Standard economic theory does not capture trust among anonymous Internet traders. But when traders are allowed to have social preferences, uncertainty about a seller’s morals opens t he door for trust, reward, exploitation and reputation building. We report experiments suggesting that sellers’ intrinsic motivations to be trustworthy are not sufficient to sustain trade when not complemented by a feedback system. We demonstrate that it is the interaction of social preferences and cleverly designed reputation mechanisms that solves to a large extent (...) the trust problem on Internet market platforms. However, economic theory and social preference models tend to underestimate the difficulties of promoting trust in anonymous online trading communities. (shrink)

This essay frames systemic patterns of mental abuse against women of color and Indigenous women on Turtle Island (North America) in terms of larger design-of-distribution strategies in settler colonial societies, as these societies use various forms of social power to distribute, reproduce, and automate social inequalities (including public health precarities and mortality disadvantages) that skew socio-economic gain continuously toward white settler populations and their descendants. It departs from traditional studies in gender-based violence research that frame mental abuses such as gaslighting--commonly (...) understood as mental manipulation through lying or deceit--stochastically, as chance-driven interpersonal phenomena. Building on structural analyses of knowledge in political epistemology (Dotson 2012, Berenstain 2016), political theory (Davis and Ernst 2017), and Indigenous social theory (Tuck and Yang 2012), I develop the notion of cultural gaslighting to refer to the social and historical infrastructural support mechanisms that disproportionately produce abusive mental ambients in settler colonial cultures in order to further the ends of cultural genocide and dispossession. I conclude by proposing a social epidemiological account of gaslighting that a) highlights the public health harms of abusive ambients for minority populations, b) illuminates the hidden rules of social structure in settler colonial societies, and c) amplifies the corresponding need for structural reparations. (shrink)

In recent years postcolonial and decolonial feminisms have become increasingly salient in philosophy, yet they are often deployed as conceptual stand-ins for generalized feminist critiques of eurocentrism (without reference to the material contexts anti-colonial feminisms emanate from), or as a platform to re-center internal debates between dominant European theories/ists under the guise of being conceptually ‘decolonized’. By contrast, this article focuses on the specific contexts, issues and lifeworld concerns that ground anti-colonial feminisms and provides a brief survey of the literature. (...) Because the terms implicated in the analysis (Third World, transnational, women of color, postcolonial, decolonial and indigenous feminisms) are highly contested on their own, I only provide provisional and non-foundational histories and definitions for the purposes of resisting philosophical appropriations of anti-colonial feminist theory. (shrink)

Intersectionality is a term that arose within the black feminist intellectual tradition for the purposes of identifying interlocking systems of oppression. As a descriptive term, it refers to the ways human identity is shaped by multiple social vectors and overlapping identity categories (such as sex, race, class) that may not be readily visible in single-axis formulations of identity, but which are taken to be integral to robustly capture the multifaceted nature of human experience. As a diagnostic term, it captures the (...) confluence of power and domination on the social construction of identity in order to remedy concrete harms that result from this convergence. It is not a prescriptive methodology or closed system of analysis, but rather an open-ended hermeneutic lens through which interconnected systems of oppression can come into focus in the fight for social justice. (shrink)

Systemic epistemic failings in institutions are often explained through settler epistemologies and settler colonial frameworks that both obscure and reproduce the conditions necessary for those failings to endure. What is never questioned in the standard picture of institutional epistemic injustice is the implicit origin myth of an ‘institutional big bang’ that spawned many modern social institutions out of presumably noble orienting goals for a well-functioning society in democratic nation-states. We are concerned with the functional outcomes of institutions in settler colonial (...) societies, and how these outcomes consistently undermine whitewashed narratives of any inherent institutional design allegedly aimed at promoting testimonial justice in settler colonial societies. Institutions are built to target and maintain a status quo, especially (but not only) when they are charged with securing part of the social order or fabric of settler colonial societies. We will illustrate this concern through a discussion of various functional outcomes of the U.S. institution of asylum using Shannon Speed’s (2019. Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settler-Capitalist State. The University of North Carolina Press) analysis of the violence Indigenous women migrants from Latin America experience within the complex administrative web of U.S. migration and asylum systems. (shrink)

