Successful therapies to combat microbial diseases and cancers require incorporating ecological and evolutionary principles. Drawing upon the fields of ecology and evolutionary biology, we present a systems‐based approach in which host and disease‐causing factors are considered as part of a complex network of interactions, analogous to studies of “classical” ecosystems. Centering this approach around empirical examples of disease treatment, we present evidence that successful therapies invariably engage multiple interactions with other components of the host ecosystem. Many of these factors interact (...) nonlinearly to yield synergistic benefits and curative outcomes. We argue that these synergies and nonlinear feedbacks must be leveraged to improve the study of pathogenesis in situ and to develop more effective therapies. An eco‐evolutionary systems perspective has surprising and important consequences, and we use it to articulate areas of high research priority for improving treatment strategies. (shrink)

Este trabajo analiza el discurso de la cooperación técnica brasileña para la promoción del desarrollo en los países africanos, relacionándolo con el aumento significativo de las inversiones en las empresas brasileñas en el continente. La estabilidad política, junto con el éxito de la economía brasileña, ha favorecido una participación más activa en la coordinación de la política mundial y el aumento de la cooperación con los países de Sudamérica, pero sobre todo en países africanos como Mozambique. Los países africanos se (...) han convertido en importantes receptores de la cooperación técnica en el marco del discurso de la solidaridad internacional y la necesidad de compensación de la deuda histórica. Sin embargo, si este discurso se propaga a la desvinculación de los intereses económicos en un momento de crisis económica mundial, es imprescindible reflexionar sobre las limitaciones del discurso desinteresado. En este sentido, a partir de la documentación producida por la diplomacia brasileña y las posiciones de Brasil y Mozambique en la escena internacional, el objetivo de este artículo es analizar el discurso brasileño, especialmente en Mozambique, en contra de la lógica capitalista de producción impregnada de un escenario de crisis internacional. (shrink)

In recent years, applied ethics has taken on board the various dimensions of public reason that can no longer be reduced to the political construction of a common will. While the question of a just society has traditionally been found in the political dimension, the state and its institutions, current globalization has broken this state monopoly over what is public, opening the way for other institutional actors with the same or greater power to intervene in the public space, actors that (...) have little or nothing to do with representation, majority rule, etc. As the current financial downturn clearly demonstrates, states are pandering to the markets, striving to ‘get their houses in order’ to meet the demands imposed by the global financial magnates. It seems, at least to most citizens, that public politics, like the state’s capacity to deal with social and economic rights, no longer depends on either governments or their ability to govern. So should they be left out of a public reason that is capable of explaining whether they are just or otherwise? The ethical perspective –known to be a critical perspective– cannot remain silent about this new scenario. The present proposal attempts to combine applied ethics, which takes in the logic of social practices, with new contributions from institutional design theories that set out to analyse the power and responsibility of these institutions from ‘inside’, as institutional actors. In this short paper my analysis focuses on the ethical dimension of institutional design, specifically in a proposal for an institutional ethics that is a fundamental part of any applied ethics. The paper aims to explain in what way we can speak of an institutional morality to demonstrate that these civil society institutional actors hold some of the responsibility for facing the problems of defining and managing what is public. (shrink)

Nesta investigação, propomo-nos demonstrar que Jesus foi um verdadeiro contador de histórias. A narrativa lucana conhecida tradicionalmente por parábola do Filho pródigo não é propriamente uma parábola, pois assume os contornos formais de um conto, podendo-se nela encontrar as caraterística centrais do género literário “o conto”. Nela encontramos propriedades configuradoras da sua individualização como género: a conclusão moralizante de uma história fechada, com princípio, meio e fim; a concentração de espaço, tempo e reduzido número de personagens; a curta extensão sintagmática, (...) mas sempre extensa comparada com a das parábolas. Em suma, concluímos que estamos perante um verdadeiro e extraordinário conto. Há, no entanto, outras narrativas evangélicas que pelas suas características se assemelham à do Filho pródigo. Podemos assim identificar a do Administrador infiel, a narrativa dos Vinhateiros homicidas, a das Moedas de ouro e respetivos paralelos de Mt, que se revestem de característica muito semelhantes às do Filho pródigo, apesar de muito menos desenvolvidas e que, no fundo, as consideramos como sendo embriões de contos. (shrink)

