Claims that necessary and sufficient conditions are not converse relations are discussed, as well as the related claim that If A, then B is not equivalent to A only if B . The analysis of alleged counterexamples has shown, among other things, how necessary and sufficient conditions should be understood, especially in the case of causal conditions, and the importance of distinguishing sufficient-cause conditionals from necessary-cause conditionals. It is concluded that necessary and sufficient conditions, adequately interpreted, are converse relations in (...) all cases. (shrink)

Background: Coronavirus disease 2019 has resulted in an increase in known risk factors for mental health problems. Mexico adopted lockdown and physical distancing as a containment strategy with potential consequences on day to day life, such as social isolation, loss of income and loneliness that can have important consequences in terms of mental health.Objective: We aimed to examine the effect of the initial phases of the COVID-19 pandemic on psychological distress, well-being and perceived physical health among Mexican-base respondents and to (...) examine whether coping strategies would play a potential intermediating role in relation to these variables. Under the Existential Positive Psychology perspective, an emphasis was made on meaning-centered coping.Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted between April 30 and June 16th 2020 among 604 Mexicans-base respondents of which 471 were women and 132 men. Data was collected by using online questionnaires. Psychological distress was measured using the Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale. The Brief COPE Inventory was used to assess problem-focused and emotion-focused coping strategies. We also used the Meaning-Centered Coping Scale. PERMA-Profiler was used to assess well-being, perceived physical health, and loneliness. Profiler and Descriptive analyses and bivariate linear regression were performed to examine the association of variables.Results: 45.9% of the participants reported moderate to extremely severe psychological distress. Our results demonstrate that problem-focused and emotion-focused coping were positively related to psychological distress, whereas meaning-centered coping was negatively associated with distress. Furthermore, psychological distress played a potential negative role in the perceived physical health, while meaning-centered coping and well-being buffered the negative influence of psychological distress on perceived physical health (completely standardized indirect effect = –0.01, SE: 0.012, 95% CI [−0.065; −0.017].Conclusion: Meaning-centered coping was found to suppress the negative influence of psychological distress on sensation of decreased physical health corroborating the critical role of meaning in life in promoting well-being. Future studies can further examine the value of the critical role of meaning in life in promoting well-being as a protective factor against severe distress during traumatic events. Findings of this study can be used to orient policies and interventions aimed to alleviate suffering in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. (shrink)

Reseña del libro: Miguel Saralegui, The Politics of Time. Introduction to Carl Schmitt’sPolitical Thought, Cantabria University Press, Santander, 2021, 273 pp.

Since the mid-20th century, human beings have become aware of the negative changes that planet Earth is undergoing, some of them produced by themselves and which endanger their existence. One of these changes is the increase in the average temperature caused by the greenhouse effect. The United Nations has taken care of this problem and organized 25 summits on global warming. In 2021, the World Economic Forum proposed leveraging the crisis that the world is experiencing due to COVID-19 for a (...) “great reset” within a globalist agenda that guides the next meeting on climate change. From a bioethical perspective, some components and strategies of this agenda are analyzed, and reflections and recommendations are made. We conclude that climate change is a real issue but magnified by pseudoscience and permeated by politics. Mitigation and adaptation strategies are needed to combat it, including techno-scientific advances, political will, and changes in human behavior. (shrink)

La identidad cultural ha sido abordada desde diferentes disciplinas científicas, se va construyendo desde disímiles ángulos, de aquí que los referentes teóricos para su estudio procedan de diversas áreas del saber. Aunque no es un tema exclusivamente latinoamericano, es justamente América Latina uno de los lugares en que el análisis de esta problemática ha sido más polémico. El artículo presenta los resultados de un diagnóstico del estado de la identidad cultural de los estudiantes de la Preparatoria No.1, de la Universidad (...) Autónoma de Nuevo León, y propone un modelo pedagógico para el desarrollo de este fenómeno. Cultural identity has been studied from different scientific disciplines and considered from various perspectives. The theoretical references of its study come from diverse areas of knowledge. Being not exclusively a Latin American theme, Latin America is exactly one of the places that provide a controversial analysis. This article deals with the results of a study on cultural identity in students registered in the Preparatory n. 1, at the Autonomous University of Nuevo Leon, and presents an educational model for its development. (shrink)

