This thesis is presented from a historical life history, the conscious world of an academic whose thoughts were not dogmatic nor censured, neither within or without the university. It was a dialogue with others who never hesitated to judge him as critical and heuristic. The only way to be authenti..

Chronic diseases are the main disease burden worldwide, leading to premature deaths and poor individual and population health outcomes. Although modern medicine has made significant progress in developing effective treatments, only around 50% of people follow long-term treatment recommendations in high-income countries and presumably even less in low-income and middle-income countries.1 Health outcomes for chronic diseases follow a social gradient across socioeconomic groups, suggesting that the 50% adherence rate distributes unequally across social groups, affecting those who live in disadvantage the (...) most despite universal health coverage.2 Bioethicists have largely ignored inequalities that arise from differences in adherence to long-term treatments and the importance of the ethical dimension of chronicity for clinical practice. As I discuss in detail elsewhere, the concept of ‘chronic disease’ lacks a successful and agreed definition, failing to be structured in a traditional way and allowing for a disjunctive group of diseases to fall under the concept.3 Still, the main element that helps distinguish ‘chronic diseases’ from all other diseases is their long duration, so the noun chronicity can help demarcate and identify the nature of ‘chronic disease’. Drawing on conceptual analysis and phenomenological research on illness that highlight the tension between the cyclical and static elements of chronic disease, I have argued that chronicity has a phenomenological sense beyond its …. (shrink)

Purpose This paper reviews the origins of the Ethics Council of the Federation of Social Communication Media of Chile and looks into the historical circumstances surrounding its creation, the concept of self-regulation as understood by its founders, and the criteria that initially ruled its operation. Design/methodology/approach A qualitative survey of nine contemporary witnesses and the confrontation with the scientific literature. Findings The results reveal a significant coincidence with the academic literature both in the description of the concept of self-regulation and (...) in the origin of the ethics councils and of the system under which they operate. However, a series of nuances not usually considered in the concept of self-regulation are described. Originality/value This study will help assess the national and international possibilities of self-regulation and the significance of the Chilean ethics council. (shrink)

This article investigates three things: (1) what development might be, (2) how development and ethics might be related, and (3) what an ethics of development might look like. First, I show how if we move away from an essentialist metaphysics of being to a possibilist-functionalist metaphysics of becoming in our understanding of development, we can reconceptualize ethics as self-directed ontogeny. Thus, ethics turns out to be a part of development. Secondly, I sketch out the possibility of an ethics of development, (...) showing how it should be based on three desiderata: (1) sustainability, promoting the long-term existence of the maximum human and non-human biodiversity, (2) democracy, promoting human-human relationships that are bidirectional and, to the extent possible, non-imposing, and (3) non-ethnocentrism, promoting true modernity; a modernity not predicated on a non-existent abstract universality but on concrete syncretism. The ultimate aim of this ethics of development is the optimization of individual and collective subjectivity and agency across time. (shrink)

This paper explores how understandings of sociality influence the way members of two different social groups discursively animate moral conflicts. It examines how moral conflicts are constructed in life-story interviews by Chinese and Latin American migrants as they reflect on patterns of sociation with co-ethnics in London. These interviews typify the kind of conflicts that emerged across a 102 interview database where a discrepancy between expectations of how contextually-situated interpersonal relations are established and how they should unfold are. The transnational (...) setting that we focus on inevitably draws our attention to the importance of the larger relational context where interpersonal relations among migrant co-ethnics are entrenched. In this context, rights and obligations towards one another are often reconfigured to adapt to the circumstances of the new environment. This paper turns the pragmatic lens on transcultural relations. (shrink)

The readiness of Buddhists to dialogue with and embrace modern science has caused some to worry that this encounter will deform Buddhist traditions for the sake of acceptance by the West. But their strong tradition of epistemological skepticism and intellectual pluralism makes it unlikely that Buddhists will embrace scientific positivism. Given the tensions between religion and science in contemporary western society, it is perhaps this feature of Buddhism that can make the most fruitful contribution in its dialogue with science.

