However broad or vague the notion of connexivity may be, it seems to be similar to the notion of relevance even when relevance and connexive logics have been shown to be incompatible to one another. Relevance logics can be examined by suggesting syntactic relevance principles and inspecting if the theorems of a logic abide to them. In this paper we want to suggest that a similar strategy can be employed with connexive logics. To do so, we will suggest some properties (...) that seem to be hinted at in Nelson’s work. Following this strategy will ideally shed some light over the notion of content and will also help make a clear comparison between relevance and connexive logics. (shrink)

O hipotireoidismo congênito (HC) é uma doença endócrina resultante da carência de hormônios tireoidianos no organismo. Os programas de rastreamento neonatal para HC possibilitam evitar a maior parte das conseqüências neuropsicológicas, permitindo que as crianças tenham um desenvolvimento normal. Est..

Background: A short version of the Posttraumatic Diagnostic Scale comprising only re-experiencing symptom items has been recently validated on Japanese adults. This short-version-PDS had good psychometric properties among Japanese adults with and without posttraumatic stress disorder. The aim of this study was to translate and culturally validate the short-version-PDS for the Brazilian sociolinguistic context.Methods: A translation of the short-version-PDS was performed based on established guidelines. We enrolled 53 patients with PTSD as a potential comorbidity. The translation and cross-cultural adaptation of (...) the short-version-PDS included forward and back-translation by a Japanese Brazilian researcher and a certified translator; synthesis was achieved by consensus, backward translation, pilot test, and finalization. Content validity coefficient was used to assess quality of adaptation. Internal consistency was calculated using Cronbach's alpha coefficient. Spearman correlations were between the new short-version-PDS and the Brazilian version of the posttraumatic Stress Disorder Checklist for DSM-5, and a receiver operating characteristic curve was used to determine the best cut-off values for the short-version-PDS.Results: The short-version-PDS was well accepted by all subjects, none of the questions were experienced as inappropriate, and all questions of the 3 items were judged important. Item 1 presented CVCt = 0.92; item 2 had a CVCt = 0.87 and item 3 had a CVCt = 0.95. The internal consistency of the final version as measured by Cronbach's alpha was 0.78. The short-version-PDS scale correlated positively with the DSM-5 scale with a Spearman rho of 0.64 (95%CI [0.4-0.8], p 31.0 with sensitivity and specificity are 86.4 and 93.5%, respectively.Conclusions: This Brazilian Portuguese version of the short-version-PDS had good psychometric properties among Brazilian adults with and without PTSD. Transferability and generalizability of the cut-off scores should be further analyzed. (shrink)

Before the advent of fibrinolytic therapy as a gold standard method of care for cases of acute ischemic stroke in Romania, issues regarding legal medicine aspects involved in this area of medical expertise were already presented and, in the majority of cases, the doctors seem to be unprepared for these situations. The present research illustrates some of the cases in which these aspects were involved, that adressed a clinical center having 6 years of professional experience in the application of fibrinolytic (...) treatment for stroke. The following cases report either situations in which the afore mentioned therapy was not rightfully administrated or legal aspects regarding the obtainment of informed consent. Obtaining informed consent is a mandatory procedure, which takes time, to the detriment of application of fibrinolytic treatment. (shrink)

Evaluative markers of diminution and augmentation typically express quantity or intensity. Prior evidence suggests that they also convey emotions, although it remains unexplored as to whether this function is mediated by their role in expressing quantification/intensification. Here we investigated the effects of evaluative suffixes on the assessment of word affective properties by asking participants (N = 300) to score valence and arousal features for augmentatives, diminutives and base words with negative, positive or neutral valence. Diminutives and, to a lesser extent, (...) augmentatives were assessed more positively than base forms in negative words and more negatively than bases in positive words. The capacity of diminution to express attenuated emotions is in line with its function in conveying quantity. By contrast, valence effects for augmentatives suggests a role in expressing pejoration and amelioration that is not mediated by quantification. With regard to arousal, negative, neutral and positive augmentatives showed higher scores than base words, which, in addition, were also rated higher than diminutives. These incremental effects suggest that suffixes which convey larger quantity are also associated with increased arousal. Thus, with the exception of valence effects in augmentatives, it seems that evaluative suffixes encode both valence and arousal through quantification. (shrink)

