This research aims to identify the ethical issues perceived by intensive care nurses in their everyday practice. It also aims to understand why these situations were considered an ethical issue and what interventions/strategies have been or are expected to be developed so as to minimize them. Data were collected using a semi-structured interview with 15 nurses working at polyvalent intensive care units in 4 Portuguese hospitals, who were selected by the homogenization of multiple samples. The qualitative content analysis identified end-of-life (...) decisions, privacy, interaction, team work, and health-care access as emerging ethical issues. Personal, team, and institutional aspects emerge as reasons behind the experience of these issues. Personal and team resources are used in and for solving these issues. Moral development and training are the most significant strategies. (shrink)

Being incoherent is often viewed as a paradigm kind of irrationality. Numerous authors attempt to explain the distinct-seeming failure of incoherence by positing a set of requirements of structural rationality. I argue that the notion of coherence that structural requirements are meant to capture is very slippery, and that intuitive judgments – in particular, a charge of a distinct, blatant kind of irrationality – are very imperfectly correlated with respecting the canon of structural requirements. I outline an alternative strategy for (...) explaining our patterns of normative disapproval, one appealing to feasible dispositions to conform to substantive, non-structural norms. A wide range of paradigmatic cases of incoherence, I will argue, involve manifesting problematic dispositions, dispositions that manifest across a range of cases as blatant-seeming normative failures. (shrink)

What requirements must deflationary formal theories of truth satisfy? This chapter argues against the widely accepted view that compositional and Tarskian theories of truth are substantial or otherwise unacceptable to deflationists. First, two purposes that a formal truth theory can serve are distinguished: one descriptive, the other logical (i.e., to characterise the correctness of inferences involving ‘true’). The chapter argues that the most compelling arguments for the incompatibility of compositional and Tarskian theories concern descriptive theories only. -/- Second, two requirements (...) that any deflationist truth theory intended to serve a logical purpose must satisfy are put forward. These requirements, it is argued, suggest that (i) many well-known compositional and Tarskian theories are acceptable from a deflationist standpoint (including CT); (ii) certain other popular theories of truth (including KF and FS) are not similarly acceptable; (iii) there are no conclusive reasons to impose a conservativeness requirement on deflationary theories of truth. (shrink)

Within the philosophical discussion between Idealism and Romanticism that took place in Germany toward 1800, they were formed the basic directives that will guide all (critical or apologetical) later exposition about the subjectivity. The Idealism, represented by Fichte, Schelling and Hegel (its ..

Primero de todo y antes de abordar el tema para someterlo a vuestra consideración tendría que pedir disculpas. Disculpas porque todo lo que voy a exponer no puede ser sino una aproximación de lo que pudo haber sucedido y lo es por varias razones. Primera, porque actualmente los médicos no nos atrevemos a dar ningún diagnóstico sin que exista el aval de una prueba radiológica o de laboratorio que, de manera concluyente, demuestre el origen del proceso patológico. Por ejemplo, en (...) el caso de una enfermedad infecciosa precisamos de un cultivo de un líquido orgánico que certifique el agente causal de la misma o cuando estamos delante de un tumor canceroso, de una biopsia de tejido que testifique su presencia (a .. (shrink)

We report the results of an exploratory study that examines the judgments of climate scientists, climate policy experts, astrophysicists, and non-experts (N = 3367) about the factors that contribute to the creation and persistence of disagreement within climate science and astrophysics and about how one should respond to expert disagreement. We found that, as compared to non-experts, climate experts believe that within climate science (i) there is less disagreement about climate change, (ii) methodological factors play less of a role in (...) generating disagreements, (iii) fewer personal or institutional biases influence climate research, and (iv) there is more agreement about which methods should be used to examine relevant phenomena we also observed that the uniquely American political context predicted experts’ judgments about some of these factors. We also found that, in regard to disagreements concerning cosmic ray physics, and commensurate with the greater inherent uncertainty and data lacunae in their field, astrophysicists working on cosmic rays were generally more willing to acknowledge expert disagreement, more open to the idea that a set of data can have multiple valid interpretations, and generally less quick to dismiss someone articulating a non-standard view as non-expert, than climate scientists were in regard to climate science. (shrink)

Based on a Lived Experience Description written by an experienced nurse in Denmark, this article offers an ontological and existential‐phenomenological exploration of aesthetic dimensions of excellence in nursing. In the research of Patricia Benner and colleagues, excellence in nursing is described as a matter of intuitive pattern recognition based on clinical experience and narrative understanding. In this article, and based on phenomenological reflections and philosophical inspirations from the Danish philosopher Dorthe Jørgensen and the French philosopher Maurice Merleau‐Ponty, I suggest an (...) extended understanding of excellence in nursing, and I argue that the work and research of Benner seem to overlook ontological and aesthetic aspects of excellence in nursing. This article argues that aesthetic aspects of excellence in nursing can be comprehended as moments where nurses sense a surplus of meaning and moments where the nurse and the patient share and are subjected to communal and unfolding life phenomena. Aesthetic dimensions of being in nursing can, from an ontological approach, best be described as similar to the way human beings listen to a piece of music or to how artists try to give a voice to the world: as a resonant way of being and becoming within the moment. (shrink)

