The use of artificial intelligence in healthcare contexts is highly controversial for the (bio)ethical conundrums it creates. One of the main problems arising from its implementation is the lack of transparency of machine learning algorithms, which is thought to impede the patient’s autonomous choice regarding their medical decisions. If the patient is unable to clearly understand why and how an AI algorithm reached certain medical decision, their autonomy is being hovered. However, there are alternatives to prevent the negative impact of (...) AI opacity in shared (healthcare professional–patient) decision-making processes, and benefit from the high accuracy of such systems. Despite these ethical issues, this paper advocates for its usage and also defends the positive role that it could have in enhancing patients’ autonomy. I advocate for a system where the implementation of AI is only partial, and humans will remain in control of oversighting algorithm interpretation of medical images and patients’ data. (shrink)

Dans un contexte d’invisibilisation de l’histoire palestinienne et de négation même de l’existence du peuple palestinien par l’occupant israélien, le fait de se rendre visible aux yeux du « monde » est en soi un acte politique, et tout artiste palestinien semble devoir être, en ce sens, « engagé », parfois malgré lui. Ma contribution se penche sur cette injonction au politique dans la pratique d’acteurs et actrices palestiniens de la danse. Elle s’appuie sur une recherche ethnographique multi-située et digitale (...) menée durant quatre ans dans les studios, les théâtres et les festivals de danse en Palestine, en Israël et en Europe. J’avance que le politique, dans la pratique des acteurs de ma recherche, ne s’avère pas toujours une question d’« engagement », mais découle aussi d’une pression sociale liée au contexte palestinien, tout comme de politiques culturelles européennes et de programmes d’aide au développement porteurs d’une vision de l’art comme nécessairement « utile ». (shrink)

ObjectiveTo determine the factors associated with quality of life and depressive symptoms in Peruvian university students during the COVID-19 pandemic.MethodsMulticentre study in 1,634 students recruited by convenience sampling. The quality of life was assessed with the European Quality of Life-5 Dimensions at three levels and depressive symptoms with the Patient Health Questionnaire-9. To assess factors associated with QoL and depressive symptoms, linear regressions and fitted regressions were used, with robust coefficients of variance information.ResultsA 345 reported problems in performing daily activities, (...) 544 reported pain and discomfort, 772 were moderately/very anxious or depressed. Furthermore, 207 had moderate-severe and severe depressive symptoms. Men reported better QoL than women and fewer depressive symptoms. Ayacucho’s residents had more depressive symptoms than Ancash’s residents and Piura’s residents had fewer depressive symptoms than Ancash’s residents. Students who left home during quarantine reported more depressive symptoms.ConclusionProblems performing daily activities, pain and discomfort, as well as mild to severe depressive symptoms were found in more than three-quarters of the sample. Authorities could consider depression care to improve quality of life in regions where high rates of infection occurred during the pandemic. (shrink)

According to Perfect Being Theism, God is the absolutely perfect (i.e., greatest possible) being. The notion of absolute perfection can be analyzed in different ways. On one interpretation, to be absolutely perfect requires the exemplification of all absolute perfections. On another interpretation, to be perfect requires the exemplification of the best possible combination of perfections. It seems that the latter analysis is better than the former, because it does not fall prey to the problem of incompatible perfections, viz., that there (...) (probably) are perfections that cannot be coexemplified. Here I argue that even if perfect being theists accept the latter analysis, the problem of incompatibility does not go away. I argue that perfections are (probably) incomparable: it is false that some perfection is better than, worse than, or equally good to another perfection. If so, then it is impossible or at least extremely difficult to say that among the combination of perfections there are, there is one that is best among them. I also argue that adopting the former analysis with some restrictions (as Mark Murphy does) leads to the same incompatibility and incomparability problems. (shrink)

Euthanasia and the duty to die have both been thoroughly discussed in the field of bioethics as morally justifiable practices within medical healthcare contexts. The existence of a narrow connection between both could also be established, for people having a duty to die should be allowed to actively hasten their death by the active means offered by euthanasia. Choosing the right time to end one’s own life is a decisive factor to retain autonomy at the end of our lives. However, (...) there is no definitive consensus on why physicians should be the ones performing the medical procedure to end a person’s life. The moral problems arising from such assertion are not to be taken lightly, for medical tradition has long regarded the duty not to kill, not to actively end a patient’s life, as the core moral obligation that gives meaning to the medical profession. Our concern is to question the moral justifiability of the arguments offered by physicians not to actively help patients die. (shrink)

When considering our own death, we normally weigh its impact on the people we love and care about, as well as worrying about the way in which our life might end, hoping that not too much suffering precedes it. However, such view, despite necessary, is a passive understanding of death, interpreted as something that merely happens to us, where we would have some control over timing if physician-assisted dying were legal in our countries. But what if our relation to death (...) would not end there? What if special medical needs, such as the emergency situation resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic, could have a direct impact on us creating a moral duty to end our lives? That is the thesis that will be advocated for in this paper: a moral duty to die will arise in some people to save resources that will help others get through Covid-19. It is important to indicate that the duty to die is personally acknowledged and self-imposed, thus nobody can be coerced to carry it out; for autonomy would be lost and such action should be considered an instance of incitement to die, therefore being morally blameworthy. (shrink)

