The modern epoch is characterized by a paradoxical form of social inequality: poverty expands alongside the unprecedented growth in socially-produced wealth. Any conception of this dynamic stakes a claim within the classical liberal problematic, where the central political challenge is the negotiation of individual interests with those of the social whole. Part one of this work analyzes three conceptions of this inequality paradox, those of G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. Each encompasses a perspective on the nation-state and (...) its relationship to the institutions of economic intercourse. Chapter One analyzes and argues for an interpretation of “the problem of poverty” in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. I intervene in an ongoing discussion on whether and how Hegel resolves the problem he raises, which holds important implications for those drawing insights from Hegel’s work today. Marx’s work responds to Hegel and represents an original viewpoint on modern inequality (Chapter Two). He identifies its dual economic and political character. I argue that the consolidation of modern property relations in Europe played a critical role in the development of his conception and most theoretically significant is his debate with Proudhon on the cause of inequality. Chapter Three presents an analysis of Keynes’s conception of the inequality paradox. I present a philosophical assessment of his proposed rectification, showing the justifications he offers bear remarkable similarity to Hegel’s approach. Part two takes us to the present day. Expansion of social inequality in the last phase of global expansion of capitalism has strained the nation-state system to its limits, posing economic and political challenges for which there are no institutional solutions. Considering the historical conceptions, I offer an appraisal of contemporary Keynesian perspectives and a counter-assessment, based on the inequality data Piketty, et al. have produced, to argue for a more equitable and democratic alternative. (shrink)

Presentación: critica y conceptos -- Primera parte. Movimientos fundacionales: la legitimación de los maestros de arquitectura moderna y las primeras teorizaciones, 1925-1969 -- Capítulo 1. Los inicios de la teoría de la arquitectura y el urbanismo en Argentina -- Capítulo 2. Los pioneros de la teoría de la arquitectura en Brasil y Chile -- Capítulo 3. Indicios de la teoría e historia de la arquitectura en mexico, venezuela y peru [sic] -- Segunda parte. La consolidación de la teoría de la (...) arquitectura en Latinoamérica -- Capítulo 4. La consolidación de la teoría de la arquitectura en Argentina -- Capítulo 5. La búsqueda de una arquitectura y una teoría propia -- Tercera parte. Las nuevas generaciones cosmopolitas de críticos -- Capítulo 6. La consolidación de una nueva generación cosmopolita de críticos de arquitectura en Argentina -- Capítulo 7. La nueva generación de críticos en Brasil, Chile, Perú y otros países --Conclusiones -- Bibliografía -- Anexo: reseña de 21 textos seleccionados. (shrink)

Laymen occasionally have to write texts in specialized domains, such as when interacting with the public administration. However, in Spanish, most studies related to administrative texts have focused on texts written by the administration for laymen rather than texts that average citizens write to the administration. Against this backdrop, this article aims to carry out the following: a linguistic analysis on a corpus of Spanish-language texts from five textual genres written by laymen and addressed to the public administration on the (...) textual, lexical and discourse levels; a contrastive analysis that applies statistical techniques to quantitative data to identify significant differences among these textual genres. The results show a detailed and comprehensive understanding of the characteristics of each genre. Also, the statistical results indicate that there are significant differences among some of the analyzed genres. (shrink)

No Tratado político, Espinosa, ao primeiro movimento do texto, faz dura crítica àqueles que criaram utopias ao tratarem da política. Tais filósofos, afirma, por tomarem os homens não pelo que são, mas pelo que gostariam que fossem, conceberam uma forma de política que nunca pôde ser posta em aplicação. Tese muito próxima à de Maquiavel, presente em O Príncipe, segundo a qual, para escrever coisa útil neste campo, deve-se ir direto alla verità effettuale della cosa che alla immaginazione di essa. (...) Não casualmente, portanto, no Capítulo V do Tratado político, último parágrafo, Espinosa usa os termos ‘agudíssimo’ e ‘prudentíssimo’ ao se referir ao florentino. Há mais Maquiavel em Espinosa para além das citações elogiosas? O artigo procurará tratar desta questão ao mostrar alguns traços comuns às respectivas filosofias políticas. Ao que indicam as fontes primárias e alguns comentadores, Espinosa teria se apropriado, e reconceitualizado, à sua maneira, teses-chave do florentino para escrever suas obras, em particular o Tratado político. (shrink)