We can say that Picasso’s images speak to us, and, as writing, speak to us from that space in which any text – far from being reduced to a single sense – “disseminates” its “truths”. Using the figure and the story of the Minotaur, Picasso devoted himself to one of the great themes of his pictorial work. The word “labyrinth” connotes, to the European mind, Greece, Knossos, Dedalus, Ariadne and the Minotaur. However, the Greek formula already represents a mythic and (...) poetic outcome thoroughly developed from an imagery forged in the remotest eras of our evolution. The relationship between the image, the spiral, and the word, labyrinth is also linked to the perception of a drilled earth, excavated, with numberless tortuous tunnels which, in our imagination, provoke concern because they lead to the world of the inferi, the unknown depths of the realms of the dead. Juan Larrea, a little-known essayist in the sphere of philosophical studies, although, from the outset of international renown for Picasso’s work, he gives what is perhaps the best interpretation of Guernica and consequently also sheds much light on the engravings immediately preceding the execution of this painting, the Minotauromachy among them. The artist is not a prophet. He is not foreseeing what the future holds for humanity, but he does possess a heightened sensitivity that drives him to minutely scrutinise the conditions of the time that he has had to live, and he has a transforming eye for the symbols that constitute the deepest threads in the fabric of his culture. (shrink)

This research aims to identify the ethical issues perceived by intensive care nurses in their everyday practice. It also aims to understand why these situations were considered an ethical issue and what interventions/strategies have been or are expected to be developed so as to minimize them. Data were collected using a semi-structured interview with 15 nurses working at polyvalent intensive care units in 4 Portuguese hospitals, who were selected by the homogenization of multiple samples. The qualitative content analysis identified end-of-life (...) decisions, privacy, interaction, team work, and health-care access as emerging ethical issues. Personal, team, and institutional aspects emerge as reasons behind the experience of these issues. Personal and team resources are used in and for solving these issues. Moral development and training are the most significant strategies. (shrink)

The paper discusses some formal difficulties concerning the theory of universals of Trope-Only ontologies, from which the formal theory of predication advanced by Trope-Only theorists seems to be irremediably affected. It is impossible to lay out a successful defense of a Trope-Only theory without Russellian types, but such types are ontologically inconsistent with tropes’ nominalism. Historically, Tropists’ first way to avoid the problem is appealing to the supervenience claim, which however fails on its terms and, thus, fails as a ground (...) for a solution to the higher-order or ‘type’ problem. A later solution involves the invariance of primitive equivalence relations in order to make universals ontologically innocuous. However, I argue that this latter solution fails to meet the requirements imposed on an ontologically unbiased nominalist attitude. So, this paper discusses how Trope-Only theories alter standard formal moves in Nominalism, and also is interested in clarifying further the formal assumptions for these problems. (shrink)

A characterization of epistemic rationality, or epistemic justification, is typically taken to require a process of conceptual clarification, and is seen as comprising the core of a theory of (epistemic) rationality. I propose to explicate the concept of rationality. -/- It is essential, I argue, that the normativity of rationality, and the purpose, or goal, for which the particular theory of rationality is being proposed, is taken into account when explicating the concept of rationality. My position thus amounts to an (...) instrumentalist position about theories of epistemic rationality. Since there are different purposes, or goals, for which theories of rationality are proposed, the method of explication leaves room for different characterizations of rationality. I focus on two such (kinds of) purposes: first, the purpose of guiding the formation (or maintenance) of doxastic states and, second, the purpose of assessing (the formation or maintenance of) doxastic states. I conclude by outlining a pluralistic picture concerning rationality. (shrink)

This essay is based on remarks I gave as a member of a diversity panel at the 59th Annual Conference of the Florida Philosophical Association. The purpose of the essay is simple and somewhat informal: provide one way to prompt a philosophical discussion about the problem of the lack of diversity in the profession.