Latin American women’s filmmaking has an unprecedented international profile thanks to the films of the Peruvian director Claudia Llosa, and the Argentine directors Lucía Puenzo and Lucrecia Martel. What is frequently unacknowledged when discussing the work of these award-winning filmmakers is the fact that all of their films are co-productions with Europe, and that programmes such as Cinéfondation, a programme aligned with the Cannes film festival, the Hubert Bals Fund, the World Cinema Fund and Ibermedia have been instrumental (...) in their production. This article will tell this story through a discussion of the work of Claudia Llosa with an introduction to the issues raised by her award winning festival film Madeinusa, and a focus on La teta asustada/The Milk of Sorrow. It will consider the arguments of theorists who critique what they see as neo-colonial European interventions in ‘world cinema’, and those who celebrate the enabling work of the funding bodies. The chapter asks where can we pl... (shrink)

Os discursos da Biblioteconomia brasileira são objeto de estudo desta pesquisa, que se concentrou nos artigos publicados durante a década de 1980 na Revista de Biblioteconomia de Brasília. Essa revista, cujo primeiro número foi publicado em 1973, encerrou suas atividades em 2001 e teve como foco as áreas de Biblioteconomia, Ciência da Informação, Arquivologia e afins. Com a intenção de discutir sobre dois conceitos centrais da Biblioteconomia - o de biblioteca e o de bibliotecário - analisamos as produções que versavam (...) sobre tais categorias de análise. A pesquisa é, então, considerada exploratória, de cunho bibliográfico, cujo método empregado foi o da análise de conteúdo. Essa década foi marcada pela importância da informação e da tecnologia como fatores responsáveis pelo desenvolvimento social e econômico do país. A biblioteca, nesse contexto de uma sociedade da informação, é marcada pela discussão da automação de seus serviços e produtos. O bibliotecário, visto como um profissional da informação, também tem um importante papel a desempenhar na sociedade, inclusive, o de estar ao lado dos mais vulneráveis. (shrink)

This essay argues that current advocacy of lesbian and gay rights to legal marriage and parenthood insufficiently criticizes both marriage and motherhood as they are currently practiced and structured by Northern legal institutions. Instead we would do better not to let the State define our intimate unions and parenting would be improved if the power presently concentrated in the hands of one or two guardians were diluted and distributed through an appropriately concerned community.

Apresenta uma análise preliminar das manifestações dos autores das Ciências Sociais e Humanas dentro do campo da Biblioteconomia e da Ciência da Informação (B & C.I.), por meio do método bibliométrico e análise de citação. Com o objetivo de descortinar quais teóricos são convocados para a construção do conhecimento na produção científica dos campos supracitados, realizou-se uma pesquisa exploratória com vistas ao levantamento dos autores das Ciências Sociais e Humanas e, posteriormente, a verificação da ocorrência deles na produção indexada pela (...) Base de Dados em Ciência da Informação (BRAPCI). Foram identificados 180 autores, dos quais 91 apareceram pelo menos uma vez nas buscas empreendidas pelos nomes e sobrenomes desses autores das Ciências Sociais e Humanas. O resultado desta pesquisa demonstrou os dois autores mais citados, Michel Foucault e Pierre Bourdieu, bem como a presença de diversos autores das Ciências Sociais e Humanas na construção do conhecimento da Biblioteconomia e da Ciência da Informação, o que contribui para o fortalecimento e a consolidação de ambas. (shrink)