Emergency online education has been adopted worldwide due to coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic. Prior research regarding online learning predominantly focused on the perception of parents, teachers, and students in tertiary education, while younger children’s perspectives have rarely been examined. This study investigated how family, school, and individual factors would be associated with primary school students’ satisfaction, perceived effectiveness, and preference in online learning during COVID-19. A convenient sample of 781 Hong Kong students completed an anonymous online survey from June to (...) October 2020. Logistic regression was conducted for 13 potential factors. Results indicated that only 57% of students were satisfied with their schools’ online learning arrangement and 49.6% regarded the online learning as an effective learning mode. Only 12.8% of students preferred online learning, while 67.2% of students preferred in-person schooling. Multiple analyses suggested that teacher–student interaction during online classes was positively associated with students’ satisfaction, perceived effectiveness, and preferences in online learning. Compared to grades 1–2 students, grades 3–6 students perceived more effectiveness and would prefer online learning. Happier schools were more likely to deliver satisfying and effective online education. Students who reported less happiness at school would prefer online learning, and students who reported less happiness at home would be less satisfied with online learning and reflected lower effectiveness. Teachers are encouraged to deliver more meaningful interactions to students and offer extra support to younger children during online classes. Primary schools and parents are encouraged to create a healthy and pleasant learning environment for children. The government may consider building up happy schools in the long run. The study findings are instrumental for policymakers, institutions, educators, and researchers in designing online education mechanisms. (shrink)

The online dating application has in recent years become a major avenue for meeting potential partners. But while the digital public sphere has gained the attention of political philosophers, a systematic normative evaluation of issues arising in the ‘digital sexual sphere’ is lacking. I provide a philosophical framework for assessing dating app corporation conduct, capturing why people use these apps and their experience so often is unsatisfactory. Identifying dating apps as agents intervening in a social institution necessary for the reproduction (...) of society, with immense power over people's lives, I ask if they exercise their power in line with individuals’ interests. Acknowledging that people have claims to non-interference, equal standing, and choice improvement relating to intimacy, I find that the traditional, non-digital, sexual sphere poses problems to their realisation, especially for sexual minorities. In this context, apps’ potential for justice in the sexual sphere is immense, but unfulfilled. (shrink)

John and Curran have convincingly shown that Scanlonian contractualism is a valuable resource for evaluating pandemic response policies, and that we should reject cost–benefit analysis in favour of a contractualist framework. However, they fail to consider the part of contractualism that Scanlon constructed precisely to deal with the question of when the state can restrict individuals from making choices that are harmful to themselves and others: the value of choice view. In doing so, they leave it open for opponents of (...) lockdowns to misuse contractualism to justify mistaken policies. This is because the most powerful contractualist objections to locking down are likely to be based on the VoC. When we apply the value of choice view, we see that a lockdown policy’s justifiability depends on the extent to which particular values of choice are found to be threatened by the policy in question, and what safeguards policy-makers have put in place to increase the value of choice and protect people from the harmful consequences of lockdown. Without the VoC, it is harder to explain why lockdowns, to be non-rejectable, must have certain features. With the VoC, the case for contractualism over cost benefit analysis can be made even stronger. (shrink)

The stakeholder approach offers the opportunity to consider corporate responsibility in a wider sense than that afforded by the stockholder or shareholder approaches. Having said that, this article aims to show that this theory does not offer a normative corporate responsibility concept that can be our response to two basic questions. On the one hand, for what is the company morally responsible and, on the other hand, why is the corporation morally responsible in terms of conventional and post-conventional perspectives? The (...) reason why the stakeholder approach does not offer such a definition, as we shall see, is because the normative stakeholder approaches tend to confuse the social validity with the moral validity or legitimacy. It leads us to a conventional definition of corporate moral responsibility (CMR) that is not relevant to the pluralistic and global framework of our societies and economies. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate this intuition. (shrink)