This paper aims to explore and offer different hypotheses that could account for an adequate understanding of the duty to die and its relation to biopolitics from two neglected approaches. First, death will be analysed from a biopolitical perspective to understand the crucial role it has in biopower. Second, the focus lies on the two-folded implication that death has in biopower, for it could be either a defiance of it or the final sublimation of its control. Similarly, the next section (...) addresses the relations between death and neoliberalism from a biopolitical perspective, exploring the possibility of understanding the duty to die as resistance to economic mandates or, on the contrary, as the fulfilment of neoliberal interests. Finally, as a continuation of the relations between the duty to die and neo-liberalism, the paper analyses a similar two-folded view of the former from a psychopolitical perspective. (shrink)

Perfect being theism is the view that the perfect being exists and the property being-perfect is the property being-God. According to the strong analysis of perfection, a being is perfect just in case it exemplifies all perfections. On the other hand, the weak analysis of perfection claims that a being is perfect just in case it exemplifies the best possible combination of compatible perfections. Strong perfect being theism accepts the former analysis while weak perfect being theism accepts the latter. In (...) this paper, I argue that there are good reasons to reject both versions of perfect being theism. On the one hand, strong perfect being theism is false if there are incompatible perfections; I argue that there are. On the other hand, if either no comparison can be made between sets of perfections, or they are equally good, then there is no best possible set of perfections. I argue for the antecedent of this conditional statement, concluding that weak perfect being theism is false. In the absence of other analyses of perfection, I conclude that we have reason to reject perfect being theism. (shrink)

This paper straightforwardly addresses one of the strongest, from an ethical perspective, objections presented to the duty to die, the one concerned with the lack of a normative theory to support it, offered by Seay in his paper Can there be a “duty to die” without a normative theory? The aim of the paper is to provide strong metaethical grounds to support the duty to die without the need of a moral normative theory. First, the definition and main argument for (...) the duty to die will be presented. Second, Seay’s objection will be described and clearly explained. Third, our metaphysical assumptions and a preliminary metaethical discussion will be offered to situate and understand the context. Finally, we will show how the duty to die can be integrated within the metaethical approach previously presented, defending that there is no need of a normative theory to provide good justification and strong ethical grounds for the duty to die, because they will have already been provided by our metaethical argument. (shrink)

El objetivo de este artículo es explorar y ofrecer diferentes hipótesis que puedan dar cuenta de una adecuada comprensión del deber de morir y su relación con la biopolítica desde dos enfoques olvidados. En primer lugar, se analizará la muerte desde una perspectiva biopolítica para comprender el papel crucial que tiene para el biopoder. En segundo lugar, la atención se centra en la implicación doble que tiene la muerte para el biopoder, ya que podría ser bien un desafío para él (...) o la sublimación final de su control. De igual forma, la siguiente sección aborda las relaciones entre muerte y neoliberalismo desde una perspectiva biopolítica, explorando la posibilidad de entender el deber de morir como una resistencia a los mandatos económicos o, por el contrario, como el cumplimiento de los intereses neoliberales. Finalmente, como continuación de las relaciones entre el deber de morir y el neoliberalismo, el artículo analiza una doble visión similar a la primera desde una perspectiva psicopolítica. (shrink)

According to one of the most powerful paradigms explaining the meaning of the concept of natural number, natural numbers get a large part of their conceptual content from core cognitive abilities. Carey’s bootstrapping provides a model of the role of core cognition in the creation of mature mathematical concepts. In this paper, I conduct conceptual analyses of various theories within this paradigm, concluding that the theories based on the ability to subitize (i.e., to assess anexactquantity of the elements in a (...) collection without counting them), or on the ability to approximate quantities (i.e., to assess anapproximatequantity of the elements in a collection without counting them), or both, fail to provide a conceptual basis for bootstrapping the concept of an exact natural number. In particular, I argue that none of the existing theories explains one of the key characteristics of the natural number structure: the equidistances between successive elements of the natural numbers progression. I suggest that this regularity could be based on another innate cognitive ability, namely sensitivity to the regularity of rhythm. In the final section, I propose a new position within the core cognition paradigm, inspired by structuralist positions in philosophy of mathematics. (shrink)

Turing and Church formulated two different formal accounts of computability that turned out to be extensionally equivalent. Since the accounts refer to different properties they cannot both be adequate conceptual analyses of the concept of computability. This insight has led to a discussion concerning which account is adequate. Some authors have suggested that this philosophical debate—which shows few signs of converging on one view—can be circumvented by regarding Church’s and Turing’s theses as explications. This move opens up the possibility that (...) both accounts could be adequate, albeit in their own different ways. In this paper, I focus on the question of whether Church’s thesis can be seen as an explication in the precise Carnapian sense. Most importantly, I address an additional constraint that Carnap puts on the explicative power of axiomatic systems—an axiomatisation explicates when it is clear which mathematical entities form the theory’s intended model—and that implicitly applies to axiomatisations of recursion theory used in Church’s account of computability. To overcome this difficulty, I propose two possible clarifications of the pre-systematic concept of “computability” that can both be captured in recursion theory, and I show how both clarifications avoid an objection arising from Carnap’s constraint. (shrink)

The main objective of this paper is to design a common background for various philosophical discussions about adequate conceptual analysis of “computation”.