ObjectivePhysical and mental well-being are threatened by climate change. Since hospitals in high-income countries contribute significantly to climate change through their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the medical ethics imperative of ‘do no harm’ imposes a responsibility on hospitals to decarbonise. We investigated hospital stakeholders’ perceptions of hospitals’ GHG emissions sources and the sense of responsibility for reducing GHG emissions in a hospital.MethodsWe conducted 29 semistructured qualitative expert interviews at one of Germany’s largest hospitals, Heidelberg University Hospital. Five patients, 12 clinical (...) and 12 administrative employees on different levels were selected using purposive maximum variation sampling. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and analysed using the framework approach.ResultsConcerning GHG emissions, hospital stakeholders perceived energy and waste as most relevant emission sources followed by mobility. Climate change mitigation in general was considered as important. However, in their role as patients or employees, hospital stakeholders felt less responsible for climate change mitigation. They saw providing best possible medical care to be the top priority in hospitals and were often concerned that patients’ health could be jeopardised by climate change mitigation measures.ConclusionPerceptions of most important emission sources did not coincide with those in literature, highlighting the need to inform stakeholders, for instance, about pharmaceuticals as important emission source. A frequently perceived conflict between reducing emissions and providing high-quality medical care could be eased, if reducing emissions would not only be justified as a contribution to mitigation, but also as a contribution to preventing ill health—a basic principle of medical ethics. (shrink)

Claudia Brodsky skillfully combines close readings of narrative works by Goethe, Austen, Balzac, Stendhal, Melville, and Proust with a detailed analysis of the relation between Kant's critical epistemology and narrative theory. Originally published in 1987. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal (...) of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

Claudia Déméné,Anne Marchand | : La diminution de la durée de vie des produits électroniques est à l’origine de nombreux débats. Le fabricant a traditionnellement été désigné comme le principal responsable de ce phénomène, alors que l’usager est généralement considéré comme une victime. Bien que le fait soit peu reconnu, les autorités politiques exercent également une influence sur la pérennité des biens par le biais des stratégies qu’elles adoptent et des règlements qu’elles instaurent. À partir d’une analyse critique de (...) la littérature sur ce thème, le présent article a pour objectif de jeter un nouveau regard sur l’obsolescence en discutant des responsabilités souvent ambiguës de ces trois acteurs qui, à différents niveaux, influencent la durée de vie des appareils électroniques. Cet article révèle que le cadre législatif européen, visant principalement les fabricants, offre des résultats mitigés pour lutter contre l’obsolescence des équipements électroniques. Sur la base de ce constat, les autorités politiques devraient également reconnaître l’influence de l’usager dans la diminution de la durée de vie des produits électroniques en vue d’instaurer des outils de politique environnementale permettant une gestion plus durable et efficace de ce type de biens. À cette fin, l’affichage environnemental de la durée de vie est explorée dans le but de mieux informer l’usager, à l’achat, de la durée de vie des appareils électroniques, et potentiellement minimiser l’obsolescence. | : The decrease in the lifespan of electronic products is the source of many debates. The manufacturer has traditionally been designated as the main cause of the decrease in the lifespan of electronic devices, while the consumer is usually considered as a victim. Although it is little known, political authorities have also an influence on the goods durability regarding the strategies they choose and the regulations they establish. Based on a critical analysis of literature, the present article aims at bringing a new perspective on obsolescence by discussing the ambiguous responsibilities of these three actors who, at different levels, influence the lifespan of electronic appliances. This article reveals that the current legal framework first aims at the manufacturers, but offers mitigated results to take concrete measures against obsolescence. In the view of this finding, political authorities should also recognize the influence of user in the decrease in product lifetimes in order to introduce environmental policy instruments to tend towards sustainable management of electronic equipment. To this end, the environmental labelling in product lifetimes is explored to better inform the user, at the time of purchase, on the electronic device lifespan and potentially minimize obsolescence. (shrink)

Mollidor, Claudia The Church today understands itself primarily in terms of an ecclesiology of communion. If ordinary parishioners are going to experience how the Church enacts that ecclesiology, it will normally, perhaps exclusively, be through their local parish. The concept of community is essential to an understanding of parish. As Pope John Paul II emphasised in Christifideles Laici, a parish is not principally a structure, a territory or a building, but rather 'the family of God', 'a familial and welcoming (...) home', 'the community of the faithful'. Canon law defines the parish as 'a certain community of Christ's faithful stably established within a particular Church'. However, a parish community does not exist just for its own sake but for the purpose of carrying out the Church's mission in its local area. Fundamental to an ecclesiology of communion is this interpenetration of community and mission. This is true of all the baptised: all are 'incorporated into the Church and made sharers in her mission', or, as the ACBC website puts it, 'all who have been baptised have rights and responsibilities in the Church', which includes non-church-attending Catholics. (shrink)