Now that the usage and meaning of urban spaces have been dramatically challenged by the global pandemic, several debates and reflections are going on around the manner in which cities – both as concerns the public and the private spaces – have been designed. The article observes how “urban-human face” representations have served different models of urbanity across times and cultures. Using a framework deriving from semiotics of culture, according to which the city represents a model of the world, the (...) article attempts to interpret how portraits of faces have been modelling the city through different urban faciality mechanisms. The focus is on a sample of what we call ‘urban-human faces’, ranging from Soviet propaganda posters to the digital #selfiecity project. The expression refers to series of representations that bring together the city and the face. It can be argued that both the city and the face, produced at a specific historical and cultural moment, with their figurative and plastic elements, deploy the struggle for the city ownership and authorship. Nonetheless, the commensurability of the city and the face can be just based on the fact that both semiotic configurations represent an excess with the help of cartographic reproduction (the city) and the portrait (the face), respectively. A city can be represented by a face to the extent to which it is also multifaceted as a polylogue. On the basis of such instable commensurability, the article will ultimately attempt to bring together the semiotics of the face and the semiotics of the city. (shrink)

Philosopher Elsa Dorlin looks across the global history of the left to trace the politics, philosophy, and ethics of self defense.

En 1685, le Code noir défendait « aux esclaves de porter aucunes armes offensives ni de gros bâtons » sous peine de fouet. Au xixe siècle, en Algérie, l'État colonial français interdisait les armes aux indigènes, tout en accordant aux colons le droit de s'armer. Aujourd'hui, certaines vies comptent si peu que l'on peut tirer dans le dos d'un adolescent tout en prétendant qu'il était agressif, armé et menaçant. Une ligne de partage oppose historiquement les corps « dignes d'être défendus (...) » et ceux qui, désarmés ou rendus indéfendables, sont laissés sans défense. Ce « désarmement » organisé des subalternes et des opprimés au profit d'une minorité jouissant d'un droit permanent à porter des armes et à en user impunément pose directement, pour tout élan de libération, la question du recours à la violence pour sa propre défense. Du jiu-jitsu des suffragettes aux pratiques insurrectionnelles du ghetto de Varsovie, des fusils des Black Panthers aux patrouilles queer, Elsa Dorlin retrace une généalogie philosophique de l'autodéfense politique. Derrière l'histoire officielle de la légitime défense, il est ici question du récit des « éthiques martiales de soi », ces histoires ensevelies où le Sujet ne préexiste pas à sa propre défense, où le fait de se défendre en attaquant apparaît à la fois comme la condition de possibilité d'un soi et la matière des mythologies politiques. Cette histoire – une histoire de la violence – conditionne la définition même de la subjectivité moderne. Elle s'écrit à la lumière d'une relecture critique de l'histoire de la philosophie politique, où Hobbes et Locke sont à confronter avec Franz Fanon, Michel Foucault ou Judith Butler. (shrink)

Among various case studies addressing the reception of relativity, very few deal with Portugal at either the international or the national level. The national literature on the topic has mainly concentrated on the reactions to relativity of the Portuguese mathematical community. The absence of Portuguese astronomers alongside Eddington during the 1919 expedition to Principe, then a Portuguese island, has been implicitly equated with the astronomical community's lack of interest in the event. In reception studies dealing with general relativity, analysis has (...) tended to focus on the physics and mathematics communities, less on the astronomers. Given that relativity was born at the interface of physics, mathematics and astronomy, reactions of members of these scientific communities depended on differences in shared traditions, values, problems and expectations, as well as on individual practitioners' idiosyncrasies. This paper addresses the contributions of the overlooked Portuguese astronomical community, evaluates the actions and reactions of its members to the expedition and assesses their role in the process of appropriation of relativity. (shrink)

How do social norms influence our choices? And does the presence of biased norms affect what we owe to each other? Looking at empirical research relating to PrEP rollout in HIV prevention policy, a...