El texto presenta una clasificación de los principales movimientos sociales populares de América Latina y aborda problemas del eje diversidad, identidad y articulación entre ellos. Se analizan algunos de los problemas presentes en el nuevo escenario y territorio político regional marcado por las políticas posneoliberales y la emergencia del movimiento social popular frente a la civilización excluyente, patriarcal, discriminatoria y depredadora del capital.

"Tough, smart, superbly engaging, The Material Ghost is a terrific book." -- Edward W. Said In The Material Ghost , Gilberto Perez draws on his lifelong love of the movies as well as his work as a film scholar to write a lively, wide-ranging, penetrating study of films and filmmakers and the nature of the art form. For Perez, film is complex and richly contradictory, lifelike and dreamlike at once, a peculiar mix of reality and imagination. "The images on (...) the screen," he writes, "carry in them something of the world itself, something material, and yet something transposed, transformed into another world: the material ghost." "Dazzling... The sheer intelligence at work in these lucid pages is exhilarating." -- Alfred Guzzetti, Boston Book Review "A pleasure. Gilberto Perez is one of the smartest film critics writing anywhere." -- Jonathan Rosenbaum "Strikes an ideal balance between insightful analysis and graceful writing... A model of thoughtful criticism." -- David Sterritt, Christian Science Monitor "Brilliantly polemical in his critique of cynical reason ('the official philosophy of late capitalism'), no less passionate in defending the truth-value of cinema, Perez seems to be the clearest heir to the great humanist critic André Bazin." -- Sight & amp Sound "The chapters on Keaton and Renoir are stunning, full of perceptive remarks the chapter on Godard is a persuasive rehabilitation none of the chapters is without memorable insights." -- Michael Wood, London Review of Books "Gilberto Perez's ambitious, abundant, and cultivated book--the fruit of decades of thinking and teaching -- accompanies readers on a journey of discovery into the wonder of film." -- Stanley Cavell "Few books of film criticism in the past twenty-five years have been so enjoyable or instructive... [Perez] has excellent things to say about authorship, about documentaries, about popular genres, about cinematic point of view and narrative technique, about actors, and above all about camera style... He makes us want to look once more at the remarkable pictures he discusses." -- James Naremore, Cineaste. (shrink)

A theory of necessary and sufficient conditions is presented, as well as a theory of necessary and sufficient causes and effects, viewed as a particular case of the former. Ambiguities of the terms 'condition' and 'necessary condition' are explored, and a neutral meaning for 'condition' is favoured. The relation between necessary and sufficient conditions and implicative conditionals (including counterfactuals) is also discussed. Two problems of counterfactual theories of causal explanation are indicated, concerning (i) how to account for causes that are (...) not necessary and (ii) how to interpret the counterfactual from the negation of the effect to the negation of the cause. Application of the theory of necessary and sufficient conditions to Euler’s explanation of the Königsberg bridge problem is discussed. The theory of necessary and sufficient causes and effects is then applied to the flagpole shadow explanation and to two biological explanations, one involving a sufficient but not necessary cause and the other a necessary but not sufficient cause. Causes that are neither sufficient nor necessary are also recognized. Finally, a probabilistic approach to causes that are either not sufficient or not necessary is explored, including its application to examples of such cases. (shrink)

