Affective variables have been shown to impact working memory and cognitive control. Theoretical arguments suggest that the functional impact of emotion on cognition might be mediated through shifting action dispositions related to changes in motivational orientation. The current study examined the effects of positive and negative affect on performance via direct manipulation of motivational state in tasks with high demands on cognitive control. Experiment 1 examined the effects of monetary reward on task-switching performance, while Experiment 2 examined the effects of (...) both rewards and punishments on working memory, using primary (liquid) reinforcers. In both experiments, dissociable trial-by-trial and contextual (block-related) enhancements of cognitive control during task performance were observed in relationship to motivational incentive value. Performance enhancements were equivalent in the reward and punishment conditions, but were differentially impacted by individual difference measures of trait reward and punishment sensitivity. Together, the results suggest both common and specific mechanisms by which approach and avoidance motivational states influence cognitive control, via activation of reward and punishment processing systems. (shrink)

This article relies on two major business ethics books to propose a decalogue of corporate behavior. Notably, both Donaldson and Dunfee's Ties That Bind (1999) and Kerr et al.'s CSR: A Legal Analysis (2009) tried to avoid the sinuous and inconclusive normative quest for hypernorms of business social responsibility: the former proposed an integrated social contract between business and community, while the latter adopted a positivist approach, looking at existing law of all sorts, national and international, to decant eight principles (...) of CSR. Using a methodological tool from the first book, namely, the macrosocial contract between business and communities, this article updates the list proposed in the second book. As societal expectations evolve in time, emerging principles are included in the amended list, such as meeting tax obligations, refraining from taking advantage of disaster-struck communities, and prioritizing the human in the age of artificial intelligence. The mixed approach (ethical, contractarian, and positivist) allows introducing the 10 principles as “commandments”: initial reasonable content of a macrosocial for business, informed by undisputed ethical principles (hypernorms) and potentially implemented through positive law. (shrink)

Motivated by the recent wave of investigations on plane domain wall spacetimes with nontrivial topologies, the present paper deals with (probably) the most simple source field configuration which can generate a spatially planary symmetric static spacetime, namely a minimally coupled massless scalar field that depends only upon a spacelike coordinate. z. It is shown that the corresponding exact solutions (ℳ. g±) are algebraically special, type D-[S-3T] (in11), and represent globally pathologic spacetimes with a G4-group of motion acting on R2 × (...) R orbits. In spite of the model simplicity, these Φ-generated worlds possess naked timelike singularities (reached within a finite universal time by normal nonspacelike geodesics). are completely free of Cauchy surfaces, and contain, in the t-leveled sections, points that cannot be joined by C1-trajectory images of oblique non-spacelike geodesies. Finally, we comment on the possibility of deriving from (ℳ, g±) two other physically interesting Φ-generated” spacetimes by appropriate joining conditions in the (z=0)-plane. (shrink)

One of the central charges that Žižek levels down against Adorno is that his critique of ideology comes dangerously close to a post-ideological position in which all ideological contents, political actions or rituals are reduced to a cynical consciousness which automatically obeys certain social imperatives though being aware of their falsity. Against this, Žižek comes up with an alternative understanding of cynicism as operating not at the level of consciousness, but everyday practices. What the present article tries to show is (...) that Žižek's critique is misplaced, for Adorno has a much more subtle approach in which the problem of ideology lies neither simply in theory, nor in practice, but somewhere in-between, in the compulsion of gestures. Moreover, from an Adornian perspective, Žižek's commitment to a Hegelian self-referential approach obliterates the double-edge character of determinate negation, that of addressing both the present social-historical context and the possibility of an alternative social reality. (shrink)

Istvan Kiraly V., Moartea si experienta muririi. In(tro)spectie metafizica si filosofico-aplicata Editura Casa Cartii de Stiinta, Cluj-Napoca 2002, 154 p.

It has become customary in multilevel selection theory to use the same terms to denote both two explanatory goals and two explanatory means. This paper spells out some of the benefits that derive from avoiding this terminological conflation. I argue that keeping explanatory means and goals well apart allows us to see that, contrary to a popular recent idea, Price’s equation and contextual analysis—the statistical methods most extensively used for measuring the effects of certain evolutionary factors on the change in (...) the focal individual trait in multilevel selection scenarios—do not come with built-in notions of group selection and, therefore, the efficacy of these methods at analyzing various kinds of cases does not constitute a basis for deciding how group selection should best be defined. Moreover, contrary to another widely accepted idea, I argue that more than one type of group selection may serve as explanatory means when one’s goal is that of explaining the evolution of individual traits in multilevel selection scenarios and I spell out how this explanatory role should be understood. (shrink)