Throughout the 20th century, market capitalism was defended on parallel grounds. First, it promotes freedom by enabling individuals to exploit their own property and labor-power; second, it facilitates an efficient allocation and use of resources. Recently, however, both defenses have begun to unravel—as capitalism has moved into its “platform” phase. Today, the pursuit of allocative efficiency, bolstered by pervasive data surveillance, often undermines individual freedom rather than promoting it. And more fundamentally, the very idea that markets are necessary to achieve (...) allocative efficiency has come under strain. Even supposing, for argument’s sake, that the claim was true in the early 20th century when von Mises and Hayek pioneered it, advances in computing have rekindled the old “socialist calculation” debate. And this time around, markets—as information technology—are unlikely to have the upper hand. -/- All of this, we argue, raises an important set of governance questions regarding the political economy of the future. We focus on two: How much should our economic system prioritize freedom, and to what extent should it rely on markets? The arc of platform capitalism bends, increasingly, toward a system that neither prioritizes freedom nor relies on markets. And the dominant critical response, exemplified by Shoshana Zuboff’s work, has been to call for a restoration of market capitalism. Longer term, however, we believe it would be more productive to think about how “postmarket” economic arrangements might promote freedom—or better yet, autonomy—even more effectively than markets, and to determine the practical steps necessary to realize that possibility. (shrink)

Agents know some but not all logical consequences of what they know. Agents seem to be neither logically omniscient nor logically incompetent. Yet finding an intermediate standard of minimal rationality has proven difficult. In this paper, I take suggestions found in the literature (Lewis, 1988; Hawke, Özgün and Berto, 2020; Plebani and Spolaore, 2021) and join the forces of subject matter and impossible worlds approaches to devise a new solution to this quandary. I do so by combining a space of (...) FDE worlds (Berto and Jago, 2019) with a Lewisian (1988) understanding of subject matters as partitions. By doing so, I show how subject matters impose some order in the anarchic space of FDE worlds, while the worlds allow for distinctions between contents which would not otherwise be available. Combining the two approaches, then, brings us closer to the desired closure principles for knowledge of minimally rational agents. (shrink)

Alors que le pays brûle, je brode. Je le fais depuis des années pour différentes raisons. Tout d’abord, pour évoquer les tissus de ma maison qui ont été brodés par ma mère et mes tantes. D’autre part, pour apporter cette affectivité et cette mémoire dans un espace organisationnel avec mes collègues de travail. Nous nous sommes réunies et rapprochées après avoir brodé une grande toile représentant les travailleurs de la maison centrale de l’université du Chili, une tâche qui nous a (...) pris des mois et qui a été décomposée en d’autres pièces connexes, telles que des slogans et des revendications syndicales. Des pièces différentes, mais toutes liées. J’ai également brodé un slogan de lutte pour les survivants de la violence politique et sexuelle pendant la dictature. Je continue également à broder les souvenirs d’un groupe de femmes qui ont été enlevées et assassinées dans la ville de mon enfance, en créant leurs visages avec un matériau particulier : les cheveux de femmes comme elles. (shrink)

Many of the actual bioethical discussions start from the assumption that we have absolute dominance/disposition over our body. Based on the thesis of autonomy, control over one's own life and the freedom to do anything, at least with one's body, the goodness or legitimacy of acts such as suicide and euthanasia are often justified. Considering the last statements, this paper seeks to approach the question of the nature of the disposition –main attribute of dominion or property– over the body. It (...) will be argued on the basis of Thomas Aquinas' theory and Immanuel Kant's exposition, often wrongly considered, in my opinion, as rival doctrines. The whole writing will be oriented to review the relations of the modern principle of autonomy with the problem of the morality of suicide. (shrink)

Este artigo objetiva a inserção crítica na prática poética da artista contemporânea francesa Sophie Calle, proeminente em uma trajetória que perpassa diversos gêneros artísticos como artes visuais e literatura compreendidos em uma variedade de suportes como fotografia, publicação em livro, instalação, performance. Analisa procedimentos de criação em que estão articuladas imagem fotográfica e verbal em relação a narrativas pessoais. Aporta questões provenientes da inter-relação entre os campos do real e do ficcional, entre visibilidade e vazio, entre deslocamento e perseguição, entre (...) memória e fio. Esse trabalho se estabelece na análise ensaística de suas obras e escritos em articulação com bibliografia pertinente do campo artístico, crítico, filosófico e antropológico, como também, investiga suas estratégias de criação através de novos desdobramentos conceituais e teóricos.Palavras-chave: Imagem. Fotografia. Escrita. Deslocamento. Fio. AbstractThis article aims the critical insertion in the poetic practice of the French contemporary artist Sophie Calle, prominent in a trajectory that crosses several artistic genres such as Visual Arts and Literature comprised in a variety of supports such as photography, book publishing, installation and performance. It analyzes her creation procedures in which photographic and verbal images are articulated in relation to personal narratives. It raises questions from the interrelationship between the fields of the real and the fictional, between visibility and void, between displacement and shadowing, between memory and thread. This work is established in the essay analysis of her works and writings in conjunction with pertinent bibliography from the artistic, critical, philosophical and anthropological fields, as well as it aims to investigating her creative strategies through new conceptual and theoretical developments.Keywords: Image. Photography. Writing. Displacement. Thread. (shrink)