In the terms of ancient epistemology, Pyrrho is a dogmatist, not a skeptic, simply on account of putting forward a metaphysical theory. His most contested claim is that things are indifferent, unmeasured, and indeterminate—or, on a competing reconstruction, that things are indifferentiable, unmeasurable, and indeterminable. This paper argues that Pyrrho’s position, which I call Pyrrhonian Indeterminacy, belongs to a rich tradition of revisionist metaphysics that includes ancient atomism, flux metaphysics, Plato’s analysis of becoming, and today’s discussions of indeterminacy and vagueness. (...) This tradition, my argument continues, makes room for a kind of metaphysics that proceeds in epistemological terms. Pyrrho’s indeterminacy claim says that things are indeterminate insofar as they do not have features by reference to which we can determine them to be such-and-such. We should not waver or be inclined to see things one way or another—we should see things, and describe them, as “no more this than that.”. (shrink)

As aesthetic appreciators of the environment, we often encounter cases where our environmental commitments and our aesthetic responses do not seem to match. Some highly altered or contaminated environments may occasion powerful and insightful aesthetic experiences. In this article, I discuss some arguments that have been offered in favor of the view that this mismatch is not possible when we appreciate a particular environment with full awareness of its damaged or altered condition. I show that these arguments are not conclusive (...) and that there is room for valuable experiences of damaged or highly altered environments. Our knowledge of the damaged condition of an environment, while perceptually significant, does not necessarily make the resulting aesthetic experience to be negative. Finally, I show that these cases do not necessarily diminish the role that aesthetics can play in shaping our environmental sensibility and commitments. (shrink)

En un momento de gran efervescencia feminista, se entremezclan las reclamaciones políticas del movimiento con las peligrosas reapropiaciones que de sus núcleos de lucha hace el neoliberalismo. Las tensiones que se presentan en este contexto son muchas y variadas, algunas evidentes y otras invisibles, pero todas contribuyen a la torsión actual del feminismo. En el presente artículo se abordarán algunas de estas tensiones que nacen en la intersección entre feminismo y neoliberalismo: desde la publicidad como posible herramienta feminista hasta los (...) discursos sobre el emprendimiento y el empleo, pasando por el diseño de políticas públicas, y la mercantilización de los cuerpos femeninos. También se abordarán algunas de las posibles rearticulaciones y respuestas políticas feministas ante esta realidad, mostrando la complejidad de los retos a los que tienen que hacer frente los feminismos hoy.In times of great feminist effervescence, the political claims of the movement are intermingled with the dangerous reappropriations that neoliberalism makes of its struggle nuclei. The tensions that appear in this context are many and varied, some obvious and some invisible, but all of them contribute to the torsion of feminism. This article will address some of the tensions that arise from the intersection between feminism and neoliberalism: from advertising as a possible feminist tool, to speeches on entrepreneurship and employment, through the design of public policies, and the commodification of female bodies. Some of the possible re-articulations and feminist political responses to this reality will be addressed, showing the great complexity of the challenges that feminisms face today. (shrink)

Studies investigating the COVID-19 pandemic from a psychological point of view have mostly focused on psychological distress. This study adopts the framework of existential positive psychology, a second wave of positive psychology that emphasizes the importance of effective coping with the negative aspects of living in order to achieve greater wellbeing. Trait emotional intelligence (trait EI) can be crucial in this context as it refers to emotion-related personality dispositions concerning the understanding and regulation of one’s emotions and those of others. (...) The present study investigated the relationship between trait EI and both wellbeing and psychological distress (i.e., depression, anxiety, and stress), while exploring the mediating role of meaning-centered coping (proactive transformative strategies based on meaning in life) and maladaptive coping (i.e., behavioral disengagement and self-blame) during the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic. A sample of 326 Lebanese adults completed measures of trait EI, wellbeing, psychological distress, coping, and meaning-centered coping. Results showed a strong positive correlation between trait EI and meaning-centered coping. Trait EI also correlated positively with wellbeing and negatively with psychological distress. Structural equation modeling showed that meaning-centered coping partially mediated the relationship between trait EI and wellbeing. Maladaptive coping fully mediated the relationship between trait EI and psychological distress. Findings indicate that trait EI is positively related to dealing with a stressful situation such as the pandemic in positive ways at both the cognitive level, by reformulating the situation to see something valuable in it, and behavioral level, by being proactive about it. Trait EI was positively linked to seeing the situation as an opportunity for personal growth, finding personal meaning in this situation, maintaining an attitude of hope and courage, and acting more responsibly with one’s self and others during the current crisis. In turn, this coping formula was related to lower psychological distress and improved mental health. These results are consistent with the existential positive psychology framework and can inform implementation programs and policies aiming at raising awareness and promoting healthy and successful coping during the pandemic. (shrink)

Most critics of our contemporary meritocratic practices and institutions believe their arguments speak to the defects of the ideal of meritocracy itself. I argue that this is a misguided generalization because meritocracy can take many forms depending on the conception of the good and broader theory of justice to which the distributive principle of merit it is attached. To illustrate, I contrast two radically different forms of meritocracy – a telic or end-oriented model based on Plato’s Kallipolis and a procedural (...) model inherent in our free market of careers open to talents. Far from being a unified ideal, meritocracy is a spectrum of social and political arrangements, ranging between the telic and the procedural poles. Thus, identifying ‘merit’ and ‘meritocracy’ as the main sources of injustice in our contemporary societies further conceals the background conditions and underlying commitments that should be subject to our critical scrutiny. (shrink)

