BackgroundUmbilical cord banks are a central component, as umbilical cord tissue providers, in both medical treatment and scientific research with stem cells. But, whereas the creation of umbilical cord banks is seen as successful practice, it is perceived as a risky style of play by others. This article examines and discusses the ethical, medical and legal considerations that arise from the operation of umbilical cord banks in Mexico.DiscussionA number of experts have stated that the use of umbilical cord goes beyond (...) the mere utilization of human tissues for the purpose of treatment. This tissue is also used in research studies: genetic studies, studies to evaluate the effectiveness of new antibiotics, studies to identify new proteins, etc. Meanwhile, others claim that the law and other norms for the functioning of cord banks are not consistent and are poorly defined. Some of these critics point out that the confidentiality of donor information is handled differently in different places. The fact that private cord banks offer their services as "biological insurance" in order to obtain informed consent by promising the parents that the tissue that will be stored insures the health of their child in the future raises the issue of whether the consent is freely given or given under coercion. Another consideration that must be made in relation to privately owned cord banks has to do with the ownership of the stored umbilical cord.SummaryConflicts between moral principles and economic interests (non-moral principles) cause dilemmas in the clinical practice of umbilical cord blood storage and use especially in privately owned banks. This article presents a reflection and some of the guidelines that must be followed by umbilical cord banks in order to deal with these conflicts. This reflection is based on the fundamental notions of ethics and public health and seeks to be a contribution towards the improvement of umbilical cord banks' performance. (shrink)

Desde una perspectiva transnacional y comparada, que incorpora la experiencia del exilio, este trabajo analiza las tensiones identitarias que afectaron a la juventud militante de la izquierda revolucionaria española y argentina durante los años setenta. A través de las relaciones familiares y de género, estudia las formas públicas y privadas del compromiso y la transgresión. Aborda cómo la politización de lo privado marcó a hombres y mujeres dentro de un proceso global contestatario, heredero del 68, para destacar las contradicciones que (...) afloraron entre la teoría y la práctica, el deseo y la realidad, que llevaron a los jóvenes militantes a asumir un régimen emocional en constante debate entre el ser y el deber ser. (shrink)

The winds of change sweeping across our globalised world have inspired a wide range of studies, new research paradigms, and new concepts that seek to characterise their nature and effects, the chal...

The planetary boundaries concept has profoundly changed the vocabulary and representation of global environmental issues. The article starts by highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of planetary boundaries from a social science perspective. It is argued that the growth imperative of capitalist economies, as well as other particular characteristics detailed below, are the main drivers of the ecological crisis and exacerbated trends already underway. Further, the planetary boundaries framework can support interpretations that do not solely emphasize technocratic operational approaches and costs, (...) but also assume that these alone can be the solution. (shrink)

Background: Adolescence is a period with physical, psychological, biological, intellectual, and social changes in which there is usually little perception of risk. COVID-19 has generated constant situations of change and uncertainty worldwide. During the pandemic, the acquisition of preventive behaviors has been relevant. Various studies carried out with adults associate risk perception and the implementation of preventive behaviors with knowledge about the COVID-19 and with age, but there are not many studies with adolescents. Therefore, the objective is to validate, in (...) Spanish, the questionnaire of the knowledge, attitudes, risk perceptions, and practices of adolescents toward the pandemic, and analyze it according to sociodemographic characteristics.Method: This study was a descriptive cross-sectional study, which included adolescents between the ages of 12–18. First, a translation and a back-translation of the questionnaire were performed. The questionnaire was presented in several high schools chosen by convenience sampling and following a non-probabilistic snowball sampling. Reliability and validity analyses were then carried out and the relationships between the different sociodemographic variables were analyzed.Results: The reliability of the questionnaire is acceptable. Knowledge was higher in women, and in those with a higher level of education; and were lower in those who lived in smaller towns, as well as in those who had a member of their family receiving financial aid. In terms of attitudes and risk perceptions, younger adolescents had higher scores, and those who had a member of their family receiving financial aid, lower.Conclusion: The questionnaire is a reliable tool in the Spanish adolescent population. Knowledge was influenced by gender, place of residence, level of education, and financial aid. Attitudes and risk perceptions were influenced by age and financial aid. For practices, no predictors were found. In general, adolescents scored lower on knowledge about COVID-19, but they scored higher on COVID-19 safety practices. (shrink)

The notion of societal boundaries aims to enhance the debate on planetary boundaries. The focus is on capitalist societies as a heuristic for discussing the expansionary dynamics, power relations, and lock-ins of modern societies that impel highly unsustainable societal relations with nature. While formulating societal boundaries implies a controversial process – based on normative judgments, ethical concerns, and socio-political struggles – it has the potential to offer guidelines for a just, social-ecological transformation.