1. Introduction The readiness potential was found to precede voluntary acts by about half a second or more (Kornhuber & Deecke, 1965). Kornhuber (1984) discussed the readiness potential in terms of volition, arguing that it is not the manifestation of an attentional processes. Libet discussed it in relation to consciousness and to free will (Libet et al. 1983a; 1983b; Libet, 1985, 1992, 1993). Libet asked the following questions. Are voluntary acts initiated by a conscious decision to act? Are the physiological (...) facts compatible with the belief that free will determines our voluntary acts? What is the role of consciousness in voluntary action? In this paper I will discuss these questions and the answers that Libet gave to them. (shrink)

This paper investigates whether 'even if A, B' is pragmatically polysemic, so that a nonconcessive conditional may have 'even if', and whether concessive conditionals, pragmatically defined, can fail to have 'even if' or a non-temporal 'still'. Different paraphrases are used to help elucidate pragmatic meanings. A theory of the pragmatic meanings of concessive and implicative conditionals is presented. The semantic meaning of 'even if' and the question of whether concessive conditionals imply the truth of their consequents are also discussed.

It is argued that contraposition is valid for a class of natural language conditionals, if some modifications are allowed to preserve the meaning of the original conditional. In many cases, implicit temporal indices must be considered, making a change in verb tense necessary. A suitable contrapositive for implicative counterfactual conditionals can also usually be found. In some cases, the addition of certain words is necessary to preserve meaning that is present in the original sentence and would be lost or changed (...) in the contrapositive without them. A distinction is made between adding new meaning and adding new words to preserve existing meaning. For concessive conditionals and relevance conditionals, however, no valid contrapositive can be found. They do not belong to the class of contraposable conditionals, which can be independently defined. Difficult cases are also discussed in which the contradictory of the consequent semantically entails the truth of the antecedent. In such cases the content of the antecedent is implicit in the meaning of the consequent. Contraposition becomes possible if what is implicit in the original consequent is made explicit in the contrapositive antecedent. (shrink)

In the Poetics of Aristotle there is a definition of the human being that perhaps has not yet been well considered in educational theory and practice. This definition calls into question a dynamism that according to Plato was unavoidable for an appropriate understanding of the educational process that turns a human being into a beautiful, good and just citizen: mimesis. The paper's intent is to reconsider the definition of the human being, centred on mimesis, presented by Aristotle in the Poetics (...) to demonstrate if, and how, it might establish new paradigms for human coexistence. Aristotle's anthropological statement is included in a much wider discourse concerning philosophy of art; but if isolated from the context, it is an essential definition of human beings that can be synthesised as follows: human beings are the mimetic animal par excellence, and their process of understanding has a fundamental connection with such excellence. Ignorance and/or negligence of how relevant mimesis might be in the educational process may have decisively contributed to separate human beings from this core aspect of their humanity and therefore produced painful consequences in human coexistence. As long as education does not pay attention to the pedagogical implications of the definition taken from the Poetics, how can human flourishing be safeguarded? I argue that recognition of the centrality of mimesis in the educational process allows human edification to proceed devoid of ideological basis, be it secular or confessional; and overcomes the risk of relativism. Mimesis, formerly recognised by Plato as a link between what is expressed and what really is, is masterfully reinterpreted by Aristotle. Aristotle recognised its positive pedagogic value in the Poetics, and nowadays we can recognise how it offers existential dynamics that restore the vital human relationship between self and other. The sense of this proposal lies in giving mimesis the role it deserves in education, by raising the significance of how coexistence might benefit from a vast human dimension, capable of recognising our humanity beyond our rational capacity. (shrink)

Cinema is commonly hailed as "the universal language," but how does it communicate so effortlessly across cultural and linguistic borders? Drawing on a lifetime's worth of viewing an reviewing, influential critic Gilberto Perez invokes a dizzying array of masters past and present includin Chaplin, Ford, Kiarostami, Eisenstein, Malick, Mizoguchi, Haneke, Hitchcock, and Godard--to explore the transaction between filmmaker and audience. The Eloquent Screen shows how cinema, as the consummate contemporary art form, establishes a thoroughly modern rhetoric in which different (...) points of view are brought into clear focus.". (shrink)