Book Description\n\nIn Aristotle's Ethics as First Philosophy, Claudia Baracchi demonstrates\nthe indissoluble links between practical and theoretical wisdom in\nAristotle's thinking. Baracchi shows how the theoretical is always\ninformed by a set of practices, and, specifically, how one's encounter\nwith phenomena, the world, or nature in the broadest sense, is always\na matter of ethos. \n\nAbout the Author\n\nClaudia Baracchi is a Professor of Moral Philosophy at the Universit...\ndi Milano-Bicocca, Italy and the author of Of Myth, Life, and War\nin Plato's Republic.

This study offers syntactic and semantic evidence that there are three types of locative modifiers within the verbal domain that differ with respect to their syntactic base position and interpretation. Two of them are subject to semantic indeterminacy, thereby leading to multiple utterance meanings. The study aims at showing that the full range of interpretations can be derived within a rigid account of lexical and compositional semantics. Locative modifiers are invariably treated as first-order predicates adding a locative constraint. All semantic (...) differences originate from the structural environment they are embedded in and the pragmatic resolution of semantic indeterminacy. The syntactic distribution of locative modifiers is shown to be derivable from interface conditions. (shrink)

Abstraction and generalization are two processes of reasoning that have a special role in the construction of scientific theories and models. They have been important parts of the scientific method ever since the nineteenth century. A philosophical and historical analysis of scientific practices shows how abstraction and generalization found their way into the theory of the logic of science of the nineteenth-century philosopher Charles S. Peirce. Our case studies include the scientific practices of Francis Galton and John Herschel, who introduced (...) composite photographs and graphical methods, respectively, as technologies of generalization and thereby influenced Peirce’s logic of abstraction. Herschel’s account of generalization is further supported by William Whewell, who was very influential on Peirce. By connecting Herschel’s scientific technology of abstraction to Peirce’s logical technology of abstraction—namely, diagrams—we highlight the role of judgments in scientific observation by hypostatic abstractions. We also relate Herschel’s discovery-driven logic of science and Peirce’s open-ended diagrammatic logic to the use of models in science. Ultimately, Peirce’s theory of abstraction is a case of showing how logic applies to reality. (shrink)

In Aristotle's Ethics as First Philosophy Claudia Baracchi demonstrates the indissoluble links between practical and theoretical wisdom in Aristotle's thinking. Referring to a broad range of texts from the Aristotelian corpus, Baracchi shows how the theoretical is always informed by a set of practices, and specifically, how one's encounter with phenomena, the world, or nature in the broadest sense, is always a matter of ethos. Such a 'modern' intimation can, thus, be found at the heart of Greek thought. Baracchi's (...) book opens the way for a comprehensively reconfigured approach to classical Greek philosophy. (shrink)

Over the last decades, various predictors have proven relevant for job performance [e.g., general mental ability, broad personality traits, such as the Big Five]. However, prediction of job performance is far from perfect, and further potentially relevant predictors need to be investigated. Narrower personality traits, such as individuals' character strengths, have emerged as meaningfully related to different aspects of job performance. However, it is still unclear whether character strengths can explain additional variance in job performance over and above already known (...) powerful predictors. Consequently, the present study aimed at examining the incremental validity of character strengths as predictors of job performance beyond GMA and/or the Big Five traits and identifying the most important predictors of job performance out of the 24 character strengths, GMA, and the Big Five. Job performance was operationalized with multidimensional measures of both productive and counterproductive work behavior. A sample of 169 employees from different occupations completed web-based self-assessments on character strengths, GMA, and the Big Five. Additionally, the employees' supervisors provided web-based ratings of their job performance. Results showed that character strengths incrementally predicted job performance beyond GMA, the Big Five, or GMA plus the Big Five; explained variance increased up to 54.8, 43.1, and 38.4%, respectively, depending on the dimension of job performance. Exploratory relative weight analyses revealed that for each of the dimensions of job performance, at least one character strength explained a numerically higher amount of variance than GMA and the Big Five, except for individual task proactivity, where GMA exhibited the numerically highest amount of explained variance. The present study shows that character strengths are relevant predictors of job performance in addition to GMA and other conceptualizations of personality. This also highlights the role of socio-emotional skills, such as character strengths, for the understanding of performance outcomes above and beyond cognitive ability. (shrink)