Psychiatry is rapidly adopting digital phenotyping and artificial intelligence/machine learning tools to study mental illness based on tracking participants’ locations, online activity, phone and text message usage, heart rate, sleep, physical activity, and more. Existing ethical frameworks for return of individual research results (IRRs) are inadequate to guide researchers for when, if, and how to return this unprecedented number of potentially sensitive results about each participant’s real-world behavior. To address this gap, we convened an interdisciplinary expert working group, supported by (...) a National Institute of Mental Health grant. Building on established guidelines and the emerging norm of returning results in participant-centered research, we present a novel framework specific to the ethical, legal, and social implications of returning IRRs in digital phenotyping research. Our framework offers researchers, clinicians, and Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) urgently needed guidance, and the principles developed here in the context of psychiatry will be readily adaptable to other therapeutic areas. (shrink)

El fenómeno originario de la pertenencia explicita uno de los problemas fundamentales de la tradición filosófica continental: la relación cuerpo-mundo. Dicha relación se ha construido tradicionalmente a partir de la propia mismidad del sujeto (Yo) o de su corporalidad, afirmando que es porque tengo un cuerpo que puedo decir que pertenezco a un mundo. Ante esta problemática se alza una fenomenología de la pertenencia propuesta por R. Barbaras, la cual expresa la necesidad de re-pensar la concepción de la subjetividad, así (...) como la necesidad de una inversión en la relación cuerpo-mundo a partir de la pertenencia al mundo del propio sujeto. Ahí es donde aparece el verdadero sentido y alcance ontológico de la experiencia del cuerpo puesto que tener un cuerpo no significa otra cosa más que pertenecer y la aparición sólo podrá darse desde dentro del mundo, a partir de nuestra inscripción en él. Así, la ecología corporal constituirá un ejemplo específico que muestra el alcance de dicha inversión y explicitará el parentesco ontológico entre el cuerpo y el mundo. (shrink)

The Priestley duality for Wajsberg algebras is developed. The Wajsberg space is a De Morgan space endowed with a family of functions that are obtained in rather natural way.As a first application of this duality, a theorem about unicity of the structure is given.

O artigo que ora apresentamos problematiza a formação e os enfrentamentos da Associação Liberdades Poéticas para atender ao Objetivo Número 16 da ONU, “Paz, Justiça e Instituições Eficazes”. Trata-se de um grupo de voluntários, composto por pessoas de diferentes sexualidades, formações acadêmicas, atuações profissionais e faixas etárias, criado em 2020 durante a pandemia, que tem como premissa reconhecer a prática da leitura como um Direito Humano, indispensável à humanização e à transformação dos sujeitos. Atuamos com remição de pena por leitura (...) no sistema prisional paulista, que confere, às pessoas privadas de liberdade, quatro dias de redução na sentença para cada obra lida, em um limite de dez títulos/ano. Nossa fundamentação teórica sustenta-se em Antonio Candido, em Lynn Hunt, no Conselho Nacional de Justiça (CNJ), na Constituição Federal, entre outros. Concluímos que, apesar da orientação geral da ONU e dos esforços do governo federal com a publicação da Resolução 391/2021, do Conselho Nacional de Justiça, para flexibilizar a remição de pena por meio da leitura, agentes do sistema penitenciário no estado de São Paulo ainda operam sob uma lógica autoritária que não corresponde à do CNJ, tampouco à ODS 16. (shrink)

La primera parte de este artículo ofrece un panorama de la Nueva Ciencia constituida durante el siglo XX. La segunda parte describe cómo el Enfoque Centrado en la Persona, de Carl Rogers, asume la Nueva Ciencia, bajo el punto de vista teórico, y la lleva a un alto nivel práctico de excelencia, primero en la terapia, luego en la educación y, más tarde, en toda relación interpersonal y social. El artículo finaliza señalando las líneas matrices de la tradición de investigación (...) fenomenológica, propia de este enfoque desde su nacimiento en los años 40 del siglo XX. (shrink)