El objeto de este artículo es examinar las relaciones entre ‘utilidad’, universalidad’, ‘razón’ y ‘sentimientos de humanidad’ en el contexto de la filosofía moral de D. Hume. No hay utilidad per se; sostenemos que no podemos entender la utilidad humeana sin hablar de los ‘sentimientos de humanidad’.

The following article analyzes the development of education plans in home economics and home education between 1920 and 1960 in the case of Chile. From this perspective, it is interesting to investigate the impact on female pedagogical training of the manuals and education programs in home economics and home education between 1920 and 1960, promoted by the different Chilean governments of the period. The results show that these plans and programmes enhanced the training of women in domestic work, contributing to (...) this task from primary, secondary and later university education, it is also noted that the educational policies promoted in the period contributed to strengthen a naturalizing discourse on the relationship. (shrink)

O breve ensaio de Heidegger O que é isto - a Filosofia? guarda em si as questões essenciais sobre os fundamentos, perspectivas norteadoras e finalidades que possibilitaram o surgimento da filosofia como forma eminente do conhecimento ocidental. Contemplando o modo como Parmênides, Heráclito, Platão e Aristóteles estabelecem o sentido do Ser, Heidegger mostra em que sentido os filósofos gregos depuseram no νoεῖν e no λόγος fundamento essencial de ἀλήθεια. Na exposição que Heidegger faz das continuidades e distinções características de cada (...) um dos filósofos gregos por respeito à questão do sentido do Ser e da Verdade destacaremos concomitantemente os pressupostos do próprio pensamento de Heidegger, os quais o orientaram na abordagem do Ser. (shrink)

I provide a new way of thinking of questions using an expanded space of FDE worlds. This allows both for non-exclusive and non-exhaustive answers to questions concerning one’s gender identity. Further, and most crucially for the purposes of this paper, it allows for a new, more general definition of question-inclusion that makes it possible to identify a new form of hermeneutical injustice. This form of injustice, I argue, affects trans people by keeping them in a prolonged state of gender questioning (...) and confusion in which they only grasp the part of the question Am I a member of gender G? that corresponds to the question Do I want to be a member of gender G?. (shrink)

The era of AI-based decision-making fast approaches, and anxiety is mounting about when, and why, we should keep “humans in the loop” (“HITL”). Thus far, commentary has focused primarily on two questions: whether, and when, keeping humans involved will improve the results of decision-making (making them safer or more accurate), and whether, and when, non-accuracy-related values—legitimacy, dignity, and so forth—are vindicated by the inclusion of humans in decision-making. Here, we take up a related but distinct question, which has eluded the (...) scholarship thus far: does it matter if humans appear to be in the loop of decision-making, independent from whether they actually are? In other words, what is stake in the disjunction between whether humans in fact have ultimate authority over decision-making versus whether humans merely seem, from the outside, to have such authority? Our argument proceeds in four parts. First, we build our formal model, enriching the HITL question to include not only whether humans are actually in the loop of decision-making, but also whether they appear to be so. Second, we describe situations in which the actuality and appearance of HITL align: those that seem to involve human judgment and actually do, and those that seem automated and actually are. Third, we explore instances of misalignment: situations in which systems that seem to involve human judgment actually do not, and situations in which systems that hold themselves out as automated actually rely on humans operating “behind the curtain.” Fourth, we examine the normative issues that result from HITL misalignment, arguing that it challenges individual decision-making about automated systems and complicates collective governance of automation. (shrink)

