In this paper I expose and criticise the distinction between pure indexicals and demonstratives, held by David Kaplan and John Perry. I oppose the context of material production of the utterance to the “intended context” (the context of interpretation, i.e. the context the speaker indicates as semantically relevant): this opposition introduces an intentional feature into the interpretation of pure indexicals. As far as the indexical I is concerned, I maintain that we must distinguish between the material producer of the utterance (...) containing I and the “intended agent of the context” - i.e. the individual designated by the material producer as the responsible for the utterance. (shrink)

The mental representation of one’s own body does not necessarily correspond to the physical body. For instance, a dissociation between perceived and actual reach-ability has been shown, that is, individuals perceive that they can reach objects that are out of grasp. We presented participants with 3D pictures of objects located at four different distances, namely near-reaching space, actual-reaching space, perceived-reaching space and non-reaching space. Immediately after they were presented with function, manipulation, observation or pointing verbs and were required to judge (...) if the verb was compatible with the object.Participants were faster with function and manipulation verbs than with observation and pointing verbs. Strikingly, with both function and manipulation verbs participants were faster when objects were presented in actual than the perceived reaching space. These findings suggest that our knowledge of the world is implicitly built online through behaviour, and is not necessarily reflected in explicit estimates or conscious representations. (shrink)

This article re-examines Vilém Flusser's philosophy of photography and its relation to what I will name the philosophical question of 'image-thinking'. It places his work on photography in the context of the much discussed 'pictorial' and 'iconic' turns in the study of visual culture and, through this, aims to reveal the depth of Flusser's approach to understanding media culture and to argue for the significance and continuing relevance of his philosophy of photography.

The elderly are often considered a vulnerable group in public and academic bioethical debates and regulations. In this paper, we examine and challenge this assumption and its ethical implications. We begin by systematically delineating the different concepts of vulnerability commonly used in bioethics, before then examining whether these concepts can be applied to old age. We argue that old age should not, in and of itself, be used as a marker of vulnerability, since ageing is a process that can develop (...) in a variety of different ways and is not always associated with particular experiences of vulnerability. We, therefore, turn to more fundamental phenomenological considerations in order to reconstruct from a first person perspective the intricate interconnections between the experiences of ageing and vulnerability. According to this account, ageing and old age are phenomena in which the basic anthropological vulnerability of human beings can manifest itself in an increased likelihood of harm and exploitation. Thus, we plead for a combined model of vulnerability that helps to avoid problems related to the current concepts of vulnerability. We conclude first that old age as such is not a sufficient criterion for being categorized as vulnerable in applied ethics, and second that reflections on ageing can help to develop a better understanding of the central role of vulnerability in human existence and in applied ethics. (shrink)

This work is devoted to the relations between Lambek’s Syntactic Calculus and noncommutative variants of Girard’s Linear Logic; in particular the paper will consider: the geometrical representation of the laws of LC by means of proof-nets; the discovery - due to such a geometrical representation - of some laws of LC not yet considered; the discussion of possible linguistic uses of these new laws.

En 2011 el señor Mario Posada Ochoa donó a la Universidad EAFIT una extensa y poco conocida colección de arte; acaso unos cuantos amigos habrían visto de cerca las 480 obras que recibió la Universidad, de artistas como Segundo Angelvis, Inés Acevedo Bernal, Sergio Trujillo Magnenat, Luis A. Rengifo y Ramón Vásquez, entre otros. Algunas de ellas carecían de la firma del autor o de un dato que comprobara la autoría, y estaban deterioradas, más que por el tiempo, por el (...) improvisado bodegaje: don Mario las había guardado durante cuarenta años en su hermosa casa de Maracaibo, en el centro de la ciudad. En Extensión Cultural de EAFIT han procurado, desde entonces, conservar este legado. (shrink)