History and Philosophy of Logic, Volume 32, Issue 2, Page 191-193, May 2011.

En su artículo, Leonardo Ruíz Gómez busca dilucidar la articulación leibniciana entre fuerza primitiva y fuerza derivativa, de modo que se tengan luces sobre uno de los asuntos problemáticos de la propuesta de Leibniz, a la vez que se aporten elementos de comprensión para una posible articulación entre la dinámica y la metafísica leibnicianas. Mi texto breve es un comentario del artículo de Ruíz Gómez en el que reconstruyo de manera general la estructura de su texto y señalo algunas inquietudes (...) y reparos frente al análisis que Ruíz Gómez hace de tres caraterizaciones de la fuerza derivativa y de la articulación de esta con la fuerza primitiva. (shrink)

This is a descriptive and detailed revision of qualitative investigations of coping styles and strategies; academic performance of adolescent students. It considered both, independent and correlational studies among the two variables. Different data bases were revised like Dialnet, Redalyc, Scielo y Science Direct. 479 articles were obtained from these, 46 of these responded to the selection criteria that entailed (research article, indexed journal, adolescents). Alongside this search there was a prevalence of the studies related to different variables and their relationship (...) with coping styles and strategies. The studies present common results in terms of positive correlations between active coping styles and well being. (shrink)

ABSTRACTEmotion regulation substantially develops during the childhood years. This growth includes an increasing awareness that certain ER strategies are more appropriate in some contexts than...

The core of the problem discussed in this paper is the following: the Church-Turing Thesis states that Turing Machines formally explicate the intuitive concept of computability. The description of Turing Machines requires description of the notation used for the input and for the output. Providing a general definition of notations acceptable in the process of computations causes problems. This is because a notation, or an encoding suitable for a computation, has to be computable. Yet, using the concept of computation, in (...) a definition of a notation, which will be further used in a definition of the concept of computation yields an obvious vicious circle. The circularity of this definition causes trouble in distinguishing on the theoretical level, what is an acceptable notation from what is not an acceptable notation, or as it is usually referred to in the literature, “deviant encodings”. Deviant encodings appear explicitly in discussions about what is an adequate or correct conceptual analysis of the concept of computation. In this paper, I focus on philosophical examples where the phenomenon appears implicitly, in a “disguised” version. In particular, I present its use in the analysis of the concept of natural number. I also point at additional phenomena related to deviant encodings: conceptual fixed points and apparent “computability” of uncomputable functions. In parallel, I develop the idea that Carnapian explications provide a much more adequate framework for understanding the concept of computation, than the classical philosophical analysis. (shrink)

This paper reassesses the criticism of the Lucas-Penrose anti-mechanist argument, based on Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, as formulated by Krajewski : this argument only works with the additional extra-formal assumption that “the human mind is consistent”. Krajewski argues that this assumption cannot be formalized, and therefore that the anti-mechanist argument – which requires the formalization of the whole reasoning process – fails to establish that the human mind is not mechanistic. A similar situation occurs with a corollary to the argument, that (...) the human mind allegedly outperforms machines, because although there is no exhaustive formal definition of natural numbers, mathematicians can successfully work with natural numbers. Again, the corollary requires an extra-formal assumption: “PA is complete” or “the set of all natural numbers exists”. I agree that extra-formal assumptions are necessary in order to validate the anti-mechanist argument and its corollary, and that those assumptions are problematic. However, I argue that formalization is possible and the problem is instead the circularity of reasoning that they cause. The human mind does not prove its own consistency, and outperforms the machine, simply by making the assumption “I am consistent”. Starting from the analysis of circularity, I propose a way of thinking about the interplay between informal and formal in mathematics. (shrink)

According to popular belief, big data and machine learning provide a wholly novel approach to science that has the potential to revolutionise scientific progress and will ultimately lead to the ‘end of theory’. Proponents of this view argue that advanced algorithms are able to mine vast amounts of data relating to a given problem without any prior knowledge and that we do not need to concern ourselves with causality, as correlation is sufficient for handling complex issues. Consequently, the human contribution (...) to scientific progress is deemed to be non-essential and replaceable. We, however, following the position most commonly represented in the philosophy of science, argue that the need for human expertise remains. Based on an analysis of big data and machine learning methods in two case studies—skin cancer detection and protein folding—we show that expert knowledge is essential and inherent in the application of these methods. Drawing on this analysis, we establish a classification of the different kinds of expert knowledge that are involved in the application of big data and machine learning in scientific contexts. We address the ramifications of a human-driven expert knowledge approach to big data and machine learning for scientific practice and the discussion about the role of theory. Finally, we show that the ways in which big data and machine learning both influence and are influenced by scientific methodology involve continuous conceptual shifts rather than a rigid paradigm change. (shrink)