This essay addresses structural violence against Latinas by looking at the existential toll different forms of cultural violence take on us. In particular, it looks at linguistic violence and the role lesser-known violences play in the intergenerational continuation of colonial violence, such as hermeneutic violence. Defined as violence done to systems of meaning and interpretation, hermeneutic violence is discussed at length in relation to the experience of harm and injury. The essay further explores some resistant epistemic practices Latina feminists have (...) generated to address systemic violence. The work of Gloria Anzaldúa is elaborated as an example of resistant epistemic practices. (shrink)

In the wake of continued structural asymmetries between women of color and white feminisms, this essay revisits intersectional tensions in Catharine MacKinnon’s Toward a Feminist Theory of the State while exploring productive spaces of coalition. To explore such spaces, we reframe Toward a Feminist Theory of the State in terms of its epistemological project and highlight possible synchronicities with liberational features in women-of-color feminisms. This is done, in part, through an analysis of the philosophical role “method” plays in MacKinnon’s argument, (...) and by reframing her critique of juridical neutrality and objectivity as epistemic harms. In the second section, we sketch out a provisional coalitional theory of liberation that builds on MacKinnon’s feminist epistemological insights and aligns them with decolonizing projects in women-of-color feminisms, suggesting new directions and conceptual revisions that are on the way to coalition. (shrink)

One way to track the many critical impacts of women of color feminisms is through the powerful structural analyses of gendered and racialized oppression they offer. This article discusses diverse lineages of women of color feminisms in the global South that tackle systemic structures of power and domination from their situated perspectives. It offers an introduction to structuralist theories in the humanities and differentiates them from women of color feminist theorizing, which begins analyses of structures from embodied and phenomenological st¬¬andpoints--with (...) the day-to-day concerns of our lives. The essay is divided into three sections. In section one, I discuss theories of structure in the humanities and sciences, differentiating them from women of color’s analysis of structure as diagnostic of the ways colonial power relations are functionalized through social structures. In section two, I discuss the diverse contexts of interpretation that background women of color feminisms, outlining key themes and ideas related to theories of structure. I argue against a unified theory of women of color structural feminisms that supplants difference, favoring a rehabilitated concept of structure for the purposes of making targeted interventions in contemporary radical anti-colonial politics. I offer the example of systematic marginalization produced by colonial violence and mythology as one reason to take up this approach. In section three, I outline four provisional characteristics of women of color structural feminisms. I conclude that, when divested from colonial myths that guide mainstream notions of structure, it can be a useful hermeneutic tactic in the fight for liberation from ongoing colonial violence. (shrink)

This paper investigates the concept of behavioral autonomy in Artificial Life by drawing a parallel to the use of teleological notions in the study of biological life. Contrary to one of the leading assumptions in Artificial Life research, I argue that there is a significant difference in how autonomous behavior is understood in artificial and biological life forms: the former is underlain by human goals in a way that the latter is not. While behavioral traits can be explained in relation (...) to evolutionary history in biological organisms, in synthetic life forms behavior depends on a design driven by a research agenda, further shaped by broader human goals. This point will be illustrated with a case study on a synthetic life form. Consequently, the putative epistemic benefit of reaching a better understanding of behavioral autonomy in biological organisms by synthesizing artificial life forms is subject to doubt: the autonomy observed in such artificial organisms may be a mere projection of human agency. Further questions arise in relation to the need to spell out the relevant human aims when addressing potential social or ethical implications of synthesizing artificial life forms. (shrink)