Labour, for capitalist critique, is not just slavery analogised; it is slavery materialised and expanded. Across the Marxist terrain, class struggle is presupposed by the struggle not to be a slave: the struggle of ‘the worker’ combats a slavery simultaneously more complex, because it is more mediated, and implicitly more emancipatory, because it materialises what has been called ‘objective possibility’. In this article, I track symptoms of the sublation of slavery by labour in the telling of ‘new labour history’ and (...) counter with ‘objective impossibility’ as a more open and efficacious diagnostic for the slave’s political position. Though the sentences of United States labour history are alive with promises of solidarity, the field also remains an unstable landmine of antagonism, death, failure, limit. I argue that this labour history, despite its gestures towards the problem ‘race’, is grammatically caught in a web of desires that Sylvia Wynter names ‘the hegemony of the labour conceptual frame (i.e., the frame of the struggle against capitalism)’. The labour conceptual frame is hegemonic because the relation between race and class already presupposes a latent Marxist orientation to subjects, objects, consciousness, and history that renders perfect the slave’s objective impossibility and culminates, at the nexus of race and class, in an uncritical conversion of labour’s objective possibility into pure, unmediated possibility. This article tracks how the black worker remains stubbornly impossible throughout this theoretical convergence, bending the apparatus of labour history, the purchase of Marxist theory, and the salience of class-first politics through the excess of blackness to labour. (shrink)

In this thesis I defend and pursue that line about the foundations of probability theory which has come to be known as "the logicist view about probability", and, in particular, the shape which it took in Carnap's Inductive Logic. ;Most philosophers who now deal with probability theory claim that Carnap's program of Inductive Logic has failed. The main aim of my thesis is to show that this judgment is based on a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature and the aim of (...) inductive logic. To that end, I follow, in chapter 1, the events in the history of probability, logic and mathematics which led to choosing certain requirements as the requirements which any theory about the foundations of probability must fulfill in order to be acceptable. ;In chapter 2 I explain how Carnap's inductive logic fulfills those requirements and how the method it uses to give foundations to probability theory can also be used to solve another major problem about probability, namely, the problem of statistical inference. ;Chapter 3 shows how the ideas explained in chapter 2 were developed, formally, by Carnap, and how Carnap's program can be continued in a particular case, that of reasoning by analogy. ;Finally, in chapter 4, I attempt to show that subjectivism about probability theory, the rival theory to Carnap's logicism, does not succeed in meeting the most basic requirement for the acceptability of any theory about the foundations of probability. (shrink)

Artykuł jest próbą analizy czterech wybranych powieści młodzieżowych powstałych w ostatnich dwóch dekadach, których akcja rozgrywa się w Łodzi. Poddany analizie zbiór tworzą tytuły: _Syn złodziejki_ Grażyny Bąkiewicz oraz _Piąta z kwartetu, Możesz wybrać kogo chcesz pożreć_ i _The Restaurant Day_ Doroty Combrzyńskiej-Nogali. Oprócz usytuowania utworów na tle dotychczasowej prozy dla młodego czytelnika związanej fabularnie z Łodzią, omówiono cztery zagadnienia współtworzące literacki obraz miasta. Po pierwsze, zwrócono uwagę na konkretyzację łódzkich realiów i funkcje motywu wędrówek bohaterów ulicami Łodzi. Po drugie, (...) rozważono sposób pokazania stosunków rodzinnych i zjawisko odwrócenia ról, zestawiając je z tezami historyków na temat sytuacji dzieci łódzkich w przeszłości. Po trzecie, wskazano na ciekawą i powracającą wizję miasta jako przestrzeni ustrukturyzowanej wielowarstwowo. Na koniec wykorzystano pojęcie palimpsestu, odnosząc je do obrazu Łodzi funkcjonującej równolegle w sferze realnej i w sferze pamięci. Naświetlone tu sposoby tekstualizacji Łodzi prowadzą do wniosku, że literatura młodzieżowa, choć nie jest wolna od stereotypowego obrazu miasta niechcianego, szaro-buro-przestępczego, proponuje także inną jego koncepcję – miasta „swojego”, „mocnego”, z którym łączą bohaterów ważne, choć czasem trudne więzi i którego nie chcą opuszczać. (shrink)