This paper has a triple aim. First of all, it makes a comparison between Foucault’s notion of power relations and the notion of natural selection as it has been developed, since Darwin, by evolutionary biology. A number of common points between these two notions are analyzed here, such as acting on a spontaneity, facticity, fundamental visibility and global character. By analyzing these common points, this paper attempts – and this is its second aim – to indicate and criticize several preconceptions (...) about natural selection that still plague the comprehension, especially of non-specialists, of the notion of natural selection. Finally, by a thorough analysis of these common features, this article also attempts to indicate a point of radical divergence between these two notions, i.e. a central point that makes it impossible for the two notions to find a common application ground. (shrink)

The period that has begun after the last quarter of the 19th century brings an open conflict between the ‘histori- cal’ aspect of modernity and the ‘aesthetical’ one. The situation raises a question about the modern architectural shape’s dependency on architectonic function. Utility, production, profit become the keywords of the ideology; new social utopias and their reflection on the architecture- for-the masses projects emerge. This leads to the urban alienation of the modern man, in spite of the well-intended architectural functionalism (...) and mechanistic comfort, both of them ideologically uphold in order to ensure an easy livelihood for the proletariat. Thus, the late modernity is constrained to retrieve though eclecticism the very values that has denied itself, the mixing of codes that it ‘performs’ nowadays standing for a new ideology, one of “the ending of ideologies”. (shrink)

Moshe Idel, Cabalistii nocturni Editura Provopress, Cluj-Napoca, 2005, 81 pp.

This article aims to investigate, from an interdisciplinary point of view, the concept of parliamentary immunity. The main objective of this inquiry is to identify the historical premises and the political, linguistic, and legal instruments that determined the conceptualization of parliamentary immunity in light of the main intellectual events in Romania and France. Embracing Reinhart Koselleck's working methods, this research will develop _in extenso_ a comparative conceptual analysis based on methodological rigor, emphasizing not only the importance of the concept after (...) its entry into national languages, but also the political usages of the concept and the present understandings of it. (shrink)

This dissertation explores learned conceptions of uncertainty and risk during the period stretching approximately between 1560 and 1720. Previous historical overviews of the ideas about risk hold that pre-industrial societies viewed all worldly happenings as emanations of God's will or other forces lying beyond human control. This viewpoint is scrutinized and called into question in the dissertation through an examination of early modern Swedish sources. In order to show how earthly uncertainty was conceptualized documents dealing with actual calamities are analyzed. (...) Particular attention is paid to documents that portray man as being subjected to forces beyond his control. In early modern Sweden the questions of causality and responsibility were continuously debated according to the interests and perspectives of differing actors. The same type of occurrence could be given very different - even contradictory - interpretations. E.g. shipwrecks could be viewed as divine punishments, warnings, trials, miraculous deliverances, divine secrets, omens of coming events, or quite simply human errors. The concrete rhetorical situation determined which of them was put to use. In practical planning explanations based on God's intentions played no direct role. In a worldly perspective, fortuna was seen as a challenge that individuals were compelled to overcome by means of knowledge and virtue. Taken together, the texts serve to paint a portrait of a moral universe in which worldly events reflect the will of God, yet without relieving man of responsibility for his actions. (shrink)

_Threshold Concepts in Problem-based Learning_ provides a critical discussion and guidance for educational researchers, teachers, innovators and policy makers wanting to explore the interrelationship of PBL and threshold concepts.

The article comprises three parts. Part I contains an overview of the areas in the analysis of modern French philosophy that have been of the greatest relevance to Russian researchers over the last years. We conclude that numerous aspects of the French philosophical thought of the twentieth century are well represented in the research of Russian authors, who also point out the emerging trends in its development. Part II deals with the development of analytic philosophy in Russia within the framework (...) of such areas as “critique of bourgeois philosophy”, a purely ideological stand only nominally related to philosophy, logic, and the history of philosophy and theoretical research. Part III contains a periodization of the history of phenomenology in Russia, pointing out the most important achievements of the contemporary Russian scholars of phenomenology as well as their understanding of the essence, the problems, and the aims of phenomenological philosophy. We also indicate the tendencies within the development of the discipline in the Russian Federation. (shrink)