El presente escrito explora algunas ideas marxianas sobre la subjetivación a partir de sus críticas a la filosofía hegeliana y posthegeliana, de Feuerbach y Stirner fundamentalmente, y presenta su humanismo materialista y crítico como un nuevo modo de subjetivación que se sitúa en la estela del materialismo sensualista ilustrado, retomado por Feuerbach, que combina con la idea del hombre trabajador, el homo faber, utilizador de instrumentos, de la tradición de la economía política inglesa, al que dotan de la capacidad revolucionaria (...) retomada de los primeros románticos y de la tradición de los comunistas y socialistas utópicos. (shrink)

Agamben, Giorgio. Karman. Breve tratado sobre la acción, la culpa y el gesto, 1a. Edición, Trad. Mercedes Ruvituso. Adriana Hidalgo, 2018, 176 pp.

El presente artículo pretende analizar el método que utiliza Norberto Bobbio para investigar sus objetos de estudio centrales, a saber: el derecho y la política. Se argumenta que el método de investigación propuesto por Bobbio es el de la reconstrucción. Además, se propone que para su despliegue su acude a la delimitación conceptual y la reconstrucción histórica. Un hallazgo importante del artículo muestra que es la perspectiva de la filosofía como concepción del mundo, elaborada por Bobbio, entre los años 40 (...) y 50 del siglo pasado permite la concreción del metido y las herramientas para entender la política y el derecho. Para la filosofía, en tanto concepción del mundo, Bobbio tomará elementos importantes de la tradición de la filosofía analítica, por una parte; por otra parte, de las enseñanzas de algunos filósofos, que, a través de los siglos, se han consolidado como clásicos. La reconstrucción como método de investigación mostrará que los objetos de estudio tales como el derecho y la política se comprenden partiendo de un cuidadoso y riguroso análisis de los conceptos fundamentales que los componen y del examen de las teorías esenciales de los filósofos clásicos del pensamiento occidental en el terreno político y jurídico. Para tratar estos asuntos, el presente artículo se dividirá en las siguientes partes: en un primer momento, se analiza la concepción de filosofía de Bobbio. En segundo lugar, se examina la idea de que la filosofía como método de investigación se debe entender como una dinámica de reconstrucción. Por último, el artículo propone que el desarrollo de la filosofía como método se efectúa a través de la delimitación y el análisis conceptual y a través de la reconstrucción histórica de los clásicos del pensamiento occidental. (shrink)

El término “doble vínculo” fue utilizado por primera vez por el antropólogo Gregory Bateson. René Girard asume esta aportación de la Escuela de Palo Alto para formular su teoría del “deseo mimético”. El presente artículo expone la transformación de esta noción en la antropología contemporánea.

Chronic and current epistemological controversies, with particular attention to the development of pragmatist/historicist/constructivist reconceptions of knowledge and science in the 20th century and the scandalized responses to them by defenders of more traditional rationalist/objectivist/realist conceptions. Individual chapters deal with complex and confused relations among epistemic skepticism, relativism, and constructivist epistemology ; 20th-century "postmodern" relativism and anti-relativism; Ludwik Fleck and constructivist views of truth, science, and knowledge; attacks on and disavowals of constructivism and/or relativism by established and feminist philosophers; the Science (...) Wars and fraught relations between the humanities and the sciences; the problematic claims of Evolutionary Psychology; and chronic problems and contemporary views of animal-human relations. (shrink)

This paper proposes an approach to narrative deixis which offers a coherent analysis of the respective roles of proximal and distal deictic expressions. The paper starts by arguing that fictional narratives require an approach to deixis which modifies a number of broadly held assumptions, especially as regards the interaction between tense and other deictic forms. It then considers the widely discussed instance of the temporal adverb now in the context of Past Tense. The second part of the paper gives special (...) focus to demonstratives in narrative fiction, showing their role in temporal construals. It argues that both temporal and demonstrative expressions are primarily used to serve narrative viewpoint construction. Examples from several novels are then used to show how the proximal and distal choices of demonstratives, temporal adverbs and locative adverbs structure narrative viewpoint, including narrative representation of character experience. The paper concludes by proposing that in the context of fictional narratives the proximal/distal contrast is more relevant to meaning emergence than individual aspects of deixis, and that the construal of time can be achieved through the whole spectrum of deictic forms, not just tense and temporal adverbs such as now and then. (shrink)