"What do grown children owe their parents?" Over two decades ago philosopher Jane English asked this question and came up with the startling answer: nothing (English 1979). English joins many contemporary philosophers in rejecting the once-traditional view that grown children owe their parents some kind of fitting repayment for past services rendered. The problem with the traditional view, as argued by many, is, first, that parents have duties to provide fairly significant services to their growing children, and persons do not (...) owe repayment for others' mere performance of duty; second, even where parents go above and beyond duty in their loving and generous rearing of their children, the benefits are bestowed, at least on young children, without their voluntary acceptance and consent, and so, again, fail to generate any obligation of subsequent repayment on their part (see Blustein 1982: 182-3). Moreover, the entire idiom of obligation and repayment, in English's 1 words, "tends to obscure, or even to undermine, the love that is the correct ground of filial obligation" (352). English's alternative, however -- that children strictly "owe" their parents nothing except what flows naturally from whatever love and affection exist between them -- also strikes many as problematic. Christina Hoff Sommers offers examples of what seem to be clearly delinquent adult children, who simply don't "feel" like sharing their lives with their aging parents, or providing any emotional or financial support to them, and so don't (Sommers 1986: 440-41). Sommers points out that we need some talk of obligations in order to fill in the cracks in human relationships where love and affection fail: "The ideal relationship cannot be 'duty-free,' if only because sentimental ties may come unraveled, often leaving one of the parties at a material disadvantage'" (450-51). Sommers proposes as her alternative to English that legitimate duties arise out of special relationships defined by social roles: being a father or mother, a son or a daughter, "is socially as well as biologically prescriptive; it not only defines what one is; it also defines who one is and what one owes" (447).. (shrink)

In my paper, I present two competing perspectives on the foundational problem (as opposed to the descriptive problem) of quantifier domain restriction: the objective perspective on context (OPC) and the intentional perspective on context (IPC). According to OPC, the relevant domain for a quantified sentence is determined by objective facts of the context of utterance. In contrast, according to IPC, we must consider certain features of the speaker’s intention in order to determine the proposition expressed. My goal is to offer (...) a plausible and fair reconstruction of IPC. Drawing a parallel between quantifier domain restriction and standard cases of context dependence as indexicality, I argue that the speaker’s intentions can play a semantic role only if they satisfy an Availability Constraint: an intention must be made available or communicated to the addressee, and for that purpose the speaker can exploit any feature of the objective context (words, gestures, relevance or uniqueness of either the quantificational domain or of the referent in the context of utterance). An intention satisfying the Availability Constraint must be something that a hearer in normal circumstances is able to work out by relying on the physical surroundings of the utterance situation, on utterances exchanged during the previous conversation, and on background knowledge shared by speaker and addressee. (shrink)

Kant's critical philosophy is often regarded as standing in a problematic relation to his works in “anthropology”, or the study of human nature. In the Preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason Kant describes his critical project as a “Copernican” turn toward the cognitive subject, which might seem to signal a reorientation of philosophy around anthropology.1 However, both in the first Critique and in his subsequent works he relegates “empirical anthropology” and “practical” or “moral anthropology” to (...) the sidelines of his critical projects in cognitive and practical philosophy. Yet Kant's formulation of his critical philosophy coincided almost exactly with the development of his interest in anthropology. During the 1770s, the “silent decade” in which he formulated his critical philosophy, Kant initiated a course on anthropology at the University of Königsberg. This course was among the most popular in his regular schedule, and he offered it annually for twenty-five years until his retirement. He then published a revised version of his lectures as the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, a text that is one of his most accessible publications, and might even seem uncharacteristically loose and anecdotal to readers of his other works. Kant also published a number of shorter works on anthropological topics during this period, and even suggested, in several scattered remarks, that anthropology in some way encompasses all of the philosophical disciplines. (shrink)

