in sequential decision-making tasks. It is an open question whether one can identify evidence, at the single subject level, for such risk aversion adaptation. We conducted a behavioral experiment on human subjects, using a sequential decision making task. We developed a model-based approach for (...) estimating the adaptation of risk-taking behavior with single-trial resolution by modelling a subject’s goals and internal representation of task contingencies. Using this model-based approach, we estimated the subject-specific adaptation of risk aversion depending on the current task context. We found striking inter-subject variations in the adaptation of risk-taking behavior. We show that these differences can be explained by differences in subjects’ internal representations of task contingencies and goals. We discuss that the proposed approach can be adapted to a wide range of experimental paradigms and be used to analyze behavioral measures other than risk aversion. (shrink)

. A comparison is made between two unlikely debates over intelligence. One debate took place in 1550 at Valladolid, Spain, between Bartolomé de las Casas and Juan Gines de Sepúlveda over the intelligence of the Amerindian. The other debate is contemporary, between John Searle and various representatives of the “strong” artificial intelligence community over the adequacy of the Turing test for intelligence. Although the contemporary debate has yet to die down, the Valladolid debate has been over for four hundred years. (...) The question asked here is whether the contemporary debate can profit from the previous one. The common bond providing the basis for contrast is the issue of the “other” which is present in both debates. From this contrast, the observation is made that the question of meaning is intimately tied to the question of intelligence. (shrink)

Almost all admit that there is beauty in the natural world. Many suspect that such beauty is more than an adornment of nature. Few in our contemporary world suggest that this beauty is an empirical principle of the natural world itself and instead relegate beauty to the eye and mind of the beholder. Guided by theological and scientific insight, the authors propose that such exclusion is no longer tenable, at least in the data of modern biology and in our view (...) of the natural world in general. More important, we believe an empirical aesthetics exists that can help guide experimental design and development of computational models in biology. Moreover, because theology and science can both contribute toward and equally profit from such an aesthetics, we propose that this empirical aesthetics provides the foundation for a living synergy between theology and science. (shrink)