An extended analysis and account of the psychological/social/cognitive dynamics of intellectual controversy. The immediate focus is the recurrent failure of intellectual engagement, in encounters having to do with with truth, knowledge, language, science, and/or objectivity, between, on the one hand, rationalist-realist-objectivist philosophers and/or those they have instructed and, on the other hand, constructivist-pragmatist ("postmodern") theorists and/or those persuaded by their critiques and/or alternative views. Individual chapters examine critiques and defenses of objectivist-rationalist views in law, politics, literary studies, ethics, communication theory, (...) and philosophy of science. Theorists whose views are discussed critically at some length include legal scholar Robin West and philosophers Jürgen Habermas, Karl-Otto Apel, and Philip Kitcher. (shrink)

This collection breaks new ground in four key areas of feminist social thought: the sex/gender debates; challenges to liberalism/equality; feminist ethics; and feminist perspectives on global ethics and politics in the 21st century. Altogether, the essays provide an innovative look at feminist philosophy while making substantive contributions to current debates in gender theory, ethics, and political thought.

While public health ethics typically deals with issues wherein individual well-being competes with the population’s wellbeing, it also deals with competing groups’ well-being. Public health responses to the Chicago heat wave and Hurricane Katrina were strongly criticized, in part, because certain groups of people experienced far greater and longer-lasting losses compared to others. Diff erences in experience were largely due to socio-economic-political disadvantages or vulnerabilities. This article is written in light of the recent fi rst and second “waves” of the (...) H1N1 pandemic in Canada. Its focus is on people living in the community with a mental health or addiction problem during the pandemic and, more specifi cally, in the context of supplies of anti-viral medications and vaccines being limited. The article explores how certain social justice concerns may increase the risks of serious illness or death for these people and the kinds of compensatory responses that might be implemented. (shrink)

Considerable ethics-related focus has been directed to the pharmaceutical industry’s relationship with physicians, in part because physicians have the only profession able to prescribe much of what the industry manufactures. In Alberta, however, pharmacists have recently been permitted to modify physician prescriptions for a patient and even to prescribe without physician involvement. This paper will examine how this change in responsibilities could change pharmacists’ relationships with the industry.

The moral ideology of banking and insurance employees in Spain was examined along with supervisor role modeling and ethics-related policies and procedures for their association with ethical behavioral intent. In addition to main effects, we found evidence supporting that the person–situation interactionist perspective in supervisor role modeling had a stronger positive relationship with ethical intention among employees with relativist moral ideology. Also as hypothesized, formal ethical polices and procedures were positively related to ethical intention among those with universal beliefs, but (...) the relationship was much weaker among relativists. Thus, firms wishing to optimally promote ethical attitudes and behavior must tailor their organization-based initiatives to the individual characteristics of their employees. (shrink)

This collection of essays by Robert Brandon spans two decades and most of the important problems in the philosophy of biology. Four of his five most important contributions to the philosophy of biology can be found here: the concept of relative adaptedness and its role in the propensity interpretation of fitness; the principle of natural selection; the use of the screening-off relation in defense of organismic selection; and the distinction between units of selection and levels of selection. The fifth major (...) contribution, an analysis of the concept of "environment," mentioned briefly in an essay on the co-evolution of organisms and environment, is given an extended treatment in his 1990 book, Adaptation and Environment. (shrink)

En su prolijo discurso sobre “La Palabra de Dios en la vida y la misión de la Iglesia” la XIIª Asamblea General de los Obispos no abordó de una forma expresa la índole sacramental de la Palabra. Y, sin embargo, en una de sus Conclusiones-Propuestas finales demanda que se abra una reflexión sobre la misma. El presente trabajo se sitúa en esa perspectiva. Tras sopesar los límites de los apuntes sugeridos por el propio Sínodo, un tanto marcados por la indefinición (...) y una cierta perplejidad, se ofrecen, como un avance de ensayo provisional, una serie de elementos reflexivos que deberán ser integrados, con la organicidad propia del caso, en una visión complexiva de esa sacramentalidad. (shrink)