In search of human uniqueness Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9472-6 Authors Elsa Addessi, Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione, Via Ulisse Aldrovandi, 16/b, 00197 Rome, Italy Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

Nous sommes aujourd'hui confrontés, à travers les objets techniques comme la réalité virtuelle ou, plus quotidiennement les images des jeux vidéo, à un changement qui affecte non pas les objets de la perception mais la perception elle-même. Ce changement a un nom qui est aussi un des grands impensés de la philosophie du XXe siècle : la «perception artificielle». A travers les textes d'Edmund Husserl, Jacques Derrida et Bernard Stiegler et en s'appuyant sur des cas empruntés tant aux jeux vidéos (...) et aux dispositifs de simulation qu'au cinéma, Elsa Boyer se livre à une enquête philosophique à la fois radicale et profonde. Car c'est la perception elle-même que son artificialité l'amène à repenser, par-delà l'opposition entre le réel et l'imaginaire. Relisant Husserl après Derrida et confrontant le dernier au fantôme du premier, Elsa Boyer nous montre comment la réalité virtuelle nous oblige à (re)faire de la philosophie. (shrink)

De l'anonyme le plus discret au professeur le plus admiré, nombre d'entre nous cherche son quart d'heure de gloire. Ce penchant, exposé, exploité et nourri par la présence des médias et des réseaux sociaux dans notre quotidien devient un phénomène de société majeur. Quelle est l'origine de ce besoin de visibilité, de cette quête insatiable de notoriété, de cette soif inextinguible de reconnaissance? Après quoi court ce monde qui tourne autour de la popularité? Pour répondre à ces questions, Elsa (...) Godart en appelle à la philosophie. Elle sonde les caractéristiques typiques d'une époque exhibitionniste et développe l'idée selon laquelle cette quête de célébrité, et plus largement de 'reconnaissance,' cache le vide de nos vies, nos manques-à-être, nos absences, nos vacuités, nos disparitions, nos oublis et nos contresens. Mais plutôt que de chercher à exister à tout prix, ne serait-il pas temps de recommencer à vivre?"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

This ambitious book presents a new interpretation of Chinese thought guided both by a philosopher's sense of mystery and by a sound philosophical theory of meaning. That dual goal, Hansen argues, requires a unified translation theory. It must provide a single coherent account of the issues that motivated both the recently untangled Chinese linguistic analysis and the familiar moral-political disputes. Hansen's unified approach uncovers a philosophical sophistication in Daoism that traditional accounts have overlooked. The Daoist theory treats the (...) imperious intuitionism that alienates critical thinkers as a feature of Confucianism alone. Freed from the view that Confucianism is the core of Chinese thought and from myopic Confucian interpretations, Chinese thinkers emerge as unmistakably philosophical. (shrink)

Social norms regulating carework and social reproduction tend to be inegalitarian. At the same time, such norms often play a crucial role when we plan our lives. How can we criticise objectionable practices while ensuring that people can organise their lives around meaningful and predictable rules? Gerald Gaus argues that only ‘publicly justified’ rules, rules that everyone would prefer over ‘blameless liberty,’ should be followed. In this paper, we uncover the inegalitarian implications of this feature of Gaus's framework. We show (...) that because a society without clear social norms for how social reproduction and care work ought to be organised would be so unattractive, inegalitarian rules would pass Gaus's test. They would pass this test since they would nevertheless be better than ‘blameless liberty.’ Those who are disproportionately burdened by a rule are faced with the daunting task of showing that they would be better off under no rule, instead of merely having to show that they would be better off with a different rule. (shrink)

According to Ruth Chang (2002, 2022), incommensurability in hard cases cannot be cases of vagueness. This is because vagueness, unlike hard cases, can always be resolved by arbitrary stipulation, leaving no resolutional remainder or substantive disagreement. Contrary to this, I argue that Chang’s argument fails because proponents of the vagueness view are in no way necessarily committed to the claim that vagueness always can be resolved by arbitrary stipulation. In fact, there seems to be no reason to assume that vagueness (...) could not accommodate our intuitions about resolutional remainder and substantive disagreements in a satisfying way. If we want a simple theory, and if at least some incommensurability is vagueness, this could then be a reason for understanding incommensurability as vagueness; and perhaps even rejecting parity. (shrink)