No primeiro movimento o artigo analisa, em panorama, a ontologia espinosana. Após, mostra como, do interior dos conceitos presentes na ontologia, derivam os de homem, desejo, alegria e tristeza, esperança e medo, segurança e desespero, ação e paixão. Da relação entre ontologia, homens e desejo – bem como dos demais afetos –, são extraídas, em breves considerações, algumas teses políticas de Espinosa. Levanta-se, neste movimento argumentativo, a hipótese de que as teses políticas espinosanas derivam de sua ontologia e de sua (...) concepção de homem como desejo e variação de potência. O conceito de desejo é analisado à luz da variação de potência e do tema do direito natural, o qual, em Espinosa, se identifica a potência. Quando das breves derivações à política, algumas teses hobbesianas – relacionadas aos temas da multidão, povo, representação, direito natural, estado civil, etc. – são trazidas à argumentação para que se mostre, por contraste, o peso das inovações espinosanas. (shrink)

Trata-se de mostrar as teses e argumentos de Holbach sobre a liberdade, a necessidade, bem como sobre seu "sistema do fatalismo". Objetiva-se sustentar a hipótese de que as teses de Holbach sobre a liberdade, a necessidade e o fatalismo não implicam a aceitação da imutabilidade ou cristalização do real.

Machado de Assis, no conto _A Sereníssima República_, aponta, por meio da alegoria, problemas de fundo do sistema político brasileiro. Uma espécie de cultura da fraude estaria presente nos comportamentos das aranhas, o que impossibilitaria a implantação reta e precisa da lei, bem como a instituição da paz e da _securitas_. Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, ao analisar, a partir de fontes primárias, o período em que se passa o conto, constata os mesmos problemas que Machado de Assis apontara. Os conceitos (...) políticos espinosanos são movimentados, ao final, para mostrar que em um _imperium_ no qual as leis são constantemente violadas, não se está distante do estado de natureza, com grande perigo de vida para os súditos-cidadãos. Seria este o caso da república do conto e do Brasil atual? (shrink)

O artigo pretende tratar de um tema presente nos Discursos sobre a primeira década de Tito Lívio, bem como em outros textos de Maquiavel: o dos homens bons plenos de virtù e seu papel na fundação do campo jurídico-político. A primeira questão a ser trabalhada é a do método em Maquiavel. Após, o conceito de virtù será analisado no que se refere a sua importância para a fundação e manutenção jurídico-política da cidade.

O tema de fundo do artigo é o dos regimes políticos em Espinosa. O objetivo é o de analisar, no interior deste tema mais amplo, o da distribuição da potência entre os membros do corpo político como critério comum aos regimes. A questão dos regimes, em Espinosa, não passa apenas pela definição do número dos que governam. Um rol de conceitos - homem como potência, afetos, multidão, imperium, entre outros - deve ser levado em conta para tratar da clássica questão.

Resenha do livro "O mais natural dos regimes. Espinosa e a Democracia", de Diogo Pires Aurélio.