The issue of the resurrection of the body has given rise to a plethora of interpretations. There is a natural need to clarify such issues, since there cannot be a separation between faith in Christ and the resurrection of the body. The two go hand in hand, because one cannot go without the other. In the context of debates spawned by the need to understand, Thomas Burnet seems like a study theologian and a clean hearted man, who wrote for the (...) neighbour, and who managed to offer a detailed map of the resurrection the body. The essay will point to the main aspects of the Burnet’s theology on the resurrection of the body, in a rather descriptive manner. It will also refer to other writers, who tackled the same issues, as a means to show the depth of Burnet’s perspective. (shrink)

This paper argues that the contextual approach to natural selection does not offer an estimation of the contributions of individual and group selection to evolutionary change in multi-level selection scenarios, and that this is so because the term “group selection”, as defined by the contextual approach, does not refer to a process taking place at the group level. In the contextual analysis framework, this term simply denotes an evolutionary change that takes place due to the fact that, overall, individual types (...) do not share similar contexts or environments, and the only way to claim that such an evolutionary change is a result of selection is by admitting that “group selection” is in fact a kind of frequency-dependent selection, i.e. a selection process taking place at the individual level. Therefore, under the names “individual selection” and “group selection”, the contextual approach actually isolates two aspects of the relation between individual types and their environment, and not two distinct levels of selection. (shrink)

In this paper, I identify two general positions with respect to the relationship between environment and natural selection. These positions consist in claiming that selective claims need and, respectively, need not be relativized to homogenous environments. I then show that adopting one or the other position makes a difference with respect to the way in which the effects of selection are to be measured in certain cases in which the focal population is distributed over heterogeneous environments. Moreover, I show that (...) these two positions lead to two different interpretations—the Pricean and contextualist ones—of a type of selection scenarios in which multiple groups varying in properties affect the change in the metapopulation mean of individual-level traits. Showing that these two interpretations stem from different attitudes towards environmental homogeneity allows me to argue: that, unlike the Pricean interpretation, the contextualist interpretation can only claim that drift or selection is responsible for the change in frequency of the focal trait in a given metapopulation if details about whether or not group formation is random are specified; that the traditional main objection against the Pricean interpretation—consisting in arguing that the latter takes certain side-effects of individual selection to be effects of group selection—is unconvincing. This leads me to suggest that the ongoing debate about which of the two interpretations is preferable should concentrate on different issues than previously thought. (shrink)

This paper argues that Jean-Paul Sartre’s discussion of violence from his Notebooks for an ethics constitutes an attempt to go beyond an instrumental view of violence. An “instrumental view of violence” essentially assumes that violent behavior is a form of pragmatic behavior whose distinguishing feature consists in the kind of means one employs for reaching one’s goals (violent behavior resorting to means that are harmful for others, whereas non-violent behavior does not). For his part, Sartre attempts to provide a stronger (...) demarcation between violent and pragmatic behaviors. First, violent behavior is, for Sartre, not necessarily characterized by the use of particular means, but by a particular manner of using means, one that involves a certain “forcing” or “straining” of the means. Second, I argue that, according to Sartre, in contrast with pragmatic behavior, violent behavior involves a modification of one’s attitude towards one’s goals. Three such modified attitudes with respect to one’s goals are detailed here, namely the non-productive attitude (the assumption that the goal is not to be produced or that it is not to be produced by means that are under our control), the counter-productive attitude (the exacerbation of one’s proximate goal at the expense of more distant goals) and the anti-productive attitude (the active refusal of one’s previously set goal). Moreover, I show that Sartre’s view that violence involves the “straining” of one’s means is undergirded by his idea that violent behavior presupposes the modification of one’s attitude with respect to one’s goals. (shrink)

Philosophers of biology have recently been debating about whether random genetic drift is a distinct process from that of natural selection. One camp argues that drift is a process of “indiscriminate sampling” that is logically and ontologically distinct from the “discriminate sampling” process that is natural selection. The other camp argues that, rather than being two autonomous processes, natural selection and drift are just two aspects or facets of a single process. I argue that the two positions involved in this (...) dispute are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, by explicitly taking into account its sources, I argue that two kinds of drift are theoretically possible. The first kind – that I call circumstantial-drift – involves a process of its own, separate from the process of natural selection, or, more specifically, it requires that differences in a circumstantial trait cause differences in reproductive output of biological entities. The second kind – that I label probabilistic-drift – requires no other process than a probabilistic causal relation between a heritable physical trait and reproductive output, i.e. requires only the causal relation on which the work of natural selection could also depend. If both of these kinds of drift are theoretically possible, then neither defining, nor empirically identifying drift need to be zero-sum games. (shrink)