This paper compares two logical conditionals which are strengthenings of the strict conditional and avoid the paradoxes of strict implication. The logics of both may be viewed as extensions of KT, and the two conditionals are interdefinable in KT. The implicative conditional requires that its antecedent and consequent be both contingent. The consequential conditional may be viewed as a weakening of the implicative conditional, insofar as it also admits the case in which the antecedent and the consequent are strictly equivalent (...) (either both necessary or both impossible). The two conditionals share a number of properties, among them Transitivity, Contraposition, Aristotle’s Thesis, Weak Boethius’ Thesis and Aristotle’s Second Thesis. They also share some restricted principles such as Possibilistic Monotonicity, Possibilistic Simplification and Possibilistic Right Weakening. They differ in relation to Identity, which is validated by consequential implication, while the implicative conditional only validates the restricted principle of Possibilistic Identity. The relations between the two conditionals are represented by two Aristotelian cubes of opposition, one involving the contrariety between If A, then B and If A, then ¬B, according to Weak Boethius’ Thesis, and the other the contrariety between If A, then B and If ¬A, then B, according to Aristotle’s Second Thesis. We also explore the relations between the two logical conditionals and natural language conditionals, emphasizing the dependence of the latter on the context, and the need to distinguish natural language conditionals which may be viewed as consequential or implicative, on one side, and concessive and some other types of conditionals, on the other. (shrink)

Libet's (2000) arguments in defense of his interpretation of his experimental results are insufficient. The claims of my critical review (Gomes, 2008) do not suffer with his new statements.

The free will problem is defined and three solutions are discussed: no-freedom theory, libertarianism, and compatibilism. Strict determinism is often assumed in arguing for libertarianism or no-freedom theory. It assumes that the history of the universe is fixed, but modern physics admits a certain degree of randomness in the determination of events. However, this is not enough for a compatibilist position—which is favored here—since freedom is not randomness. It is the I that chooses what to do. It is argued that (...) the core of the free will problem is what this I is. A materialist view is favored: The I is an activity of the brain. In addition to absence of external and internal compulsion, freedom involves absence of causal sufficiency of influences acting on the I. A more elaborate compatibilist view is proposed, according to which causal determination is complete when we add events occurring in the I (of which the subject is not conscious). Contrary to what several authors have argued, the onset of the readiness potential before the decision to act is no problem here. The experience of agency is incomplete and fallible, rather than illusory. Some consequences of different views about freedom for the ascription of responsibility are discussed. (shrink)

Music reduces pain in fibromyalgia (FM), a chronic pain disease, but the functional neural correlates of music-induced analgesia (MIA) are still largely unknown. We recruited FM patients ( n = 22) who listened to their preferred relaxing music and an auditory control (pink noise) for 5 min without external noise from fMRI image acquisition. Resting state fMRI was then acquired before and after the music and control conditions. A significant increase in the amplitude of low frequency fluctuations of the BOLD (...) signal was evident in the left angular gyrus (lAnG) after listening to music, which in turn, correlated to the analgesia reports. The post-hoc seed-based functional connectivity analysis of the lAnG showed found higher connectivity after listening to music with right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (rdlPFC), the left caudate (lCau), and decreased connectivity with right anterior cingulate cortex (rACC), right supplementary motor area (rSMA), precuneus and right precentral gyrus (rPreG). Pain intensity (PI) analgesia was correlated ( r = 0.61) to the connectivity of the lAnG with the rPreG. Our results show that MIA in FM is related to top-down regulation of the pain modulatory network by the default mode network (DMN). (shrink)