ABSTRACT Objective: To contrast relief efforts for the 26 December 2004 tsunami with current global HIV/aids relief efforts and analyse possible reasons for the disparity. Methods: Literature review and ethical analysis. Results: Just over 273,000 people died in the tsunami, resulting in relief efforts of more than US$10 bn, which is sufficient to achieve the United Nation’s long‐term recovery plan for South East Asia. In contrast, 14 times more people died from HIV/aids in 2004, with UNAIDS predicting a US$8 bn (...) funding gap for HIV/aids in developing nations between now and 2007. This disparity raises two important ethical questions. First, what is it that motivates a more empathic response to the victims of the tsunami than to those affected by HIV/AIDS? Second, is there a morally relevant difference between the two tragedies that justifies the difference in the international response? The principle of justice requires that two cases similarly situated be treated similarly. For the difference in the international response to the tsunami and HIV/aids to be justified, the tragedies have to be shown to be dissimilar in some relevant respect. Are the tragedies of the tsunami disaster and the HIV/aids pandemic sufficiently different, in relevant respects, to justify the difference in scope of the response by the international community? Conclusion: We detected no morally relevant distinction between the tsunami and the HIV/aids pandemic that justifies the disparity. Therefore, we must conclude that the international response to HIV/aids violates the fundamental principles of justice and fairness. (shrink)

This article shows part of the results of a research project: The Impact of Social Change in Higher Education Staff Professional Life and Work (Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, SEJ2006-01876). The main aim of this project was to explore and understand how scholars establish a dialogue, resist, adapt themselves or adopt changes, in the process of constructing their professional identities. As the members of the research team were scholars ourselves, teaching and carrying out research in Spanish universities, we started (...) this research by writing our own autoethnographies. As a result, we developed nine autoethnographies which give a complex and in-depth account of senior and junior scholars' journeys into their process of constructing their professional identity and working lives in a rapidly changing world. This article starts by giving a context to the research project and arguing the need for conducting autoethnographies. It goes on to discuss the process itself of writing autoethnographies in the context of a given research project. We then refer to the topics which have a bearing on how we have learnt to become scholars: our experience as university students, the beginning of the academic career, relationships with others, and the consequences of the mark of gender. We conclude with the lessons learnt around the dilemmas on writing autoethnographies. (shrink)

Court rulings are among the most important documents in all legal systems. This article describes a study in which natural language processing is used for the automatic characterization of Spanish judgments that deal with the physical custody (joint or individual) of minors. The model was trained to identify a set of elements: the type of custody requested by the plaintiff, the type of custody decided on by the court, and eight of the most commonly used arguments in this type of (...) judgment. Two jurists independently annotated more than 3000 judgments, which were used to train a model based on transformers. The main difficulties encountered in this task were the complexity of the judicial language and the need to work with appellate court rulings that have a more complicated structure than decisions at first instance. For the complete court rulings, the F1 score of the inter-annotator agreement ranged from 0.60 to 0.86 and the Kappa index from 0.33 to 0.73. The F1 score of the agreement between the model and the annotators ranged from 0.66 to 0.93 and the Kappa index from 0.57 to 0.80. These results in which the model performance exceeds even the inter-annotator agreement show the high ability of transformers to identify abstract entities in legal texts. (shrink)

Is medicalization always harmful? When does medicine overstep its proper boundaries? The aim of this article is to outline the pragmatic criteria for distinguishing between medicalization and over-medicalization. The consequences of considering a phenomenon to be a medical problem may take radically different forms depending on whether the problem in question is correctly or incorrectly perceived as a medical issue. Neither indiscriminate acceptance of medicalization of subsequent areas of human existence, nor criticizing new medicalization cases just because they are medicalization (...) can be justified. The article: (i) identifies various consequences of both well-founded medicalization and over-medicalization; (ii) demonstrates that the issue of defining appropriate limits of medicine cannot be solved by creating an optimum model of health; (iii) proposes four guiding questions to help distinguish medicalization from over-medicalization. The article should foster a normative analysis of the phenomenon of medicalization and contribute to the bioethical reflection on the boundaries of medicine. (shrink)

