In this paper we develop a view about the disorientation attached to the process of falling out of love and explain its prudential and moral value. We start with a brief background on theories of love and situate our argument within the views concerned with the lovers’ identities. Namely, love changes who we are. In the context of our paper, we explain this common tenet in the philosophy of love as a change in the lovers’ self-concepts through a process of (...) mutual shaping. This, however, is potentially dangerous for people involved in what we call ‘subsuming relationships’, who give up too much autonomy in the process of mutual shaping. We then move on to show how, through the relation between love and the self-concept, we can explain why the process of falling out of love with someone is so disorientating: when one is falling out of love, one loses an important point of reference for self-understanding. While this disorientating process is typically taken to be harmful to the person experiencing it, we will explain how it can also have moral and prudential value. By re-evaluating who we were in the relationship and who we are now, we can escape from oppressive practices in subsuming relationships. We finish by arguing that this gives us reason to be wary of seeking to re-orient ourselves -or others- too quickly after falling out of love. (shrink)

Los textos que se presentan a continuación aúnan a reconocidos estudiosos en el cartesianismo, junto a investigadores más nóveles. Son fruto además de un proyecto de investigación financiado por el Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, [Referencia PID2021-126133NB-100] que lleva por título: Éticas y metafísica de los afectos. Las génesis modernas del presente actual (EMAP). Se ofrecen, por tanto, los estudios que siguen como resultados de este proyecto, que inició su andadura en septiembre de 2022.

People who experience love often experience break-ups as well. However, philosophers of love have paid little attention to the phenomenon. Here, I address that gap by looking at the grieving process which follows unchosen relationship terminations. I ask which one is the loss that, if it were to be recovered, would stop grief or make it unwarranted. Is it the beloved, the reciprocation of love, the relationship, or all of it? By answering this question I not only provide with an (...) insight on the nature of break-ups, but also make a specific claim about the nature of love. I argue that the object that is universally lost in all break-ups is a person with certain intrinsic qualities, who is in a relationship characterised by certain shared activities and recognized as romantic. That means that, at least in romantic terminations, the beloved and the relationship are not independent objects of grief. So, plausibly, they may not independent objects of value in love. Hence, those who state otherwise should face up to this objection coming from the study of break-ups. (shrink)

Empezamos mostrando el papel primordial del teatro en la filosofía de Gabriel Marcel. La necesidad que tiene su pensamiento de partir de situaciones concretas le lleva a convertirse en un autor dramático. En segundo lugar y partiendo de la trama de la obra Le palais de sable y de la evolución de sus personajes, analizaremos las implicaciones destructivas que provoca una falsa fe basada en una cierta concepción idealista de ella. Por último situaremos nuestra mirada en la conciencia creyente para (...) poder acceder al análisis existencial de la fe. (shrink)

En este artículo, Moya analiza el affaire Wikileaks, a la luz de la tesis que Pekka Himanen propone en el libro La ética hacker y el espíritu de la era de la información: los hackers, y sus valores de apertura, cooperación y creatividad, son los verdaderos arquitectos de la nueva sociedad digital.

Love is a universal experience that most people desire. A serious, long-term, and stigmatized illness makes entering and maintaining close relationships difficult, however. Ten persons, who have been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and lived with their illness for between years and decades of their lifetimes, shared their stories. They reported how the illness has influenced their emotional experiences regarding love and their intimate relationship experiences. We present here a qualitative Interpretative Phenomenological analysis (IPA) of their narratives. This analysis has been done (...) with an explicit intention to give voice to the patient’s perspective. The results highlight how illness adjustment and hospitalizations have an alienating effect on relationships through stigmatization and self-stigmatization; how illness creates psychological obstacles to love, such as diminished trust toward oneself and others; and how long-term patients experience practical difficulties in creating and sustaining relationships, such as poverty. Moreover, we show how patients experience changes in sexuality and the risks involved in it, and discuss possible coping strategies from their perspectives. (shrink)

Most philosophers would agree that loving one’s romantic partner (i.e., being in love) is, in principle, a good thing. That is, romantic love can be valuable. It seems plausible that most would then think that the process leading to being in love—i.e. falling in love—can be valuable too. Surprisingly, that is not the case: among philosophers, falling in love has a bad reputation. Whereas philosophy of love has started to depart from traditional (and often unwarranted or false) tropes surrounding romantic (...) life, this tendency has not yet reached the analysis of falling in love. The phenomenon continues to be looked at mostly through a compendium of generalisations taken as metaphysical truths—the view of falling in love being akin to “losing one’s mind” or “not being able to think about anything else”. Here, I analyse some of these generalisations to show that although they may reflect some experiences of what falling in love feels like, they wrongly reduce falling in love to two related, but distinct, phenomena: limerence and infatuation. My aim is to refine the current terminology to lay the foundations for a neutral view of falling in love. (shrink)