The use of psychoanalytic ideas to explore social and political questions is not new. Freud began this work himself and social research has consistently drawn on his ideas. This makes perfect sense. Social and political theory must find ways to conceptualise the relation between human subjects and our social environment; and the distinctive and intense observation of individual psychical structuring afforded within clinical psychoanalysis has given rise to rich theoretical and methodological resources for doing just this. However, psychoanalytic concepts do (...) not remain the same when they are rearticulated in the context of research. This book traces the reiteration and transformation of concepts in the psychoanalytic theory of Freud, Klein and Lacan, the social theory of Butler, Derrida, Foucault, Laclau and Zizek, and case studies of empirical research ranging from the classic Tavistock Institute studies to contemporary work in politics, gender studies, cultural studies and education. Each chapter explores one cluster of concepts: Melancholia, loss and subjectivity Overdetermination and free association Resistance, reflexivity and the compulsion to repeat Repression, disavowal and foreclosure Psychic defenses and social defenses Arguing against the reification of psychoanalytic concepts, Claudia Lapping suggests the need for a reflexive understanding of the play of attachments and substitutions as concepts are reframed in the contrasting activities of psychoanalysis and research. (shrink)

Charles Sanders Peirce was acknowledged by William James as the founder of pragmatism; however, while James’ appreciation for psychology is well taken into account in his philosophy, the role that psychological inquiry played in Peirce’s thought remains largely unexplored. Few excellent studies indicate Peirce as the first American experimental psychologist (Cadwallader 1974, 1975; Fisch 1986) and as the first to perform a truly modern experiment in psycho-physics (Hacking 1988). Nonetheless, Peirce’s commitment to psycho-physics fails to be fully integrated with the (...) broader project of his philosophy. This integration is crucial to gain a better understanding of the complexity of Peirce’s system of thought and of his position in the psychologistic-antipsychologistic divide. On the logical side, making Peirce’s position on psychology explicit leads to investigating his material logic; on the psychological side, Peirce’s scientific approach to psychology has its theoretical foundation in Kant and further marks the distinction between Peirce’s pragmatism and James’. (shrink)

One of the perennially intriguing questions regarding Kant’s approach to the human sciences is the relation between his ‘transcendental psychology’ and empirical cognitive psychology. In this paper I compare his analysis of the a priori conditions of human cognition in the Critique of pure reason with his empirical account of the human cognitive faculties in his Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view. In comparing his approach to self-consciousness, sensibility, imagination, and understanding in these two works, I argue that Kant (...) distinguishes between the transcendental and empirical aspects of the human cognitive faculties, and regards the transcendental functions as configuring the empirical faculties of human consciousness, or as giving them the structure that they require to become faculties of cognition. I then show that the cognitive faculties of human beings may vary in their empirical operation, even while they are configured by the same transcendental structure. Finally, I characterize Kant’s transcendental psychology in the first Critique as an account of the faculties that are required for a mind to be an agent or subject of cognition, corresponding to his account of the conditions that are required universally and necessarily for something to be an object of cognition.Keywords: Immanuel Kant; Anthropology; Psychology; Cognition; Transcendental; Empirical. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to point out that some mathematical doctrines attributed by Aristotle to Plato find their origin in a threefold order of problems: first, in some allusions contained in the dialogues, which might create ambiguities within the so-called standard model of ideas; second, in the Aristotelian interpretation of ideal entities as universals or predicates, an interpretation in turn partly authorized by Plato himself; third, in the tendency not to emphasize the possibility of understanding participation and the (...) whole-part relationship from a non-quantitative point of view. In this paper I will disregard the complex debate about whether or not to attribute the unwritten doctrines of the Aristotelian account to Plato, but I will appraise in what sense some Aristotelian objections to participation may arise from the fact of conceiving of numbers and magnitudes as ideas. (shrink)