An extended examination of Libet's works led to a comprehensive reinterpretation of his results. According to this reinterpretation, the Minimum Train Duration of electrical brain stimulation should be considered as the time needed to create a brain stimulus efficient for producing conscious sensation and not as a basis for inferring the latency for conscious sensation of peripheral origin. Latency for conscious sensation with brain stimulation may occurafterthe Minimum Train Duration. Backward masking with cortical stimuli suggests a 125-300 ms minimum value (...) for the latency for conscious sensation of threshold skin stimuli. Backward enhancement is not suitable for inferring this latency. For determining temporal relations between stimuli that correspond to subjects' reports, theendof cerebral Minimum Train Duration should be used as reference, rather than its onset. Results of coupling peripheral and cortical stimuli are explained by a latency after the cortical Minimum Train Duration, having roughly the same duration as the latency for supraliminal skin stimuli. Results of coupling peripheral stimuli and stimuli to medial lemniscus (LM) are explained by a shorter LM latency and/or a longer peripheral latency. This interpretation suggests a 230 ms minimum value for the latency for conscious sensation of somatosensory near-threshold stimuli. The backward referral hypothesis, as formulated by Libet, should not be retained. Long readiness potentials preceding spontaneous conscious or nonconscious movements suggest that both kinds of movement are nonconsciously initiated. The validity of Libet's measures of W and M moments (Libet et al., 1983a) is questionable due to problems involving latencies, training, and introspective distinction of W and M. Veto of intended actions may be initially nonconscious but dependent on conscious awareness. (shrink)

O presente ensaio se empenha em problematizar elementos contidos nos conceitos de illness e disease proposto pelo Dr. Arthur Kleinman ; especificamente no capítulo II do seu livro “The illness narratives: surfering, healing and the human condition. Nesta obra Kleinman vai dissecar o fenômeno da enfermidade e suas aflições tendo reflexos nas reações psicológicas e sociais. Ou seja, a disease tendo desdobramento na illness. A questão fundamental a que esse ensaio propõe é pensar uma inversão e refletir se illness altera (...) disease? Minha proposta é adentrar neste caminho pela via das reações emocionais e homeostasia. (shrink)

This paper compares Heidegger’s “dasein-centric” existential hermeneutic to Levinas’s primacy of the Other and the importance the latter places on the ethical relationship. Invoking the concepts of totality and infinity, the paper discusses the ways in which one encounters the Other and how signification arises from the ethical relationship. This is followed by a discussion of how Levinas’s ethics might influence existential phenomenological research methodology, pointing to the ethical demands described by Levinas as seeming to have priority over the praxis (...) of research insofar as the Other calls us beyond the methodological framework. Finally, the paper considers the extent to which the ethical demands of Levinas’s phenomenology are met by the special place of the research participant and the attitude of empathic presence prescribed within the Heideggerian framework. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology, Volume 10, Edition 2, October 2010: 11-22. (shrink)

Nature connectedness is determined by the representation individuals have about themselves within nature. This concept is often studied in relation to the direct contact individuals have with natural environment, which according to some studies have demonstrated to generate positive effects by fostering a feeling of connecting and bonding with nature, as well as improving their wellbeing. The main focus of this study was to calculate and assess the relation between Nature Connectedness and wellbeing of participants. The methodological approach of this (...) research reaches quantitative data comparing results obtained from both samples, as well as correlations between the variables. The sample for this study was composed by two groups of university students. Both contrast group and experience group filled the questionnaire in two separate moments and in different environments. First data collection moment for both groups was held inside a university classroom. A second moment of data collection was carried out after a month from the first application, having the contrast group answer the questionnaire on a classroom again whilst the experience group responded it during an excursion to Isla Del Tiburon in Northwestern Mexico after performing some recreational activities being totally immersed in a local desertic environment. Questionnaire was composed by a 6 point Likert type scale measuring Nature Connectedness through concepts such as Nature relatedness and Love and care for the natural, as well as Subjective and Psychological Wellbeing of participants. Results show that both wellbeing and Nature Connectedness are positively influenced by performing activities out in the natural environment. This work was also conducted in response to the need to understand the full extent of Contact and Connectedness to nature, carrying out an exploratory study in desertic settings when much of the early work centers around the study of these variables in green nature environments. (shrink)