El aumento de los costos sanitarios y financieros de las enfermedades, las discapacidades y las disparidades respalda la aceleración mundial de los intereses y las inversiones en IA (inteligencia artificial) sanitaria para lograr soluciones sanitarias mejores, más baratas, más rápidas y justas a escala mundial y local. Sin embargo, no existe un consenso sobre la aplicación práctica de los principios de la IA responsable en diversos sectores, estados y sistemas de creencias de todo el mundo. Este estudio de prueba de (...) concepto utiliza el marco ético pluralista global (el Contrato Social Personalista) para proporcionar, por tanto, el primer análisis conocido de ética computacional (AiCE, por sus siglas en inglés) y política basado en IA aumentada bayesiana que integra análisis clínicos, de rentabilidad y de disparidades en la atención sanitaria con datos representativos a nivel nacional para estimar el costo global de las disparidades en la atención sanitaria en la colonoscopia (CS, por sus siglas en inglés) y el ahorro de la CS habilitada por IA para reducirlas. El estudio sugiere que revertir las disparidades raciales, en particular entre hispanos y asiáticos, puede ahorrar a los sistemas sanitarios estadounidenses 17.610 millones de dólares al año, con un ahorro potencial de 625,40 millones de dólares para los hispanos y 289 millones de dólares para los asiáticos en particular (con un ahorro similar para las comunidades vulnerables en países de ingresos medios y bajos). Los resultados anteriores respaldan el imperativo de ahorro de costos que supone la inversión estratégica y de capacitación en estas medidas impulsadas por la IA para mejorar los objetivos estratégicos de sostenibilidad, eficacia, eficiencia y equidad (SEEE) de la atención sanitaria. Estos resultados empíricos informan el argumento bioético global más amplio de las dimensiones gemelas de la dignidad y la seguridad humanas (arraigadas en el relato personalista, multicultural y metafísico de la persona como miembro de la familia humana global) para destacar el imperativo ético de la IA para optimizar el rendimiento del ecosistema sanitario digital global. Semejante fin instrumental es un medio decisivo para avanzar hacia el fin último del bien común, en el que se salvaguarda el bien individual de cada persona y en el que éste encuentra su realización trabajando hacia él. (shrink)

Aristotle's discussion of friendship provides an inclusive analysis that, along with common everyday understanding, tries to take into account approaches as different as that of the sophists and Plato's meditation on this theme. The present essay examines the complexity of the phenomenon of friendship —especially the difficult intersection of friendship as loving intimacy between excellent individuals and friendship as a genuinely political bond. Above all, it attempts to cast light on the political relevance of perfect friendship. Thus understood, friendship is (...) disclosed as the end or destination of politics and may even presage the self-overcoming of politics as mere legality. This opens the way for an understanding of political finality as no mere expediency and for thinking the political on the basis of pathos and singularity. (shrink)

Admixture, the genetic exchange between differentiated populations appears to be common in the history of species, but has not yet been comparatively studied across mammals. This limits the understanding of its mechanisms and potential role in mammalian evolution. The authors want to summarize the current knowledge on admixture in non‐human primates, and suggest that it is important to establish a comparative framework for this phenomenon in humans. Genetic observations in domesticated mammals and their wild counterparts are discussed, and a brief (...) global overview on other clades is presented. Based on this, some of the consequences of gene flow, including incompatibilities and their genomic footprint, as well as adaptive introgression are discussed, and suggestions for a functional genomics approach are made. It is proposed that the field is moving beyond descriptive observations in single species, to a comprehensive analysis of admixture and its impact. Admixture is becoming an integral part of mammalian evolution. (shrink)

In this article I posit translation as philosophical operation that disrupts commonsense meaning and understanding. By defamiliarising language, translation can arrest thinking about a text in a way that assumes the language is understood. In recent work I have grappled with the phrase 'ways of knowing', which, for linguistic and conceptual reasons, confuses discussions about epistemological diversity. I here expand this inquiry by considering languages in which more than one equivalent exists for the English verb 'to know'. French, for example, (...) has both savoir and connaître , and German has wissen and kennen . This interlinguistic translation thus allows for a reconsideration of the inquiry into the phrase 'ways of knowing': do problems arise with 'ways of knowing-in-the sense-of connaître ', or with 'ways of knowing-in-the-sense-of savoir ', or both? Displacement is, more generally speaking, a method used by philosophers. Shifting the concept or phenomenon under consideration into a different context or discursive register allows one to defamiliarise it and see it in terms of something else. Through translation, whether interlinguistic or interdiscursive, philosophers ask what questions and understandings become possible when we see A in terms of B. (shrink)

Heterogenous flows across system boundaries continue to pose significant problems for efficient resource allocation especially with respect to long term strategic planning and immediate problems about allocation to address particular resource shortages. The approach taken here to modelling such flows is an engineering change prediction one. This enables margin modelling by producing system models in dependency matrices with different linkage types. Change prediction approaches from engineering design can analyse where these bottlenecks in integrated systems would be so that resources can (...) be deployed flexibility to avoid them and address them when they occur. Current state of the art of margin research can be furthered by identifying margins on multiple levels of system composition. It can usefully be complemented by a category theory based approach which allows representation of variable and constant properties of models under changing conditions, and the identification of flows within models. Category theory is useful for formalising such explanatory frameworks as it can both structure systems and permit analysis of their applications in a complementary way. (shrink)

According to Ramsey and colleagues the main constituent psychological processes of innovation are response to novelty, exploration, and the ability to recognize a novel solution. I fully support this view but point out that novelty reactions are often context-specific. I will expand on this and discuss the possible consequences of context-specific novelty reactions on the emergence of innovations.