El coloquio-conversatorio Memorias sonoras, prisión política y dictaduras en el Cono Sur. Reflexiones trasandinas sensibles se desarrolló el día 11 de septiembre de 2021, día de conmemoración de las víctimas de violencias políticas durante la dictadura militar chilena. Fue organizado por la línea Arte y Política del Núcleo de Sociología del Arte y las Prácticas Culturales de la Facultad de Ciencias Sociales de la Universidad de Chile, y contó con la participación de expositoras chilenas y argentinas: Analía Lutowicz, Victoria Polti, (...) Katia Chornik y Francisca Cornejo. A continuación, presentamos tres de las ponencias propuestas para el conversatorio: “Memorias de canciones de Violeta Parra y la Nueva Canción Chilena en mujeres ex presas políticas en la cárcel del Buen Pastor de Valparaíso durante la dictadura militar chilena” a cargo de Francisca Cornejo, “La memoria sonora de las experiencias concentracionarias en Argentina. Escuchando las miradas que construyen los relatos del Terrorismo de Estado durante la última dictadura cívico-militar”, a cargo de Analía Lutowicz y “La performatividad del sonido y la escucha en contextos concentracionarios” de Victoria Polti. (shrink)

At this time when the development of synthetic biology and artificial intelligence are changing the world around us, philosophers and scientists, first of all, must converge to analyze the present and predict the ethical-social consequences and biological dangers associated with new “living entities” that are not the result of the natural evolutionary process. As synthetic/artificial life forms (xenobots, robots, transgenic organisms, etc.) become more and more abundant and sophisticated, it seems first of all necessary to bring some order to all (...) this new biodiversity, establishing what is alive and what is not, and analyzing the consequences of this incessant creative activity. Here I intend to organize all these human-made entities and clarify their status as living beings or artificial elements, leaving the door open to an uncertain future in which we will be able to see how “the artificial” and “the natural” could merge to originate something different from everything known. Accordingly, I propose the creation of a new domain, Lithbea, which includes all synthetic and artificial entities within a new kingdom called Humade (derived from human-made). I have also included viruses in a new realm, the Viral kingdom, because they were excluded from the classical three-domain tree of life despite playing a fundamental role in the evolution of biodiversity on Earth. Finally, I make a brief comment on the unpredictability of the unknown, the implications of this new landscape of biodiversity, and the uncertain future of all these advances. (shrink)

Television commercials are often thought of as bothersome multimedia artefacts that by their very existence spoil our viewing pleasure at regular intervals. Not only that, but they seem to have the habit of ordering us around. This aspect of TV ads has often been commented on by experts and laypersons alike. Therefore, we decided to tackle this issue and look at the prototypical expression of directives, that is, imperatives in voice-overs in television commercials. To this end we have carried out (...) an empirical analysis of imperatives in voice-overs in the MATVA corpus which contains transcriptions of nearly 800 voice-overs in British TV ads recorded on six days during 2009, 2010 and 2011. We provide an exhaustive quantitative and qualitative profile of imperatives in contemporary TV advertising. This includes information on the distribution of imperatives, the most common verbs in imperative clauses, and their discourse function. We are also able to show conclusively that the directive force of imperatives in TV ads is more akin to advice or recommendation than commands, and explain from a discourse-pragmatic perspective why this is so. (shrink)

Rorty, Public Reason, and Modernity's Crisis of Critique uses the work of Richard Rorty to discuss modernity's crisis of critique and the powers and limits of public reason to address this crisis. Arguing for a redefinition of philosophy, it elaborates a political epistemology view that defends a post-metaphysical culture.

The main objective of this study is to propose, from a theoretical approach, an alternative model of the communication process that includes intentionality, interest, identification, and exchange as part of the internal process of decoding the message experienced by the receiver. The proposal includes the subdivision of the responses offered by the receiver into two possible categories: one simple, which can mean the programmed response to a specific code; and another complex, which can mean a change and/or significant transformation in (...) different aspects associated with the recipient. Through a qualitative methodology, with emphasis on documentary review, and inferential and deductive reasoning, the proposed theoretical model has been developed and explained, highlighting the added value that it could offer to the understanding of communication. (shrink)