Using a design-based research approach, we studied ways to advance opportunities for children and families to engage in engineering design practices in an informal educational setting. 213 families with 5–11-year-old children were observed as they visited a tinkering exhibit at a children’s museum during one of three iterations of a program posing an engineering design challenge. Children’s narrative reflections about their experience were recorded immediately after tinkering. Across iterations of the program, changes to the exhibit design and facilitation provided by (...) museum staff corresponded to increased families’ engagement in key engineering practices. In the latter two cycles of the program, families engaged in the most testing, and in turn, redesigning. Further, in the latter cycles, the more children engaged in testing and retesting during tinkering, the more their narratives contained engineering-related content. The results advance understanding and the evidence base for educational practices that can promote engineering learning opportunities for children. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 121.4 (2000) 637-641 [Access article in PDF] IRAD MALKIN. The Returns of Odysseus: Colonization and Ethnicity. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998. xiii + 331 pp. 6 maps. Cloth, $45, £35. The latest book from the pen of Irad Malkin is a substantial, creative contribution to the discourse in classical studies on ethnicity and ethnic identity. Malkin rejects the now familiar binary (...) opposition between Greek and Other and argues instead for "the intricate, sometimes hybrid, mutually reflecting world of exploration, contacts, colonization, and coexistence involving various Greek and native populations" (xi). Readers should be aware, however, that myth and other written sources are the means by which "group identity and ethnicity" are principally traced.The basic premise of the book appears in the brief preface: "myths, especially... Greek myths of the returns of Odysseus and other heroes, were used to mediate encounters and conceptualize ethnicity and group identity" with the inhabitants of Albania, Apulia, and southern Italy (xi). A lengthy introduction serves as a précis of the entire work. Malkin agrees that myth is a cultural representation productive of meaning, one which actively influenced history (5). At the outset, a distinction is drawn between nostoi, the narratives of heroes returning from Troy, and Nostoi, those who returned. The most important figure early on is Odysseus, an exceptional Nostos, fit for the protocolonial more than the colonial experience. Later, Greeks who colonized in the Near West (Sicily is left to the side for the most part), turned to other Nostoi "for site orientation and articulations of ethnicities, genealogies, and identities and often of cult."Malkin further proposes that non-Greeks used these myths in their own ways and perhaps in turn affected Greek views of nostoi. For this Malkin calls upon a notion of "the middle ground" (as formulated in the very stimulating book of that title by Richard White), a space both physical and cultural where each side in colonial encounters acts according to the assumed perceptions of the other to create a world comprehensible to both. In effect, Malkin suggests that the nostoi and their contexts serve as Middle Ground for the Greek colonial experience. That non-Greek populations were regarded less as Others, barbaroi, and more as xenoi seems hard to square with colonial encounters which were far from peaceful, however, and readers might keep in mind that in White's Great Lakes "middle ground" the center did not hold: the accommodation failed by the early nineteenth century.The work unfolds over eight chapters and an appendix which covers various "Homeric issues." This final section might usefully have been incorporated [End Page 637] into the introduction or first chapter; there is also a sometimes confusing amount of redundancy between sections. Chapter 1 extends the introduction; in the very first sentences Malkin sets out an explicit assumption: "that the Greeks had the nostoi in their heads" (33) in the ninth century B.C.E. or even earlier. Here Malkin lays out his views on the relationships between stories (i.e., the extant epics to other stories known from the Cycle), and of images in art from the eighth and seventh centuries to stories. Malkin insists that stories which are often considered to be later than Homer are in fact only possible alternatives. The book nearly implies that the nostoi were actually created in the ninth (or tenth) century, as an active and history-making myth. Not all readers will agree with Malkin's conclusions, but all will have to confront what kind of mythology the Greeks had before Homer and before early figurative art.Chapter 2 sets the historical stage by outlining sailing and settlement in "the Sea of Returns," which refers both to an idea and the Ionian and Adriatic Seas. Malkin strongly criticizes the work of other scholars which he regards as insufficiently historically specific, especially that of Carol Dougherty, whose approach, as he also acknowledges, is complementary to his own (readers may be interested in her forthcoming The Raft of Odysseus: The Ethnographic Imagination of Archaic Greece, from Oxford). Malkin'... (shrink)