This paper provides a classification of violent agents according to the manner in which they relate to their own goals. By interpreting Jean-Paul Sartre’s discussion of violence in Notebooks for an Ethics, I show that violent agents may be classified into four categories that I call “defenders of the given order,” “instruments of a higher power,” “mineralized subjects” and, finally, “unchained subjects.” I also show how each of these four categories of violent subjects represents a particular manner of, in Sartre’s (...) words, “refusing time” or, in other terms, of refusing to change or to adjust to the situation one finds oneself in. (shrink)

Ethical debate about the use of animals in science is argued within different ethical frameworks; mainly utilitarianism, deontology, relativism or emotional ethics, with some debaters preferring particular frameworks. Stakeholders to the debate are veterinarians, scientists using animals, animal welfare groups and the general public. To estimate the balance of ethical frameworks used, we ran a discourse analysis of written texts by each stakeholder . The discourse analysis targeted the description of animals, instances of emotional language and language associated with utilitarianism, (...) deontology and relativism. Frequencies were compared using ANOVAs and Tukey tests. All stakeholders used words associated with all frameworks but emotional language was the most used followed by utilitarian , relativist and deontological language. Emotional language was used in texts from the general public more than in texts from veterinarians and scientists and animal welfare representatives . Animals were mainly described in a utilitarian way , more frequently by scientists than the general public . All stakeholders preferentially used negative emotional language when referring to animals than positive , and all stakeholders prioritised human interests over animals . Not surprisingly, a mixture of ethical frameworks were used to assess the ethics of animal experimentation. However, the language used in texts from animal welfare groups and the general public suggest that those two groups preferentially build arguments with emotion rather than utilitarianism, a framework that is privileged by veterinarians and scientists since they primarily use animals. (shrink)

The tetradic Lorentz-gauge invariant formulation of the SU(2) × U(1) theory in S3 × R space-time is presented and the general gauge covariant Dirac-Klein-Gordon-Maxwell-Yang-Mills equations are derived. A direct comparison of these equations to those of the SU(2) × U(1) gauge theory on Minkowskian background points out major differences effectively induced by the minimally coupling to S3 × R gravity.

Starting mostly with the second half of the 20th century, the churches and the religious communities are facing the challenges raised by the process of secularization, which is considered by some sociologists of religion as irreversible. The most affected ones were / are the traditional churches and the most obvious area where this phenomenon has become very visible is the Western Europe. This study aims to analyze the situation of the traditional churches in Romania, with a special focus on the (...) Greek-Catholic Church, from the same perspective: the impact of post-modernity over a church which is very much orientated towards the West, which is becoming more and more urban and is still passing through a complicated process of structuring and transition. The study underlines the fact that one of the answers to the problems raised by the process of secularization is based on the way in which the ecclesiastical community is built and on how deep is the consciousness of the confessional identity rooted in the mind and the soul of the believers. (shrink)

This paper shows that Quentin Meillassoux’s speculative materialism doesn’t offer us the means to account for the ancestral statements that the modern sciences produce, i.e. for the scientific statements about events preceding all forms of life. An analysis of the reasons why Meillassoux thinks that the problem of ancestrality problematizes the contemporary self-evidence of correlationism is first offered. The results of this analysis are then applied to speculative materialism itself and the consequences are not very promising: very much like correlationism, (...) speculative materialism explicitly denies what I call the “generalized version of the realistic assumption of science” and, in so doing, renders scientific ancestral statements de jure unverifiable. Therefore, if correlationism is rendered suspicious by the issue of ancestrality, the same can be said of speculative materialism. (shrink)

Adrian Marino, Cenzura în România - Schitã istoricã introductivã Ed. Aius, Craiova, 2000, 96 p.

Jean Servier, Terorismul Institutul European, Iasi, 2002, Traducere de Bogdan Geangalau, Cu un studiu introductiv de Nicu Gavriluta.

The Intermediary in the Philosophy of Space: Precariousness, Creation, Freedom. The reflection proposed by this text is the result of a dialogue spread over several years between philosophers and geographers. The best common ground between each other – in the right middle of the road – is undoubtedly the concept of the intermediary, which describes, negatively or affirmatively, the future of our physical, social, conceptual spaces and which speaks to us about discontinuity, hybridization, flow, contiguity, but also vulnerability, counterpowers and (...) freedom. We wanted to show that far from being a concept of the residual, the unassimilable, the incomprehensible or even the irrational, the intermediary is the place of hospitality, the open work of alternative creativity, resistance, or affirmation of those who, excluded from dominant discourses, claim a right to speak and freely participate in social life. (shrink)