A credible fear test is an in-depth interview process given to undocumented people of any age arriving at a U.S. port of entry to determine qualification for asylum-seeking. Credible fear tests as a typical immigration procedure demonstrate not only what structural epistemic violence looks like but also how this violence lives in and through the design of asylum policy. Key terms of credible fear tests such as “significant possibility,” “evidence,” “consistency,” and “credibility” can never be neutral in the context of (...) colonial administrative violence. We argue that these terms function as mechanisms of exclusion and demonstrate that the capacity to be violent (i.e. to be an instrument of violence) is built into these tests, ready to be deployed when an administration wants to stop certain people from certain places from entering without regard to their own ongoing occupation of Indigenous lands. Not only are such practices instruments of violence, but the concept of ‘violence’ continues to be organized, defined, and conceived within settler colonial epistemologies so as to exclude these administrative forms of violence deployed against Indigenous peoples and people of color from recognition and nameability. We argue that this is an intentional strategy of colonial power preservation that is functionalized through social processes that remain structurally stable and self-regenerating across historical and political changes. (shrink)

We revisit the notion of ontology localization, propose a new definition and clearly specify the layers of an ontology that can be affected by the process of localizing it. We also work out a numbe...

Radical feminist Carla Lonzi is regarded as a founding mother of Italian feminism in the early 1970s. Italian feminists look at her diaries and pamphlets as historical testimony, or as tools of self-identification. Very little work engages Lonzi’s feminist thought in its critique of psychoanalytic constructs of female sexuality, such as the forced sexual coincidence between vaginal sexuality and masculine pleasure. While reappropriating the clitoris as the site of female autonomy, Lonzi invents the ‘donna clitoridea,’ whose authenticity opposes heteronormativity. This (...) article examines Lonzi’s theory of the clitoris and the donna clitoridea, arguing that Lonzi’s clitoris is not so much a site of pleasurable authenticity, but a phallic instrument of domination among women. (shrink)

The article links community resilience – the resilience of the political community, with the process of public policy-making. In the argumentation, the study investigates the formation of community resilience and the importance of individual attitudes, compared to the individualism-collectivism scale. The sample research is conducted among 669 respondents in Bulgaria, aged 15 to 77 years old (M=29.3; SD=13.39). The applied methodology is based on the New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) to measure people’s environmental attitudes, and the Ecological Consumer Behaviour Scale to (...) measure eco-anxiety and pro-environmental behavioural intentions. Empirical study measures self-efficacy, Big Five personality traits, and values orientations. The results confirm that there were gender differences on the NEP scale, including that women show higher environmental attitudes. The research findings provide explanations how human values were positively related to one’s awareness of the environmental crisis. Finally, neuroticism correlated positively with realising the limit to growth. Therefore, it is important, that the design and the implementation of public policies and educational programs, consider various psychological aspects of individual human behaviour. This approach may have key implications for engaging in future sustainable behaviour and increasing the degree of resilience. (shrink)

There is a growing trend across North America of women being criminalized for their pregnancy outcomes. Rather than being a series of aberrations resulting from institutional failures, we argue that this trend is part of a colonial strategy of administrative violence aimed at women of color and Native women across Turtle Island. We consider a range of medical and legal practices constituting gender-based administrative violence, and we argue that they are the result of non-accidental and systematic production of population-level harms (...) that cannot be disentangled from the goals of ongoing settler occupation and dispossession of Indigenous lands. While white feminist narratives of gender-based administrative violence in Latin America function to distance the places where such violence occurs from the ‘liberal democratic’ settler nation-states of the U.S. and Canada, we hold that administrative forms of reproductive violence against Latin American women are structurally connected to efforts in the U.S. and Canada to criminalize women of color and Indigenous women for their reproductive outcomes. The purpose of these systemically produced harms is to sustain cultures of gender-based violence in support of settler colonial configurations of power. (shrink)

This article provides a conceptual account of causal understanding by connecting current psychological research on time and causality with philosophical debates on the causal asymmetry. I argue that causal relations are viewed as asymmetric because they are understood in temporal terms. I investigate evidence from causal learning and reasoning in both children and adults: causal perception, the temporal priority principle, and the use of temporal cues for causal inference. While this account does not suffice for correct inferences of causal structure, (...) I show it to serve as a preliminary understanding of causal concepts as asymmetric, that later incorporates other types of evidence. This approach supplies causal models with an asymmetric concept of causation that underlies hypotheses about causal structure, as I will illustrate from the framework of the knowledge-based causal induction model. I further argue for an integrating perspective, showing how the understanding of causes as preceding their effects underlies both psychological models and philosophical debates over time and the causal asymmetry, particularly regarding problem cases such as simultaneous causation or backwards causation, and the conceptual connection between causation and action. (shrink)