We discuss the striking similarities between Friedrich Nietzsche's and Wilfrid Sellars's respective philosophies of mind. Drawing especially on recent Nietzsche scholarship by Riccardi and Katsafanas, we argue that the Nietzschean picture of consciousness is essentially the same as Sellars's view of conceptually structured thought. In particular, we argue that both consider structured thinking to be a linguistic phenomenon whose structure, in turn, arises contingently from social interactions within a community. Further, both views provide for a special role to be played (...) by specifically mentalistic vocabulary, making it possible to engage with the mental states of others in a reflective way. We also discuss how this parallel extends to their respective views on perception. Drawing on O'Shea and Riccardi, we argue for interpretations on which there still is a clear connection between their respective views. Finally, we end the article by discussing some reasons why this similarity should not be as unexpected as it initially seems. (shrink)

In this classic analysis, Leo Strauss pinpoints what is original and innovative in the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. He argues that Hobbes's ideas arose not from tradition or science but from his own deep knowledge and experience of human nature. Tracing the development of Hobbes's moral doctrine from his early writings to his major work _The Leviathan,_ Strauss explains contradictions in the body of Hobbes's work and discovers startling connections between Hobbes and the thought of Plato, Thucydides, Aristotle, Descartes, (...) Spinoza, and Hegel. (shrink)

In “The Bioethics of Environmental Injustice: Ethical, Legal, and Clinical Implications of Unhealthy Environments,” Ray and Cooper (2024) advocate for environmental law efforts, with a focus on the...

Over recent decades, developments in network governance have seen governments around the world cede considerable authority and responsibility to commercial migration intermediaries for recruiting and managing temporary migrant labour. Correspondingly, a by-product of network governance has been the emergence of soft employment regulation in which voluntary codes of conduct supplement hard legal employment standards. This paper explores these developments in the context of temporary migrant workers employed in Australian horticulture. First the paper analyses the growing use of temporary migrant labour (...) in this industry. It then describes how different types of intermediaries interact with this workforce. The paper then outlines both hard and soft employment regulations, and contrasts them with actual employment conditions, questioning how a network governance approach has affected this vulnerable workforce. The paper concludes that changes in network governance of migration and employment relations have emasculated formal legal regulation, leaving market forces to operate without effective or ethical constraints at the expense of the public good. (shrink)

Traditionally, liberals have confined religion to the sphere of the ‘private’ or ‘non-political’. However, recent debates over the place of religious symbols in public spaces, state financing of faith schools, and tax relief for religious organisations suggest that this distinction is not particularly useful in easing the tension between liberal commitments to equality on the one hand, and freedom of religion on the other. This article deals with one aspect of this debate, which concerns whether members of religious communities should (...) receive exemptions from regulations that place a distinctively heavy burden on them. Drawing on Habermas’ understanding of churches as ‘communities of interpretation’, we explore possible alternatives to both the ‘rule-and-exemption’ approach and the ‘neutralist’ approach. Our proposal rests on the idea of mutual learning between secular and religious perspectives. On this interpretation, what is required is (i) the generation and maintenance of public spaces in which there could be discussion and dialogue about particular cases, and (ii) evaluation of whether the basic conditions of moral discourse are present in these spaces. Thus deliberation becomes a touchstone for the building of a shared democratic ethos. (shrink)

Premier volume d’une nouvelle collection (« Cambridge Studies in the Dia­logues of Plato », dirigée par Mary Margaret McCabe), Plato’s ‘Cratylus’ présente, d’un dialogue de Platon particulièrement complexe, une lecture radicalement nouvelle. L’ouvrage ouvre bien une voie originale par rapport aux travaux con­sacrés, depuis une douzaine d’années, à l’élucidation du sens et de la portée phi­losophiques du Cratyle (mentionnons notamment : T. M. S. Baxter, The Cratylus. Plato’s Critique of Naming...