The idea that love changes who we are is widely shared, and has been mostly explored from a stance in the middle stage of love (i.e., when people already love each other). But how do we get there? And what happens when love ends? In this chapter, I explore how self-understanding may be shaped in different ways at different stages of love through the notions of narrative and existential feeling. As I will argue, love gains narrative momentum at the beginning, (...) which is maintained during the middle, and ultimately extinguished at the end. This momentum is triggered and later sustained by the existential feeling that ‘things make sense’, which keeps the lovers oriented towards each other. (shrink)

This special issue on posthumanist perspectives on affect seeks to create a platform for thinking about the intersection of, on the one hand, the posthumanist project of radically reconfiguring the meaning of the “human” in light of the critiques of a unified and bounded subjectivity and, on the other, the insights coming from recent scholarship on affect and feeling about the subject, sociality, and connectivity. Posthumanism stands for diverse theoretical positions which together call into question the anthropocentric assertion of the (...) human as a distinctive, unique and dominant form of life – in turn, the concept of affect has been linked with ideas of increasing and decreasing energetic intensities, which underlie, but for some also precede, processes of individuation and subjectivation.The contributors to this issue consider critically the vistas opened by affect studies and by posthumanism. Coming from diverse disciplinary traditions, including literature, philosophy, critical sociology, visual arts, and heritage studies, the articles contribute to the four thematic idioms of this issue in an attempt to structure a dialogical space on posthumanist perspectives on affect and on affect-based politics. Questions of environmental governance, the critique of speciesism, the formation of cross-species solidarity, the politics of the “inhuman”, biopolitics and necropolitics form the intellectual mosaic of this issue. Finally, we pose the question of “academic affects”, in circulation in the researcher's encounter with her others – humans, insects, ghostly presences or inanimate objects – and we ask how these affects, including anger and mourning, but also joyful affirmation, are brought to bear on the process of writing. (shrink)

Este artículo examina los aspectos éticos y legales de la biojurídica en el contexto del alotrasplante compuesto vascularizado facial. Se destaca la importancia de preservar la identidad facial como un derecho fundamental debido al papel central del rostro en la comunicación y las relaciones humanas. El trasplante facial permite a las personas restaurar su apariencia original, lo que contribuye a recuperar confianza y conexión emocional. Desde una perspectiva bioética y humanista, esta intervención protege los derechos humanos y mejora el bienestar (...) de los receptores. El consentimiento informado garantiza la autonomía del receptor, mientras que la ciencia proporciona opciones personalizadas y fomenta una ética rigurosa. El trasplante facial promueve el derecho a tener un rostro reconocible, abordando dilemas éticos y ofreciendo nuevas posibilidades en un enfoque multidisciplinario. (shrink)

Descartes consolida el paso de la ciencia de la verdad a la ciencia del hombre. En esta prima un cura sui, que acabará fortaleciendo al sujeto interiormente y desenfocando al otro. Todo hombre podría ser sabio; si bien, no desde la experiencia de la conciencia como ejercicio metódico y teórico del alma; pero sí como forma de vida que educa el fortalecimiento de la voluntad. La generosidad será la forma de la virtud, y si bien esta incluye las formas del (...) amor, el cogito cartesiano no logra salir de la auto-referencialidad. (shrink)

The article considers the problem of images and the role they play in our reflection turning to evidence provided by two seemingly very distant theories of mind together with two sorts of corresponding visions: dreams as analyzed by Freud who claimed that they are pictures of our thoughts, and their mechanical counterparts produced by neural networks designed for object recognition and classification. Freud’s theory of dreams has largely been ignored by philosophers interested in cognition, most of whom focused solely on (...) the linguistic incarnation of thoughts, but even though commonly neglected by respectable theories of thinking, dream images may prove to be the key to the black box of thought. As argued in this article, when seen from the right perspective and approached with the right set of questions, oneiric visions yield groundbreaking insights into the mechanism of how concepts and judgments are formed. Support for this conclusion comes from a tradition seemingly remote, if not opposed to psychoanalysis: the mechanical model of the mind conceived by information sciences and embodied in the form of artificial neural nets which mirror the activity of human visual cortex producing visions strikingly similar to those created by the sleeping mind. These purely mechanical, artificial ‘dreams’ constitute byproducts of algorithms designed for object recognition and classification, which, as I shall argue, reveals the true purpose of our own oneiric visual formations. Just like their mechanical counterparts produced by neural networks, condensations and displacements encountered in dreams are in fact visual universals. (shrink)