Health-care goods are goods with peculiar properties, and where they are scarce, societies face potentially explosive distributional conflicts. Animated public and academic debates on the necessity and possible justice of limit-setting in health care have taken place in the last decades and have recently taken a turn toward procedural rather than substantial criteria for justice. This article argues that the most influential account of procedural justice in health-care rationing, presented by Daniels and Sabin, is indeterminate where concrete properties of rationing (...) institutions are concerned. Such properties inscribe substantial norms into institutions. These norms can derive validity only from democratic majority decisions, which must be seen as an instance of pure procedural justice. We therefore have to move the discussion to a meta-level and ask how concrete properties of institutions are being chosen. I suggest four criteria for sufficiently democratic institutional design choice and conclude that as institutional properties are likely to have effects on the resulting distribution of health care, design choices should be empirically informed and taken both democratically and deliberately. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Marx's central concern, consistent throughout his works, is to challenge and overcome hierarchical oppositions, which he considers as the core of modern, capitalist societies and the cause of alienation. The young Marx critiques the hierarchical idealism/materialism opposition. In this opposition, idealism abstracts from and reduces all material elements to the mind (or spirit), and materialism abstracts from and reduces all mental abstractions to the body (or matter). The mature Marx sophisticates this critique with his (...) theory of the commodity fetish. The commodity fetish abstracts the exchange-value (the mind) from the commodity's use-value (the body). Although Marx aims to challenge capitalism by abolishing the hierarchical relation among binary oppositions, I show that in his early and later writings on the working-class woman, he reinforces hierarchical binaries, pointing at the gendered unconscious structure of capitalism. (shrink)

The objective was to propose an educational management model from the constructivist perspective to improve teacher performance in primary and secondary education institutions. The research was basic, quantitative approach, non-experimental design, cross-sectional and descriptive-propositional in scope. The sample consisted of 92 teachers from an educational institution in Lambayeque, Peru. The results obtained in the surveys place teacher performance at a low level in all its dimensions: preparation for student learning (60.90%); teaching for student learning (70.70%); participation in the management of (...) the school articulated to the community (66.30%); and development of teacher professionalism and identity (64.10%). Similarly, the information obtained regarding the management of the educational institution allows it to be classified as deficient in the four dimensions: organizational, (59.80%); administrative, (57.60%); pedagogical-didactic (60.90%) and community (62.00%). It was concluded that proposing an educational management model from the constructivist perspective will contribute to improving teacher performance in primary and secondary education institutions, which was validated by the criteria of five experts. (shrink)

The world population aged significantly over the twentieth century, leading to an increase in the number of individuals presenting progressive, incapacitating, incurable chronic-degenerative diseases. Advances in medicine to prolong life prompted the establishment of instruments to ensure their self-determination, namely the living will, which allows for an informed person to refuse a type of treatment considered unacceptable according to their set of values. From the knowledge on the progression of Alzheimer disease, it is possible to plan the medical care, even (...) though there is still no treatment available. Irreversible cognitive incapacity underlines the unrelenting loss of autonomy of the demented individual. Such a loss requires the provision of specific and permanent care. Major ethical issues are at stake in the physician–patient–family relationship, even when dementia is still at an early stage. The authors suggest that for an adequate health care planning in Alzheimer disease the living will can be presented to the patient in the early days of their geriatric care, as soon as the clinical, metabolic or even genetic diagnosis is accomplished. They also suggest that the appointment of a health care proxy should be done when the person is still in full enjoyment of his cognitive ability, and that the existence and scope of advance directives should be conveyed to any patient in the early stages of the disease. It follows that ethical guidelines should exist so that neurologists as well as other physicians that deal with these patients should discuss these issues as soon as possible after a diagnosis is reached. (shrink)

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)