This paper describes intellectual property legislation in the European Union, the US and the Draft Treaty on the legal protection of unoriginal databases, usually available in the Internet. I argue that this type of legislation, if enforced upon developing countries and countries in transition through international ‘agreements’, could in effect deprive them of their own information commons, their own public domain. With examples from China, India, Africa and Iceland, I argue that this deprivation in the case of developing countries is, (...) morally, equal to a virtual war against them by the West, wholly unjustified and dangerous-an example of virtual imperialism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Creativity Belongs to the Person, not to DiseaseJuan J. López-Ibor Jr. (bio) and María-Inés López-Ibor (bio)Keywordscreativity, patho-biography, Saint Teresa, visionsIn the paper, “From the Visions of Saint Teresa of Jesus to the Voices of Schizophrenia,” Cangas, Sass, and Pérez-Álvarez (2008) take an original approach to patho-biography that is very welcome.The temptation to designate historical individuals or characters of fiction as suffering from mental disease has always produced disagreeable feelings (...) in me. This sort of abuse of psychiatry and of the people in question is parallel to the abuse by the media or lay citizens when they describe, say, an especially violent murderer as a schizophrenic—forgetting that the vast majority of people with schizophrenia are not in the least violent. Having read Santa Teresa’s writings during my adolescence, well before I even considered entering medicine, I reacted to comments about her alleged psychiatric illnesses with uneasiness, to put it mildly. The Santa Teresa of La Vida de la Santa Madre Teresa de Jesús (her autobiography), of the Camino de Perfección, and of the El Castillo Interior was surely not a mental patient, it seemed to me. The same would apply to San Juan de La Cruz, Jean D’Arc, Don Quijote, Sancho Panza, Edipus, and Clitemnestra, to mention a few. Even van Gogh’s paintings did not seem to me the productions of a patient with schizophrenia or epilepsy. Of course all of them may have suffered, at certain periods of life, symptoms attributable to a mental disorder, but their creativity rested elsewhere, and was often manifest during healthy periods of their lives. After years spent fighting the stigma of mental diseases, and after organizing several exhibitions of works of art of people with mental diseases, we came to the conclusion that creativity and singularity belong to the person, not to the illness. Some of the diseases of these individuals may have being accidents (van Gogh’s hallucinations and psychotic symptoms, for example, were most probably due to intoxications with absinthe, then rich in hallucinogenic alkaloids such as tujone), or, together with other life circumstances, may have had unspecific influences on the person’s condition. In contrast with many other psychiatric disorders that are represented in ancient Greek and Roman literature, there are no descriptions of individuals with schizophrenia in the Greek and Roman literature dating from the fifth century bc to the beginning of the second century Ad (Evans et al. 2003), and several authors have speculated that schizophrenia did not exist before the eighteenth century (Ellard 1987).Caution is important when dealing with mental health and religious issues in contrast with creativity. The creativity of people suffering from bipolar disorders is well recognized (Jamison 1993) and [End Page 277] the same applies to alcohol and drug intoxication. Tellenbach (1986) has also written on the creativity of depressed persons, although he refers more to the disposition of mood (Schwermut) than to clinical depression as such. The link between melancholia and genius put forward by Aristotle has often been misinterpreted. The philosopher was considering the melancholic temperament and not the melancholic illness as we would understand it today. Of the four temperaments, it is in his view only the melancholic that is gifted with creativity. The sanguine person seeks the immediate pleasures of life, the choleric one considers himself powerful and dedicates himself to manifesting this power, and the phlegmatic individual is disconnected from life and seeks to live without effort or pleasure. The melancholic temperament leads to creativity because of the predominance of doubt, reflection, and dissatisfaction with the miseries of life.Freud’s notion of religiosity as a collective obsessive neurosis is totally mistaken, in my view. The three main themes of obsessions are cleanliness, order, and guilt. In none of these cases is the theme the goal of the action; rather, it is a strategy to contain anxiety. As a consequence, patients with obsessions and compulsions about dirt and cleanliness tend to be dirty themselves, because the real purpose of their compulsions is not in fact to be clean but rather to satisfy a ritual. When order... (shrink)

The purpose of the dissertation is to present a philosophical reading of Balthasar's teaching on the polarity of expression and form in beauty. ;Chapter I, "Expression," presents the concept of expression in the context of the aesthetic doctrine of Wahrheit. It confronts Balthasar's teaching about expression with an alternate view. On the basis of the clarification achieved in this confrontation, the chapter turns to some major texts from Herrlichkeit in which Balthasar unfolds the structure of expression. ;Chapter II, "Form," presents (...) Balthasar's concept of form and develops it by a presentation of some historical sources. The results of the presentation are then summarized in an exposition of some of the main metaphors used by Balthasar to describe form. ;Chapter III, "Beauty," turns to Balthasar's thesis that beauty implies the polarity of expression and form. It gives an exposition of the central metaphor of light and compares Balthasar's teaching with that of Dionysius the Areopagite, St. Thomas, and St. Bonaventure. The chapter ends with an introduction to two major developments which converge in the doctrine of participation. ;Chapter IV, "The Expression of Free Interiority in Man," presents Balthasar's analysis of the aesthetic structure of man. The two main questions discussed are how free interiority can be preserved in expression, and whether free interiority necessarily gives rise to a conventional medium of expression. ;Chapter V, "The Expression of God in Creatures," turns to the summit of Balthasar's philosophical aesthetics. It present his teaching on the apprehension of an absolute horizon of free love that lies in the awakening of the human spirit. This teaching is unfolded in a presentation of Balthasar's interpretation of the Thomistic doctrine of participation in existence . The chapter ends by pointing to the center of Balthasar's philosophical aesthetics, developing especially his thesis that the center of the light which appears in beauty remains inchoative and open to a final revelation of God's glory. ;The "Theological Epilogue" of the dissertation presents Balthasar's teaching on the appearing of trinitarian love in the expressive form of Jesus. It describes, thus, the apex of the whole of his aesthetics. (shrink)