El artículo aborda el envejecimiento poblacional y la eutanasia desde una perspectiva ética basada en los principios de la bioética personalista ontológicamente fundamentada. Se resaltan los principios de la dignidad de la persona, el respeto a la vida física, la solidaridad, la subsidiariedad, la justicia y el bien común y se muestra cómo se aplican en ambos contextos. Se enfatiza la importancia de un diálogo honesto sobre la eutanasia, evitando la manipulación del lenguaje. Se destaca que cualquier discusión sobre la (...) eutanasia debe ser respaldada por una reflexión ética profunda y que los derechos de las personas mayores deben protegerse en todo momento. El artículo aborda estas cuestiones complejas desde una perspectiva que valore la dignidad y los derechos de las personas mayores y promueva su bienestar, al tiempo que se discuten de manera reflexiva y responsable las cuestiones éticas en torno a la eutanasia. (shrink)

ObjectiveThe coronavirus pandemic affects all areas of life. Performing arts and music studies have also experienced considerable changes, with university closures and a fluctuating return to normal and more limited operations. Prior studies detail the impact of the pandemic on college students, but we do not yet know what specific consequences it has for music students. The aim of this study is to examine the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on music students’ health, practicing behavior, and everyday life.MethodsIn July 2020, (...) we conducted an online survey of 80 students enrolled in performance and music education programs at a German music university and compared these data with data from a survey of 75 students at the same music university carried out in summer 2019.ResultsThe survey revealed that the coronavirus pandemic led to a decrease in practicing hours and an increase of stressful thoughts and feelings. Students were mostly satisfied with Corona-measures taken by the university. Of analyzed determinants, only general fear of health problems was identified as a significant predictor of mental health status. Mental health status did not significantly differ between students surveyed in 2019 and 2020.ConclusionKnowledge about the specific challenges the pandemic poses for music students can help conservatories to better respond to the needs of their students. Specifically, this study will inform future measures supporting music students in coping with difficult situations like a pandemic. (shrink)

Are there brain differences between believers and nonbelievers? In order to investigate the effect of religious beliefs on cognitive control, Michael Inzlicht and his collaborators measured the neural correlates of performance monitoring and affective responses to errors, specifically, the error-related negativity. ERN is a neurophysiological marker occurring within 100 ms of error commission, and generated in the anterior cingulate cortex. The researchers observed that religious conviction is marked by reduced reactivity in the ACC, a cortical system that is involved in (...) the experience of anxiety and is important for self-regulation. Thus, they claimed that these results offer a mechanism for the finding that religion is linked to positive mental health and low rates of mortality. (shrink)

Dado el vasto abanico de posibilidades (y teniendo en cuenta que esto es solo una muestra de la heterogeneidad del debate dentro de la filosofía analítica reciente), en esta entrada nos centraremos en un solo aspecto sobre el amor. Tradicionalmente, el amor se ha considerado un tema ético (por ejemplo, Aristóteles dedica los libros VIII y IX de Ética a Nicómaco a la amistad como ruta hacia la virtud). Desde la perspectiva de la ética, y enmarcándonos dentro del amor personal, (...) se pueden distinguir tres debates principales: el amor como evaluación, el amor en la moralidad y el amor en la ética aplicada. (shrink)

Background International electives are often considered a valuable learning opportunity for medical students. Yet, as travelling to lower and middle income countries (LMICs) becomes more common, ethical considerations of such practices emerge. We conducted a scoping review to assess the extent to which five ethical themes were addressed in existing literature about electives, with the aim of investigating the ethical impacts of medical student electives on local resources, patients and clinicians in LMICs. Methods We systematically searched PubMed, Global Health and (...) Embase databases using the search terms “(ethics) AND (medical electives)”. Thematic content analysis was undertaken using a combination of deductive and inductive themes. The deductive themes included: exceeding clinical competence, use of limited local resources, respect for patients and local culture, collaboration with local community/colleagues, and one-sided benefits in partnership. In addition, we also allowed for emerging themes within the data, and conducted a narrative synthesis of the results. Results A total of 37 papers discussed ethical issues relating to medical student international electives to LMICs. More publications were written from the medical student perspective (n = 14), than by the host-institution (n = 5), with nearly half written from third-party perspectives (n = 18). Negative impacts on local host students and impact upon patient care were identified as additional ethical considerations. Conclusions Our review demonstrated that while there is a degree of awareness in the existing literature of the potential negative impacts of medical electives to local LMIC students’ access to medical education and patient care, continued work is needed to ensure equitable partnerships. We recommend that these ethical themes should be further explored in pre-departure elective teaching courses and post-elective debriefs to increase medical students’ awareness of the impact of their presence on host communities. (shrink)