El trabajo analiza el alcance del proyecto husseliano de fundamentar la objetividad del mundo y de la ciencia en la intersubjetividad trascendental. A las dificultades de precisar el sentido de esta intersubjetividad trascendental y cómo comprenderla en relación a la comunidad humana, se suman las tensiones internas de la fenomenología acerca del conocimiento y del lenguaje. La constitución del mundo socio-cultural requiere dar cuenta de los actos comunicativos y de los procesos comprensivos implícitos, y por tanto, dar una respuesta a (...) las posibilidades de convergencia de perspectivas dadas por los diversos “mundos circundantes”. La articulación husserliana en una única comunidad de mónadas fundamentada en el tiempo intersubjetivo y originario, y el recurso a la “univocidad” del significado, no resultan soluciones satisfactorias. Suponen una idea de racionalidad que exige ser revisada, y un replanteo de la idea de significado desde marcos más amplios que los definidos por una filosofía de la conciencia. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to show that in Western postmodernism, both religion and the university are under the sign of simulacra. Friedrich Nietzsche’s “death of God” instigates a discussion of postmodernism and a simulacrum of religion. According to Jean Baudrillard and the theory of the Three Orders of the Simulacra, reality died and “hyperreality” took its place and now governs our existence. If, for Michel Foucault, the religious phenomenon today is outside theological beliefs and traditions, oriented towards the (...) body, power and panoptic supervision, for Jacques Derrida the phenomenon appears more as a negative theology of deconstruction. The theoretical objective seeks to explore the mutations that have occurred both in the academic environment and in religion under the phenomenon of globalisation and the technologisation of humanity. Here, the study of religion in universities is a third order simulacrum, the consequence of which is the illusion of knowledge and the unconditional independence of humanity, manipulated by technological evolution. The methodology used is Derridarian decon­struction, Nietzschean nihilism and the Baudrillardian criticism of the postmodern consumerist system. (shrink)

This paper discusses von Wright's theory of causation from Explanation and Understanding and Causality and Determinism in contemporary context. I argue that there are two important common points that von Wright's view shares with the version of manipulability currently supported by Woodward: the analysis of causal relations in a system modelled on controlled experiments, and the explanation of manipulability through counterfactuals - with focus on the counterfactual account of unmanipulable causes. These points also mark von Wright's departure from previous action-based (...) theories of causation. Owing to these two features, I argue that, upon classifying different versions of manipulability theories, von Wright's view should be placed closer to the interventionist approach than to the agency theory, where it currently stands. Furthermore, given its relevance in contemporary context, which this paper aims to establish, I claim that von Wright's theory can be employed to solve present problems connected to manipulability approaches to causation. (shrink)

Se analiza los que se ha considerado un "descentramiento" del sujeto a partir de la crítica a la racionalidad tal como la concibió la modernidad. Se considera especialmente el impacto del giro lingüístico, sus aportes y también sus consecuencias negativas. Se realiza un análisis crítico de las posiciones contextualistas, sus consecuencias escépticas y las derivaciones en el orden de la acción. Se plantea finalmente el tema del sujeto y sus posibilidades, destacando especialmente su capacidad para configurar nuevos sentidos y crear (...) nuevos lenguajes, pero también en su capacidad de discernir y de posicionarse en el juicio. The work analizes what has been considered a "decentration" of the subject, starting from the critique of rationality such as it was conceived by modernity. The impact of the linguistic turn is especially taken into consideration, as well as its contributions and its negative influences. A critical analysis of contextualist positions, its sceptical consequences and derivations as regards action is dealt with. Finally, the theme of the subject and its possibilities is raised, pointing out especially its capacity to bring about new senses and to create new languages, but also its capacity to discern and take positions in judgement. (shrink)