Despite recent efforts by the Artificial Intelligence (AI) community to move towards standardised procedures for documenting models, methods, systems or datasets, there is currently no methodology focused on use cases aligned with the risk-based approach of the European AI Act (AI Act). In this paper, we propose a new framework for the documentation of use cases that we call use case cards, based on the use case modelling included in the Unified Markup Language (UML) standard. Unlike other documentation methodologies, we (...) focus on the intended purpose and operational use of an AI system. It consists of two main parts: firstly, a UML-based template, tailored to allow implicitly assessing the risk level of the AI system and defining relevant requirements, and secondly, a supporting UML diagram designed to provide information about the system-user interactions and relationships. The proposed framework is the result of a co-design process involving a relevant team of EU policy experts and scientists. We have validated our proposal with 11 experts with different backgrounds and a reasonable knowledge of the AI Act as a prerequisite. We provide the 5 use case cards used in the co-design and validation process. Use case cards allows framing and contextualising use cases in an effective way, and we hope this methodology can be a useful tool for policy makers and providers for documenting use cases, assessing the risk level, adapting the different requirements and building a catalogue of existing usages of AI. (shrink)

Imagine a man chatting with his AI girlfriend app. He looks at his smartphone and says, ‘Finally, I'm being understood’. Is he deceiving himself? Is there anything morally wrong with it? The human tendency to anthropomorphize AI is well established, and the popularity of AI companions is growing. This article answers three questions: (1) How can being charmed by AI's simulated emotions be considered self‐deception? (2) Why might we have an obligation to avoid harmless self‐deception? (3) When is self‐deception in (...) emotional relationships with AI morally questionable, and can it be blameworthy? Regarding question 1, I describe being seduced by AI's simulated emotions as self‐deception, where desires bias beliefs. In response to question 2, I outline two ways to justify a prima facie obligation to avoid harmless self‐deception – instrumental and autotelic. For question 3, I highlight crucial factors to consider in assessing the blameworthiness of harmless self‐deception, such as the emotional and cognitive competences of the self‐deceiver, reasons for self‐deception, and its consequences for one's predispositions, self‐image, and other people. Moreover, I argue that the ethical requirement to avoid self‐deception does not easily translate into attributing blame to others for being self‐deceived. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to explore how metaphor is mobilized to frame and describe the lived experience of dementia in a corpus of illness narratives compiled from 10 blogs initiated and maintained by individuals diagnosed with early-onset dementia. The article is set against the background of contemporary healthcare practices and discourse around chronic illness and focuses on the metaphors that patients use to communicate about their dementia experience in relation to three basic psychological needs: autonomy, competence and relatedness, (...) which are essential for human well-being and are heavily challenged in complex medical situations. Results are discussed in terms of the framing metaphors provide of the emotional, psychological impact of dementia and their implications for patient-centered care. This study expands prior work by researching metaphors used for a condition that has been scarcely explored from this point of view and by focusing on the patient’s perspective exclusively. (shrink)

Resumen de Tesis Tiempo humano y tiempo natural: una distinción problemática en los debates sobre el tiempo histórico del siglo XX por M. E. Arabarco.

The pharmaceutical industry and drugs advertisements are sometimes accused of “creating diseases”. This article assesses and describes the role of that industry in fostering medicalization. First, the notions of medicalization and pharmaceuticalization are defined. Then, the problem of distinguishing between harmful overmedicalization and well-founded medicalization is presented. Next, the phenomenon of disease mongering is explained and illustrated by the case analysis of medicalizing pain and suffering in three contexts: (1) the general idea of medicalizing physical pain, (2) the medicalization of (...) grief and (3) disease mongering of pseudoaddiction—a condition promoted in order to increase the demand for opioid pain relievers. (shrink)

What is the meaning of reason in our postmodern society today? Is reason a weapon of domination, or can it also serve as a means for emancipation? Is it possible for reason to understand its "other"--what it is not? Confronting such questions, Bounds of Reason is a compelling discussion of the limits and meaning of rationality as a tool for understanding the ideas of truth, justice and freedom. Emilia Steuerman explores the modernist and postmodernist controversy between Habermas and Lyotard (...) to highlight the problems encountered both by a defense of reason and by the lack of meaning that haunts a world without it. Using Kleinian theory to examine the debate as it is manifested in the main philosophical themes of this century, Steuerman argues that a rational and ethical theory of justice must take into account that which is not rational, symmetrical or transparent--namely a primitive world of love and hatred which colors and shapes our perceptions. (shrink)