Este artículo analiza la secuencia de argumentos expuestos por Arendt en la segundaparte de La vida del espíritu orientados a dar cuenta de que la voluntad es la facultadespiritual creadora de la persona susceptible de ser considerada responsable de susactos y de su ser. En primer término, se examinan las ideas arendtianas acerca de lascomplejidades de la voluntad como una facultad atravesada por paradojas y controversias.Luego se explicitan los vínculos descubiertos por Arendt entre la voluntad yla responsabilidad. Finalmente, se indaga (...) sobre el concepto de natalidad como alternativade asunción de la paradojal responsabilidad. (shrink)

The current predominant conception of human rights implies that human beings have objective intrinsic value. In this paper, we defend that there is no satisfactory justification of this claim. In spite of the great variety of theories aimed at explaining objective intrinsic value, all of them share one common problematic feature: they pass from a non-evaluative proposition to an evaluative proposition by asserting that a certain entity has intrinsic value in virtue of having certain non-evaluative features. This is a step (...) that cannot be justified. In light of this negative result, we offer a radically different approach to intrinsic value. Our proposal reinterprets the claim that human beings have intrinsic value in terms of a commitment to value human beings intrinsically. This commitment provides both objective practical reasons for, and a rational explanation of, efforts aimed at defending and promoting human rights, without need to appeal to the existence of objective intrinsic value. (shrink)

Este artículo analiza jurídica y éticamente el derecho a la lactancia en la maternidad subrogada, abordando sus complejidades desde una perspectiva integral. Se destaca la necesidad de regular la maternidad subrogada a nivel federal en México, protegiendo los derechos del menor y su derecho a la lactancia materna. Se promueve una crianza afectiva y la creación de nuevas normas biojurídicas considerando la jurisdicción y los requisitos de los padres. La promoción de la lactancia materna en la maternidad subrogada se basa (...) en el beneficio ético del menor. Se resalta la importancia de una atención integral durante el puerperio y la lactancia, valorando la salud mental y garantizando una lactancia adecuada. Se recomienda cláusulas en los contratos de subrogación para extender su duración y asegurar la lactancia y el desarrollo saludable del menor. (shrink)

En el presente artículo se analizan las variaciones y continuidades del significado de la responsabilidad en los distintos momentos de la obra de Hannah Arendt. En primer lugar, se explicita el énfasis en el significado político que presentan los textos escritos con anterioridad al informe sobre el juicio a Eichmann, para luego examinar las mutaciones hacia el acento en el significado jurídico-moral y la relación de la responsabilidad con el pensamiento, la voluntad y el juicio. El texto concluye con una (...) reflexión sobre el legado del pensamiento arendtiano sobre la responsabilidad a las generaciones que lo sucedieron. (shrink)

Artykuł podejmuje namysł nad kategorią lektury z perspektywy estetycznej. Śledzi rozmaite spo­soby użycia tego pojęcia i różne sensy kryjące się za figurą czytania, nie zawsze pokrywające się z tradycyjnymi definicjami odnotowywanymi współcześnie w słownikach. W punkcie wyjścia leży rozpoznanie, że kategoria lektury ma dziś szerokie zastosowanie, tzn. jej przedmiotem są nie tylko utwory piśmiennicze czy literackie. Artykuł stara się odpowiedzieć na pytanie, co sprawia, że pojęcie lektury bywa tak chętnie aplikowane do przestrzeni estetycznej i dlaczego czytaniu poddawane są także zjawiska (...) – co szczególnie frapujące – o wyraźnym wizualnym nacechowaniu, do których zasadniczo przystaje przede wszystkim postawa widza, a nie czytelnika. O atrakcyjno­ści lektury jako narzędzia służącego do kontaktu ze zjawiskami o charakterze pozaczytelniczym decyduje splot jej właściwości. Lekturę można bowiem traktować z jednej strony jako dyspozycję mentalną i poznawczą, służącą wyjaśnianiu znaczeń, a z drugiej strony jako praktykę, która ma swoje psychosomatyczne, sensualne, percepcyjne uwarunkowania. To dzięki temu tak dobrze sprawdza się w przestrzeni estetycznej, pozostając m.in. w symbiotycznej relacji z oglądaniem. (shrink)