Proper names interpreted as rigid designators do not allow us to formulate metalinguistic statements of the form ‘NN might not have been named “NN”’. All we can do is to show what we are trying to say. But we cannot properly formulate such a metalinguistic statement about a rigid name. The rigidity of the name establishes a relationship with its bearer that is much stronger than the contingent relationship that is supposed to exist in the natural languages between the name (...) and its bearer. The sentence is intuitively true as expressed in natural languages, but once we translate it, if possible, into Kripkean formal semantics it is false because once the individual is rigidly named, she cannot have been named otherwise; or even worse, as I suspect, the whole sentence is untranslatable, because in Kripkean formal semantics there is no possible world in which she would not have had the name she rigidly has. This problem in Kripkean semantics could well be termed, as Wittgenstein would say, an ineffability. Kripkean semantics makes the actual contingent property anyone has of bearing a proper name ineffable, notwithstanding it is effable in natural languages. Keywords: rigid names, metalinguistic statements, rigid quoted names, ineffability. (shrink)

ObjectivesPrevious studies found a general increase in prejudice against Chinese people during the first months of the pandemic. The present study aims to consider inter-individual heterogeneity in stability and change regarding prejudice involving Chinese people during the pandemic. The first objective is to identify and describe different trajectories of prejudice over a seven-month period during the pandemic. The second and third objectives are to test the association between trajectory group membership and antecedent variables such as: socio-demographic factors (i.e., age, gender, (...) political affiliation) and two psychological mechanisms, namely economic threat and global citizenship identification.MethodsA representative Canadian sample (N = 3,617) according to age, gender and province of residence, was recruited for a 10-wave survey starting from April 2020 to December 2020. First, a group-based modeling approach was used to identify trajectories of prejudice. Second, a multinomial logistic regression model was used to test associations between membership in trajectories and antecedents.ResultsFour trajectories were identified. The first three trajectories have a low (71.4% of the sample), high (18.5%) or very high (5.3%) level of prejudiceagainstChinese people which is relatively stable over time. The fourth trajectory (4.9%) reports low levels of prejudicein favorof Chinese people which become more positive throughout 2020. Regarding socio-demographic factors: gender is not associated with trajectory group membership, younger people are more likely to follow the trajectory in favor of Chinese people and conservatives are more likely to follow the highest trajectories against Chinese people. Regarding some psychological mechanisms: personal but not collective economic threat is associated with the trajectory in favor of Chinese people. Finally, the highest levels of prejudice are found when the strategy of identification is more local rather than global.ConclusionThe present study shows that Canadians differ in terms of both their level and change in prejudice against Chinese people throughout the pandemic with some socio-demographic groups being more likely than others to be associated with prejudice. The results also suggest that a promising way to tackle the major social issue of prejudice is to highlight a vision of the world where individuals are all “global citizens” facing the same challenge. (shrink)

BackgroundThe highly sensitive nature of genomic and associated clinical data, coupled with the consent-related vulnerabilities of children together accentuate ethical, legal and social issues (ELSI) concerning data sharing. The Key Implications of Data Sharing (KIDS) framework was therefore developed to address a need for institutional guidance on genomic data governance but has yet to be validated among data sharing practitioners in practice settings. This study qualitatively explored areas of consensus and dissensus of the KIDS Framework from the perspectives of Canadian (...) clinician-scientists, genomic researchers, IRB members, and pediatric ethicists.MethodsTwelve panelists participated in a three-round online policy Delphi to determine the desirability, feasibility, relative importance and confidence of twelve individual statements of the KIDS Framework. Mean and IQR were calculated from panelists’ ratings to determine the strength of consensus and polarity. Qualitative content analysis of panelists’ written responses was used to assess degree of support. Statements were validated when their combined ratings and qualitative rationales indicated high-moderate consensus (at least 70% agreement across two contiguous categories), low to no polarity (IQR at least 1.0) and strong support.ResultsNine original, and one new statement reached consensus. These statements outlined essential elements of the informed consent process, including a realistic evaluation of benefits and risks and assurance of future ethics oversight for secondary data use. Discrepant views on appropriate protections for anonymized and coded i.e. de-identified genomic data were primary sources of dissensus.ConclusionsThe validated statements provide institutions with empirically supported best practices for sharing genomic and associated clinical data involving children from the perspectives of key stakeholders. Concerted efforts to quantify informational risks that can be conveyed to patients and families are further needed to align data sharing policy with stakeholder priorities. (shrink)