Much NGO (Non-Governmental Organisation) fund-raising and publicity concern disasters, emergencies and the immediate relief of suffering. Donations and support may follow but they are prompted all too often by a superficially informed compassion or guilt with donors having little understanding of the results of their action. For all their impact, such campaigns can amount to demagogic sentimentalism leading to ‘compassion fatigue’ and lack of sustained support once media attention moves elsewhere. They thus undermine the unique mission of NGOs themselves. This (...) paper urges a different and more strategic approach to communication by NGOs, one which takes account of their unique status and their mission to promote solidarity. It argues that as well as solving problems of underdevelopment, NGOs need to remain independent and to shape public opinion if they are to flourish. And for this they need stable funding from informed donors giving in a spirit of solidarity to support development carried out explicitly in the name of human solidarity. The paper sets out guidelines for NGOs to communicate in ways likely to gain the support of such donors. And it describes the la Florida project in Columbia as an example of how the beneficiary can — in the spirit of solidarity — be brought to the centre of NGO action and communication. (shrink)

This hypothesis is that anorexia nervosa is a biologically driven disorder, and mammalian hibernation may offer clues to its pathogenesis. Using this approach, this hypothesis offers suggestions for employing heart rate variability as an early diagnostic test for anorexia nervosa; employing the ketogenic diet for refeeding patients, attending to omega 3:6 ratio of polyunsaturated fatty acids in the refeeding diet; and exploring clinical trials of the endocannabinoid-like agent, palmitoylethanolamde for patients with anorexia nervosa. This hypothesis also explores the role of (...) lipids and autoimmune phenomena in anorexia nervosa, and suggest a lipodomics study to search for antibodies in the serum on patients with anorexia nervosa. (shrink)

The concept of polarity is pervasive in natural language. It relates syntax, semantics and pragmatics narrowly, Semantics: an international handbook of natural language meaning, De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin, 2011; Israel in The grammar of polarity: pragmatics, sensitivity, and the logic of scales, Cambridge studies in linguistics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2014), it refers to items of many syntactic categories such as nouns, verbs and adverbs. Neutral polarity items appear in affirmative and negative sentences, negative polarity items cannot appear in affirmative (...) sentences, and positive polarity items cannot appear in negative sentences. A way of reasoning in Natural Language is through Natural Logic. This logic is based on the concept of polarity in order to make the meaning of a sentence weaker o stronger without changing its truth value. There exist many proposals to compute polarity in the Natural Logic context, the most widely known are the ones by: van Benthem, Sánchez-Valencia, Dowty, and van Eijck, 6th international Tbilisi symposium on logic, language, and computation, Batumi, Georgia, Springer, 2007). If Natural Logic is going to be used, as an inferential mechanism between text fragments, in Natural Language Processing applications such as text summarization, question answering, and information extraction, it is a priority to know what the existing relationship among the aforementioned algorithms is; for example, to implement the most general. We show in this paper the equivalence among the analyzed algorithms, filling a gap in Natural Logic research, particularly in computing polarity, and the soundness of their algorithms. (shrink)

Divination has been practiced as a way of knowing and communicating for millennia. Diviners are experts who embrace the notion of moving from a boundless to a bounded realm of existence in their practice. They excel in insight, imagination, fluency in language, and knowledge of cultural traditions and human psychology. During a divination, they construct usable knowledge from oracular messages of various sorts. To do so, they link diverse domains of representational information and symbolism with emotional or presentational experience. Their (...) divinatory acts involve complementary modes of cognition associated with these rather different symbolic forms. In representational symbolism, intentional reference, within a relatively controlled inductive reality, is paramount, while in presentational symbolism, implicit experiential immersion, within a free‐flowing context, is grasped intuitively. Wherever a theory of divination has been elicited from diviners, there is a clear recognition of the overlapping of inductive, intuitive, and interpretive techniques and ways of knowing. In order to arrive at a theory of practice for divination, as a form of practical consciousness or knowledge within different modes of cognition, one must take what diviners say and do seriously. Recent scientific studies reveal that consciousness is connected both to electrical information in the brain and nervous system and to electronic semi‐conduction in body tissues. Brain consciousness is embedded in body consciousness and coupled to it. This validates the experience of mind‐body consciousness diviners have used for millennia in their performances. (shrink)