Cities of the past enjoyed rich soundscapes full of organic sounds. Such sounds can be hard to hear, even for those that are listening, in many of today’s cities and neighborhoods. Evaluating the sounds of life in urban neighborhoods can be one method of determining the health and vibrancy of an area. A silent neighborhood, one not devoid of sound or noise, but rather missing the sounds of human and animal life, can be detrimental to the community and its residents. (...) This paper both investigates the history of and loss of the diverse urban soundscape and how it can be reclaimed in modern cities. (shrink)

Este trabajo estudia los aportes y limitaciones del concepto de «régimen farmacopornográfico» propuesto por Paul B. Preciado junto con los pilares que lo constituyen: el farmacopoder y el pornopoder. El análisis será complementado con las aportaciones de otros autores, destacando las de Judith Butler, filósofe de referencia para el autor, cuyas teorías sobre el género y el cuerpo han influido de forma indiscutible en las posteriores investigaciones sobre la identidad. A través del estudio del pensamiento de ambos será posible llegar (...) a una mejor comprensión de lo que Paul B. Preciado denomina «farmacopornocapitalismo» y también dirimir las aportaciones y límites de la teoría del autor. Su trabajo ha sido indiscutiblemente revolucionario en materia de género e identidad, poniendo en tela de juicio categorías naturalizadas y exhibiendo las dinámicas biopolíticas de opresión y discriminación que encarnan nuestra existencia. Reconociendo esto, también debemos poner sobre la mesa los límites en su planteamiento, donde algunas veces la provocación le lleva a afirmaciones que difieren del objetivo final de su teoría: mostrar cómo actúa el control en los cuerpos y encontrar una salida a este. (shrink)

The modernization of agriculture in Northern countries has led to a loss of crop diversity, as well as a loss of knowledge, know-how and rights of farmers regarding on-farm seed breeding. In France, the _Réseau Semences Paysannes_ (RSP) brings together collectives of actors (farmers, bakers, citizens, gardeners) mobilized in a quest to reclaim these aspects. Within the framework of the decentralized participatory breeding program conducted in collaboration with INRAE, farmers have co-constructed knowledge in terms of dynamic management of heterogeneous wheat (...) populations. Yet, as the RSP network grows, these actors face new types of challenges regarding collective action. To address them, we proposed to consider peasant seeds as « common unknowns » rather than « common goods » and we adapted and applied an innovative design approach drawing upon the KCP (Knowledge-Concept-Proposals) method. This approach consisted in implementing, from 2019 to 2021, five decentralized design workshops with local seed breeding collectives. The replication of design workshops in different contexts provided a framework for interaction among RSP members, allowed the sharing of both scientific and experiential knowledge. Noteworthily, it fostered the generation of many proposals for enhancing collective action, and led to the development of operational proposals with a view to implement them in the future. This methodology-oriented paper mainly describes the decentralized design approach implemented, its outputs and outcomes, as well as its interests and limits in the context of crop diversity management. It also analyses how the workshop outputs enriches previous works in the field; in particular how such a participatory design approach leads to produce original operational solutions to respond to challenges identified in the literature. (shrink)

Poser les fondements d’une justice transformatrice en France soulève de nombreuses difficultés, qu’il s’agit de considérer afin de proposer une théorie abolitionniste ancrée dans la pratique et le quotidien. L’article confronte certaines théories états-uniennes de la justice transformatrice avec le travail de terrain, notamment réalisé par l’association Fracas, dans les milieux militants queer et féministes français. L’autrice entend ainsi apporter un nouvel éclairage sur un type de justice encore peu connu en France. Justice de la communauté, la justice transformatrice appelle (...) à se réapproprier nos conflits et nos modes de gestion pour sortir du pénal et de leur judiciarisation tout en portant une réflexion de fond sur les rapports structurels de domination. (shrink)

O artigo aborda aspectos do percurso profissional e teórico de D. W. Winnicott que exerceram influência marcante no seu pensamento. São ainda destacadas algumas linhas do debate que ele, implícita ou explicitamente, travou com as diferentes áreas do conhecimento científico de sua época - a pediatria, a psiquiatria, em especial a infantil, a psicologia acadêmica e sua principal interlocutora, a psicanálise tradicional, representada por Freud e Melanie Klein - sobre temas centrais de sua obra, tais como a natureza do psíquico, (...) a hereditariedade, o desenvolvimento humano e a saúde e a doença psíquicas. (shrink)

Presentación de la sección «Ética aplicada para una Inteligencia Artificial confiable» del número monográfico de Daimon Revista Internacional de Filosofía, nº 90 (septiembre - diciembre 2023).