In this article I think over the capacity of Raimond Llull to imagine, that allows him to introduce characters and situations in his narratives without obstacles. After some general considerations, I pay attention to the development of the imaginative capacity of Lulio in his work «Libro del amigo y del Amado», through the analysis of some images of importance. The reader of this work from Llull may note that his main character, the friend, maintains the love in a swarm of (...) sensations, in a continuous movement between the sensitive and the raciocinative, through the imaginative faculty. The mystic of Llull is dynamic, with a certain degree of «masochism». (shrink)

The aim of my contribution is to analyse the role that common sense has played in Umberto Eco’s work. After making clear the distinction between good sense and common sense, and highlighting a number of differences with the Scottish philosophy of common sense, I will consider the uses and functions that common sense assumes in Eco’s philosophy: namely, a phenomenological function, a regulatory function and a communicative function. I will demonstrate how the characterisation of common sense in Eco emphasises the (...) importance of the historical dimension of Sens, the importance of the public and social dimension of semiosis, and how common sense plays a fundamental, pragmatic role in the disposition to act, whilst revealing the importance of the Peircian lesson and Eco’s consonance with Peirce’s positions. (shrink)

En este artículo interpretamos textos neurálgicos de Husserl y Merleau-Ponty siguiendo la obra de Iribarne, principalmente Fenomenología y Literatura, articulando la diversidad de sus temas en torno a la explicitación de la intersubjetividad trascendental, sobre la cual la filósofa nunca dejó de pensar. Paralelamente a nuestros propios estudios de las relaciones intersubjetivas, la temporalidad vivida, la identidad y la diferenciación, la dialéctica entre la memoria y el olvido, la esperanza y la finitud o el sueño, continuamos pensando estos fenómenos-límite desde (...) la fenomenología genética y generativa, concebida como una investigación retrospectiva que considera esencial para la constitución tanto la relación entre actividad y pasividad como entre el yo y los otros. El estudio de estos fenómenos, relegados generalmente a la literatura, desvelará finalmente el sentido de la reflexión fenomenológica literaria en clave intersubjetiva y repercutirá en una fenomenología de la alteridad.This article interprets crucial texts of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty by following to Iribarne, mainly Phenomenology and Literature, articulating the diversity of its issues around the explication of transcendental intersubjectivity, on which she never stopped thinking. In parallel to our own studies of the inter-relationships between the lived temporality, identity and differentiation, the dialectic between memory and forgetting, hope and finitude or the dream, I continue to think about these phenomena-limit from genetic and generative phenomenology conceived as a retrospective research that considers essential to constitution both the relationship between activity and passivity as between self and other. The study of these phenomena, usually relegated to literature, will reveal the phenomenological meaning of literary reflection as central to intersubjectivity and it will have implications for a phenomenology of alterity. (shrink)

This article offers a comparative exploration of the practices of resistance Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault champion against the structures of modern power their enquiries have the merit to illuminate and contest. After a preliminary examination of their views about the relationship between theory and praxis, I shall pursue two goals: first, I shall illustrate the limitations of Adorno’s negativist portrait of an ethics of resistance and contrast it with Foucault’s more promising notion of resistance as strategic counter-conduct, which in (...) his late ethico-political writings becomes the heart of a distinctive politics of the governed. Second, despite their dissimilarities, I shall argue that their ideas can be brought together to elaborate a ‘compounded’ account of resistance, where Adorno’s politics of suffering figures as the necessary pre-condition for the creative practices of freedom Foucault seeks to encourage. (shrink)

The method of philosophy. Introduction to part I -- Thought experiments -- Reflective equilibrium -- What is philosophy? Introduction to Part II and Part III -- The nature of the philosophical enterprise -- The nature of intuitive judgements -- Experimental philosophy. Empirical inquiries versus armchair investigations -- Against experimental philosophy.

A la secció 25 de la dissertació tercera de La genealogia de la moral, en el context de la recerca de «l’antagonista natural de l’ideal ascètic», es descriu l’antagonisme «Plató contra Homer» com «l’antagonisme autèntic i total». Aquest article emmarca aquest antagonisme en el conjunt de l’obra nietzscheana i, després d’analitzar com es planteja en la República de Plató, fa algunes remarques sobre el paper que interpreta en el pensament de l’últim Nietzsche. El seu propòsit és argumentar que la presa (...) en consideració de la interpretació i l’ús que Nietzsche fa de l’antagonisme «Plató contra Homer» permet obtenir una perspectiva hermenèutica des de la qual es poden contemplar aspectes habitualment desatesos de l’antagonisme decisiu, i no menys total, que té com a camp de batalla les últimes obres nietzscheanes: el «combat contra Plató» del mateix Nietzsche, que coincideix amb el seu combat per l’abandonament de la metafísica i l’autosupressió de la moral. (shrink)