Resumen Este trabajo, de carácter exploratorio, descriptivo e interpretativo, estudia las actividades de imagen presentes en un conjunto de cartas electorales enviadas por los principales partidos políticos españoles a los ciudadanos de ese país entre 2004 y 2019; concretamente, las cartas electorales relativas a las elecciones al Parlamento Europeo celebradas en 2004, 2009, 2014 y 2019. Las cartas electorales constituyen una parte del discurso político escrito en las que el candidato a unas elecciones se dirige a los potenciales votantes con (...) un discurso persuasivo, orientado a conseguir su voto. En este contexto, las actividades que se llevan a cabo son principalmente de autoimagen, si bien es posible encontrar también actividades de cortesía y críticas hacia otros partidos políticos -u otros actores sociales-que se enmarcan en una descortesía muchas veces carente de identificación del sujeto concreto al que se dirige y que, en ese sentido, entendemos como despersonalizada. Este trabajo pone de manifiesto tales actividades, mediante el análisis y comparación de estas cartas, no solo de manera sincrónica sino también, cuando es posible, de manera diacrónica. Creemos que todavía no hay ningún trabajo que haya analizado este tipo de textos desde la perspectiva aquí planteada, por lo que consideramos que es un estudio que, además de original, puede abrir camino a otros investigadores que deseen realizar análisis similares o con los que establecer comparaciones. (shrink)

The present article provides an overview of the key subjects of scholarly research in the areas of epistemology and the philosophy of science and technology conducted in Russia between the 1980s and the present. These disciplines are shown to be deeply rooted in Soviet philosophy and still developed by contemporary Russian philosophers, with both the historical experience of the Russian philosophical thought and foreign conceptions and schools, classical as well as modern, drawn upon. The corollary is that epistemology and the (...) philosophy of science have been the most widely studied philosophical disciplines in Russia over the last couple of decades and retain this status to date. (shrink)

The present study focuses on the situation in which mind-reading machines will be connected, initially through the incorporation of weak AI, and then in conjunction to strong AI, an aspect that, ongoing, will no longer have a simple medical role, as is the case at present, but one of surveillance and monitoring of individuals—an aspect that is heading us towards a future techno-panoptic singularity. Thus, the general objective of this paper raises the problem of the ontological stability of human nature (...) which, within the limits of the technological singularity of mind-reading machines, leads to the loss of autonomy and a reduction in freedom when it comes to human thoughts. In this paradigm, the hypothesis of a future era of technological singularity is prefigured to be a cumulation of factors in which artificial intelligence holds a dominant position in relation to the human agent, in a techno-panoptic system of human supervision, in the form of a new world order of manifestation/imposition of power—that of a “singleton.” The theoretical objective analyzes the phenomenon of “deterritorrialization” of the Foucauldian panoptic mechanism —which is based on the “biopolitical” system of “biopower”—and its “reterritorialization” in the “territory” of the techno-panoptic singularity, where the scenario of a strong AI “singleton”, represents the alienation of the Being into a hard technological determinism. (shrink)

This paper presents qualitative research that focus on the Reading Groups. The aim is to understand the values of reading and discussing books in group, during the months of lockdown, caused by the Covid-19 health emergency. Using written and structured interviews, we collected the experiences of 73 adult participants in Reading Group in Milan and Bergamo provinces. The results show how, even by the unusual online mode, the Reading Group was a way to defend oneself from the pain of reality, (...) a space of relationship in isolation and a possibility of self-assertion, in situation of strong limitation of individual freedom. Starting from the analysis of what happened, this study wants to outline the potential of Reading Groups as pedagogical environments to produce change. (shrink)

This article examines how specific realist and projectivist versions of manipulability theories of causation deal with the problem of objectivity. Does an agent-dependent concept of manipulability imply that conflicting causal claims made by agents with different capacities can come out as true? In defence of the projectivist stance taken by the agency view, I argue that if the agent’s perspective is shown to be uniform across different agents, then the truth-values of causal claims do not vary arbitrarily and, thus, reach (...) a satisfactory level of objectivity. My argument connects Price’s considerations on the situation of deliberation, whose structure, common to all agents, is the same with respect to both decision making and causal claims on a concept inspired by Douglas’s classification of objectivity of thought processes: the perspective of the detached agent. I further argue that, despite his agent-independent concept of intervention, Woodward’s claim of a stronger objectivity standard cannot be achieved, as the relativity of causal concepts to a variable set brings about the issue of the agent’s choice of variables. Consequently, a more permissive objectivity standard applies to both views. (shrink)