In this short paper, I argue against what I call the “belonging to” interpretation of group selection in scenarios in which a group’s fitness is defined as the per capita reproductive output of the individuals of the group. According to this interpretation, group selection acts on “belonging to” properties of individuals, i.e. on relational or contextual properties that all the individuals of a group share simply by belonging to that group; thus, if differences in the individuals’ “belonging to” properties cause (...) differences in their fitness, group selection sensu the “belonging to” interpretation is said to be at work. I argue that the main problem with the “belonging to” interpretation is that it confuses evolutionary changes due to differences in environmental quality with evolutionary changes due to selection. In other words, I argue that, in the majority of cases, this interpretation actually takes the “selection” out of the “group selection” notion it aims to interpret: by adopting this perspective, one implicitly commits to explaining the evolutionary change under consideration not by a kind of selection, but by differences in the environmental quality experienced by individual types. (shrink)

This article examines the innovations introduced to phenomenological philosophy by the Russian philosopher Gustav Gustavovich Shpet. We identify the motifs and results of Shpet's problematization of the Husserlian concept of constitution, and we develop Shpet's treatment of the source of semantic genesis as a generative experience.

This paper outlines a hypothesis regarding the close connection between two problems in Georges Canguilhem’s work. The first problem is that of Canguilhem’s insistence to include considerations about natural selection in his work and of the role that this notion could play therein. The second problem consists in Canguilhem’s tendency to often use the term “life” as the subject of his sentences, even though this tendency may seem to at least partially contradict some of the central theses advanced in his (...) philosophy. This paper attempts to show that these two problems should not be viewed as being isolated from one another, that there is a strong connection between the two and that a certain interpretation of the first one allows us to make sense of the second. To put it otherwise, the aim of this paper is to show that a particular interpretation of the role of natural selection in Canguilhem’s work could help explain why “life” plays the role of a preferred grammatical subject in his writings. (shrink)

In "Some Criticism of the Contextual Approach, and a Few Proposals" in Biological Theory, Brian McLoone discusses some of the points about the contextual approach that I made in a recent paper. Besides offering a reply to McLoone’s comments on my paper, in this article I show why McLoone’s discussion of the two main frameworks for thinking about group selection—the contextual and the Price approach—is partly misguided. In particular, I show that one of McLoone’s main arguments against the contextual approach (...) is missing the target and that one of his (and Elliott Sober’s) arguments in defense of the Price approach is flawed. Criticizing these arguments will help me present an entirely different picture than McLoone’s of the current status of multilevel selection theory. More precisely, I argue that the idea that we are dealing with "multilevel selection" in the type of multigroup cases in which the focal units are the individuals (and their traits) has recently come under threat. Finally, I discuss the ways in which this idea might be salvaged by appealing either to the contextual or to the Price approach. (shrink)

The \\)-Robertson–Walker spacetime is under investigation. With the derived Hamilton operator, we are solving the Wheeler–De Witt Equation and its Schrödinger-like extension, for physically important forms of the effective potential. The closed form solutions, expressed in terms of Heun’s functions, allow us to comment on the occurrence of Universe from highly probable quantum states.

Nadie ha logrado explicarme de manera convincente por qué a los soldados de plástico de mi infancia todo el mundo los llamaba "indios". Algunos me dijeron que las figuras que representaban a los indios debían haber sido las más numerosas y populares desde el comienzo y que, por esta razón, el término que los designaba se había extendido a toda esta clase de juguetes. Otros propusieron la hipótesis de que el nombre en cuestión había adquirido tanta aceptación debido a que (...) en aquella época, en Rumanía y en otros países comunistas, los wéstern gozaban de gran éxito. También hubo quienes plantearon la hipótesis de que una elección semejante había sido influenciada por las lecturas de los niños de entonces, orientadas hacia el mundo del Oeste salvaje gracias a las novelas de Karl May y James Fenimore Cooper. (shrink)

The study focuses on the theoretical-methodological analysis of the concept of social freedom as a special concept of individual autonomy in relation to the social conditions of its applicability. The aim of the analysis is to reveal and clarify the main political implications and normative claims that result from it for political theory. The thesis is formulated and argued in the article that the philosophical concept of social freedom in its applicability programmatically leads to a model of the politics of (...) emancipation as a process of social transformation and political overcoming of recognized forms of unfreedom, historical forms of social oppression and domination. Social understanding of individual freedom becomes the normative basis of politics as a form of collective activity through which associated individuals govern the social conditions of their lives. By comparing the two basic forms of emancipatory politics – class politics and identity politics – the main problems of such an understanding of politics are discussed. (shrink)