The purpose of this article is to present an understanding of knowledge and learning in organisations from pragmatist perspectives. Relying on the work of early pragmatists as well as contemporary pragmatists, we introduce a conceptualisation of knowledge as the outcome of inquiry. Knowledge, in this article, is presented as provisional, multi-perspective, both particular and general. Our point of departure here is that the chief value of knowledge is its usefulness in solving problems. Pragmatist views of knowledge are further explicated in (...) our discussion of four pragmatist themes, which we have identified as particularly viable on the basis of Jane Addams’ pragmatist view and the practice of democracy in organised life: 1) Knowledge as transactional in organisations, 2) Reciprocity and learning in organisations, 3) Experience-based knowledge and meaning-making in organisations, and 4) Sustainability as an ongoing, democratic process in organisations. In the pragmatist school of thought we draw upon, a predominant issue is always also the very purpose of knowledge, or what we refer to as ‘usefulness’. Under discussion, we argue that a pragmatist understanding of knowledge and learning in organisations allows us to move beyond the polarisation of cognitive-possession — social-process and instead work from an alternative framework, with a focus on processes of learning and knowledge in organisations that aim at integrative, democratic problem solving. (shrink)

The contributions in this volume, written by leading scholars in the philosophy of hope, gives a systematic overview over the philosophical history of hope, about contemporary debates and about the role of hope in our collective life.

Emphasis in business ethics texts and courses has generally focused on corporate and other relatively high-level ethical issues. However, business school graduates in early career stages report ethical dilemmas involving individual-level decisions, often including influence attempts from one or more members of their work role sets. This paper proposes the use of role set analysis as a pedagogical technique for helping individuals to anticipate and deal with early-career ethical issues.

There is an argument that has recently been deployed in favor of thinking that the mind is mostly (or even exclusively) composed of cognitive modules; an argument that draws from some ideas and concepts of evolutionary and of developmental biology. In a nutshell, the argument concludes that a mind that is massively composed of cognitive mechanisms that are cognitively modular (henceforth, c-modular) is more evolvable than a mind that is not c-modular (or that is scarcely c-modular), since a cognitive mechanism (...) that is c-modular is likely to be biologically modular (henceforth, b-modular), and b-modular characters are more evolvable (e.g., Sperber 2002, Carruthers 2005). In evolutionary biology, the evolvability of a character in an organism is understood as the “organism’s capacity to facilitate the generation of non-lethal selectable phenotypic variation from random mutation” with respect to that character. Here I will argue that the notion of cognitive modularity needed to make this argument plausible will have to be understood in terms of the biological notion of variational independence; that is, it will have to be understood in such a way that a cognitive feature is c-modular only if few or no other morphological changes (cognitive and not) are significantly correlated with variations of that feature arising in members of the relevant population. I will also argue that all –except for (possibly) one—of the connotations contained in a cluster of notions of cognitive modularity widely accepted in some of the mainstream currents of thought in classical cognitive science, are simply irrelevant to the argument. In order to argue for this, I will have to examine the question as to whether there are any strong theoretical connections between (1) those connotations and (2) notions of modularity accepted in biology, specially in evolutionary and in developmental biology, that are thought to be most relevant to arguments to the effect that biological modularity enhances evolvability. (shrink)

Margaret Walker's Moral Understandings offers an “expressive-collaborative,” culturally situated, practice—based picture of morality, critical of a “theoretical-juridical” picture in most prefeminist moral philosophy since Henry Sidgwick. This essay compares her approach to ethics with that of John Rawls, another exemplar of the “theoretical-juridical” model, and asks how Walker's approach would apply to several ethical issues, including interaction with animals, social reform and revolution, and basic human rights.

Este texto se propone la lectura de la novela Pedro Páramo a la luz de algunos de los conceptos que, a fin de caracterizar la hermenéutica literaria, y la teoría de la interpretación, elabora Paul Ricoeur en su texto Teoría de la argumentación. La primera parte consiste en una breve presentación de los mismos y la segunda en la lectura a partir de estos conceptos, y en particular del concepto de referente, de algunos pasajes de la novela de Juan Rulfo.