This paper discusses Simone de Beauvoir’s views on the meaning of life as presented in The Ethics of Ambiguity. I argue that Beauvoir’s view matches contemporary hybrid views on the meaning of life, incorporating both subjective and objective elements, while connecting them in a distinct way—through the tension between self and other. I then analyze the meaning of excessively competitive projects through Beauvoir’s ethics and conclude that success that amounts to denying other people’s access to the things one values is (...) absurd. I use the case of contemporary academia as an illustration of extreme competition, then employ Beauvoir’s views to suggest a shift towards more meaningful practices. (shrink)

Safety assessment of technologies and interventions is often underdetermined by evidence. For example, scientists have collected evidence concerning genetically modified plants for decades. This evidence was used to ground opposing safety protocols for “stacked genetically modified” plants, in which two or more genetically modified plants are combined. Evidence based policy would thus be rendered more effective by an approach that accounts for underdetermination. Douglas (2012) proposes an explanatory approach, based on the criteria of transparency, empirical competence, internal consistency of explanations, (...) and predictive potency. However, sometimes multiple explanations can satisfy these criteria. We propose an additional criterion based on converse abduction, where explanations are selected on the basis of ontological background assumptions as well as by evidence. We then apply our proposed scheme to the case of the regulation of stacked genetically modified plants. We discuss the implications and suggest follow-up work concerning the generalizability of the approach. (shrink)

This paper presents an interpretation of the paradoxical decision of Abraham done by Søren A. Kierkegaard in his work Fear and Trembling as an ethics of silence. The main idea is to understand ethics not as moral standards or specific duties, but as the responsibility of becoming a single individual in time; singularity as the intimate and personal relationship with the calling of love. In such a way, that silence is the experience of the encounter with the paradox that being (...) human means to be singular in conditions that claim an universal and general transparent manifestation dependent of the dominant rational discourse.Then, silence becomes the fundamental ethical claim to become a human person, as spirit in time, where it becomes a time of trial and examination, a temporality, where the trial is the fidelity to love’s calling, the listening of the possibilities that are presented by the anxiety of the decision. These possibilities are not immanent to the world or to history, they call for a personal choice, always containing a space of revelation; therefore of listening to the interiority of the personal choice that for Kierkegaard is the passion of faith, communicated and lived in silence. Concluding that an ethics of silence by the image of Abraham implies to re-think the role of philosophy in relationship to faith, hope and love in time, as a silent thought. (shrink)

Most of the Latin American population, including in places like Mexico and Brazil, is becoming extremely poor, slipping in the last ten years from poverty to extreme poverty. Native communities are in this condition: to live only to survive, lacking any opportunity to improve or at least meet their basics needs of food and shelter. I practiced P4C in the multicultural community of Juchitán, Oaxaca, to find if P4C overcame the limitations of extreme poverty, respecting the cultural diversity while obtaining (...) positive results. (shrink)

The authors prove and describe the action of new networking mechanisms of formation of identities which arise in the context of societal transformations of the modern society. The networking mechanisms of identity formation represent a complex of interrelated and interdependent practices in global information and communication space, promoting individual and collective identification, interiorization and reflection. The complex includes the mechanism of network communication, mechanism of reflexive involvement of a person into the public space, mechanism of network topos-structuring and mechanism of (...) public crowdsourcing. The results of the empirical research show that the functionality of the mechanism of network communication for reproducing/positioning traditional identities and projecting new identities resides in its digital nature and a network ethos. The mechanism of reflexive involvement of individuals into the public space enables individual and collective actors to project the independent social worlds requiring the creation of their own virtualized public spaces that are closely linked with the common social space. The mechanism of network toposstructuring and mechanism of public crowdsourcing, forming situation and problem identities, have the high mobilization potential to update the activity of network communities in the form of individuals’ initiatives and large-scale civil movements where new sustained identities form which can also gain the protest nature. The authors come to conclusion that the complex of network mechanisms produces the dynamic matrix of the identity of a modern person allowing to take the opportunities for its development in the contemporary conditions of new social reality formation. At the same time, the complex of networking mechanisms is not stable; its content depends on those institutional practices which determine further conditions, processes and results of formation of identities, requiring their conceptual understanding and empirical research in social sciences. (shrink)