The generation of synthetic data is becoming a fundamental task in the daily life of any organization due to the new protection data laws that are emerging. Because of the rise in the use of Artificial Intelligence, one of the most recent proposals to address this problem is the use of Generative Adversarial Networks. These types of networks have demonstrated a great capacity to create synthetic data with very good performance. The goal of synthetic data generation is to create data (...) that will perform similarly to the original dataset for many analysis tasks, such as classification. The problem of GANs is that in a classification problem, GANs do not take class labels into account when generating new data, it is treated as any other attribute. This research work has focused on the creation of new synthetic data from datasets with different characteristics with a Conditional Generative Adversarial Network. CGANs are an extension of GANs where the class label is taken into account when the new data is generated. The performance of our results has been measured in two different ways: firstly, by comparing the results obtained with classification algorithms, both in the original datasets and in the data generated; secondly, by checking that the correlation between the original data and those generated is minimal. (shrink)

Este artículo va a estar centrado en una cuestión fundamental: ¿pueden compararse las visiones éticas de Dostoievski e Ignacio de Loyola? Haciendo una revisión pormenorizada de las bases existenciales dostoievskianas, podremos comprobar cómo la vida de Ignacio de Loyola parece coincidir con la hoja de ruta que, más tarde, elaboraría Dostoievski en sus obras en busca de una plenitud humana. El hombre pleno propuesto por el autor ruso es un reflejo del San Ignacio que conocemos por su Autobiografía, un personaje (...) que pasó de los confines existenciales más arraigados en el yo a una vida por y para los demás basada en una idea fundamental: «En todo, amar y servir». (shrink)

Se han cumplido cincuenta años desde la publicación de Teoría de la Justicia. Sin duda, la obra de J. Rawls marcó un hito fundamental en la historia del pensamiento político del siglo XX. Nuestro trabajo se pregunta hasta qué punto la justicia como imparcialidad sigue siendo una referencia fundamental en el pensamiento político actual. Para ello abordamos la propuesta de M.C. Nussbaum. Nos planteamos si el enfoque de las capacidades de Nussbaum es realmente una continuación o supone una verdadera ruptura (...) con la propuesta de Rawls. Y a partir de las objeciones de Nussbaum a Rawls, nos interrogamos por el presente y el futuro de una obra que, a nuestro juicio, después de medio siglo, parece tener todos los ingredientes necesarios para ser verdaderamente un clásico del pensamiento político. (shrink)

This article aims to improve the knowledge on Generation Z as employees within workforce and in the workplace, as well as on the main thematic trends that drive the research on the topic. To this end, and using bibliometric techniques, a sample of 102 publications on this subject from Web of Science between 2009 and 2020 is analyzed. Research discusses the most published and most cited authors and journals to have a broad view of the context of the subject. Later, (...) through a longitudinal view, the study mainly focuses on analyzing the evolution of thematic clusters, to assess the progress of the themes, as well as the network around the principal motor cluster of each period. The obtained results suggest a hardly developed topic, which started to draw attention in 2018, while still having a wide margin for growth. The core of research on the topic has evolved around “Generation-Z” “generations,” “workplace,” “management” and “attitudes,” “leadership,” “career,” or “learning-teaching-education,” although a low keyword stability among periods was noted. There is a need for further development on a variety of aspects regarding this generation and the labor market, as the study shows a clear orientation toward management and generational diversity within the workplace. (shrink)

Cette recension a déjà paru sur le blog Abandonedfootnotes. Nous remercions Xavier Marquez de nous avoir autorisé à la reproduire ici. I have previously encouraged people to read Randall Collins' work (his infrequently updated blog, The Sociological Eye, is typically excellent), but it is only recently that I tackled his book on interaction rituals. And despite its forbidding title, seemingly promising a work on some technical topic in the sociology of religion, this is a very good book that (...) - (...) Recensions. (shrink)

‘Epistemic’ arguments for conservatism typically claim that given the limits of human reason, we are better off accepting some particular social practice or institution rather than trying to consciously improve it. I critically examine and defend here one such argument, claiming that there are some domains of social life in which, given the limits of our knowledge and the complexity of the social world, we ought to defer to those institutions that have robustly endured in a wide variety of circumstances (...) in the past while not being correlated with intolerable outcomes. These are domains of social life in which our ignorance of optimal institutions is radical, and there is uncertainty about the costs of error. This is an argument for the preservation of particular institutions, not particular policies or outcomes, and it specifically identifies these with the institutions that John Rawls called ‘the basic structure of society.’ The argument further implies that to the extent that there is any reason to change these institutions, changes should be calculated as far as possible to increase their ‘epistemic power.’. (shrink)