En los Esbozos Pirrónicos, Sexto Empírico adelanta un argumento similar al sueño de Descartes, que parece comprometer a Sexto con una especie de relativismo protagórico. En este artículo examino este argumento en el contexto de otros pasajes de Sexto y propongo una interpretación que muestra que el escepticismo que uno puede trazar desde este argumento es tan radical como el de Descartes, pero nunca podrá considerarse como un argumento relativista. Muestro que Sexto comete un error crucial al describir la posición (...) de Protágoras y la suya, un error que podría llevarle a uno a concluir falsamente que Sexto es un relativista protagórico. (shrink)

The coordinated expression of the Hox gene family encoding transcription factors is critical for proper embryonic development and patterning. Major efforts have thus been dedicated to understanding mechanisms controlling Hox expression. In addition to the temporal and spatial sequential activation of Hox genes, proper embryonic development requires that Hox genes get differentially silenced in a cell‐type specific manner as development proceeds. Factors contributing to Hox silencing include the polycomb repressive complexes (PRCs), which control gene expression through epigenetic modifications. This review (...) focuses on PRC‐dependent regulation of the Hox genes and is aimed at integrating the growing complexity of PRC functional properties in the context of Hox regulation. In particular, mechanisms underlying PRC binding dynamics as well as a series of studies that have revealed the impact of PRC on the 3D organization of the genome is discussed, which has a significant role on Hox regulation during development. (shrink)

The need to be surrounded by stories, through a continuous production of and listening to narrations, is a distinctive feature of humankind. Even biology, although part of the Natural Sciences, is a discipline that “tells stories”, because it has to do with time, with the relationships between organisms and with the depths and transformations of life. Starting from the assumptions of a reading pedagogy that promotes the pleasure of reading among children, without the aim to educate and conform, the purpose (...) of this contribution is to bring out a specific didactic potential scattered throughout children’s novels, to propose interdisciplinary learning-teaching paths in biology at school by including children’s literature in science classes. (shrink)

Digitality is increasingly central to individuals’ existence, which has political implications. The article maps the political implications of digitalisation, focusing on African political thought. The latter is marked by Afro-communitarianism ideas, which foster solidarity, relationality, and communalism as foundational values of the polity. However, African communitarianism has granted little attention to contemporary phenomena such as digitalisation. Also, political theory discussions on digitality have looked mainly at (neo)liberal contexts. How the digital age is reshaping the tenets of communitarian political theories represents (...) an underdiscussed issue. This article outlines a research agenda on digitality and African political thought. New digitality-enabled relational modes change human and political interactions. The issue at stake is how these new modes challenge or strengthen the Afro-communitarian political outlook. This article recognises digital-humanism, political community, relations of power as central matters of inquiry. The analysis relies on bibliographic sources from African philosophy and comparative political theory. (shrink)

The phenomenological problem of the body (Leib) goes further than its treatment as a theoretical object, insofar as it concerns the meaning and the accomplishment of the phenomenological method itself. Both reduction and intuition, the two major poles of this method, imply in their specificity the reference to an operative corporeity (fungierende Leiblichkeit). The primordial sphere of absolute givenness cannot thus reduce the body proper without sacrificing the very principle that allows delimiting it. But this seems to lead to an (...) unavoidable subjectivation of the phenomenological experience, whose model remains the object of perception (internal or external) and its ideal of intuitivity. In the last part of the paper it is however argued that corporeity is more than the resort of such a subjectivation, appearing also to be, within the framework of expression, the key to intersubjective comprehension. (shrink)

Many physiotherapists are reluctant to treat a client with bone metastases, as treatment indications are not clearly defined. The paradigmatic case presented here, and a review of the literature, allow us to highlight some ethical and clinical issues in physiotherapy care at the end of life, particularly for patients with bone metastases. The objective of this article is not to create an ethical decision making model but rather to serve as additional guidance to existing decision models in rehabilitation. This guidance (...) is based on principlism and is specific to the oncology clients in palliative care. The proposed principles, without being exhaustive, are beneficence, non-maleficence, respect for autonomy and justice. With a review of clinical indications and precautions, the article also helps to clarify both the theoretical and the evidence-based risks. These principles provide avenues for reflection to guide the management of these patients. The physiotherapist will then be able to conduct a critical analysis, in collaboration with the interdisciplinary team, whose goal is to respect the client’s right to appropriate care at the right time and that is based on clinical need. (shrink)