The article argues that the prohibition of abortion in Chile, other than when the mother's life is in danger, is a form of human rights violation targeting women specifically. The Pro-Birth Policy was established in Pinochet's Chile as a response to the previous government's attempts, under Allende, to encourage family planning and to educate and inform women about their choices. This had been done to put an end to the increase in back-street abortions with the inevitable toll on women's lives. (...) Pinochet's regime reversed these women-oriented family planning policies, and criminalized abortion, on the basis of costs to the state and, more importantly, the need to increase the birth rate for reasons of national security. Women's bodies were used by the Pinochet regime, both by sexual violence and torture, and by the denial of women's reproductive and sexual rights, as a means to impose discipline and order on society. The fact that this is still not acknowledged in the construction of a collective memory indicates that the issue has not yet been resolved in democratic Chile. (shrink)

Dans la Russie post-soviétique, on dénombre environ 12 millions de personnes qui vivent en situation de handicap. Cependant, les recherches scientifiques consacrées à ce large segment de la société russe, principalement à propos de la stigmatisation et de l’auto-stigmatisation, sont rares. Les textes autobiographiques écrits par des personnes qui présentent un handicap, entre 1990 et 2010, permettent de mieux comprendre les expériences de ces personnes dans la Russie post-soviétique. Ces textes témoignent notamment des principales stratégies que les personnes qui présentent (...) des incapacités motrices congénitales ou acquises ont adopté afin de s’adapter aux défis de la vie quotidienne. Le diagnostic médical a profondément transformé le statut social et le mode de vie de ces personnes. Cet article examine le diagnostic selon la perspective des théories du “rite de passage” vers un autre monde, le monde des personnes handicapées, leur “bas-monde.” En s’appuyant sur les autobiographies de personnes handicapées, cet article révèle comment les étiquettes et les notions appliquées à l’infirmité au sein de la société russe contemporaine sont enracinées dans la culture russe dans son ensemble et dans les attitudes soviétiques envers le handicap et les personnes handicapées. (shrink)

The paper discusses professional communication among philosophers. The author argues that starting from the second half of the twentieth century atomization of philosophical languages has begun. Philosophers are argued to have been creating their own speech on the basis of subjective associations, exclusively personal vision, not directly related to existing intellectual tradition; they would use their own terms and concepts without proper definitions or clarification. The author addresses the major ideological changes in the intellectual and cultural life of the twentieth (...) century (the secularization and the rejection of metaphysical issues) as the core reasons for the radical «change» and the individualization of the philosophical language.Metaphorization by subjective associations; camouflaging of mystical-religious terms for the secular term; the desire to speak, avoiding the subject-object distinction and metaphysical references; essayistic style of writing are claimed to be the most characteristic properties of what is dubbed as «the philosophical language game of the second half of the twentieth century». The reality produced is fruitful for various hermeneutic interpretations, but at the same time the ideas that philosophers attempt to convey to their colleagues become very hard to grasp. (shrink)

This paper investigates how an introductory philosophy course influences the moral and political development of undergraduate students in a Liberal Arts university in Central Asia. Within a context of rapid changes characteristic of transitional societies—reflected in the organization of higher education—philosophy provides students with the means to reason about moral and political values in a way that overcomes the old ideological tenets as well as contemporary reluctance to theoretical inquiry. Studying philosophy provides a remedy for deficiencies in both secondary and (...) higher education, by improving general reading and reasoning skills, that enable the development of moral reasoning. Furthermore, familiarity with major works of moral and political philosophy can help students comprehend the patterns of social change, as well as surmount the issue of unsatisfactory theoretical foundations for social science. (shrink)