The most documented juridical studies about hispanic woman in the late Middle Ages, belong to three specialities: political law, civil or common law (matrimonial), and criminal law. It is in the sphere of matrimonial law where the influence of christian principles has been described as prominent, contributing to the juridical conjugal parity, thus recognizing woman a full civil capability.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“El secreto oficio de la abeja”A Sociopolitical Metaphor in the CelestinaCristina Guardiola (bio)Rojas returns again and again in La Celestina to the theme of the disruption of human relationships.—Stephen Gilman, The Spain of Fernando de RojasEnabled by the old bawd Celestina, the loco amor felt by the clandestine lovers Calisto and Melibea exposes a society living in disorder and conflict. Calisto and Melibea’s transgressive desire, and those who make (...) it possible, may be seen as directly contradicting moral and social laws upon which the tragicomedy claims to be predicated. Most of the characters in the work live their lives as transgression; their disorderly conduct leads inevitably to their death and destruction [Baranda 9]. The negative example offered by this work was, according to Maravall, what led early readers such as Quevedo to understand how the work: “debaxo del nombre de Comedia, enseña a vivir bien, moral y políticamente, acreditanto las virtudes y disfamando los vicios [under the title of Comedy, teaches one to live well, both moral and politically, accrediting virtues and discrediting vices]” [qtd. in Maravall 19].1 The Celestina lays bare its social and moralistic message by exposing the corruption of social and moral values prevalent in this late fifteenth-century work. Bringing together the aristocratic world of courtly love (already brought low through the Calisto’s crass treatment of waspish Melibea) and the bawdy world of the whorehouse, Rojas debases the people and passions therein. Connecting both worlds through her comings and goings is Celestina. Characterized as abeja, a political animal used in the Middle Ages and early modern period that informs the ideal structure of society, Celestina exposes a satire of society and its corruption of moral values.As the Síguese and prologue indicate, the tragicomedy was written with a dual and moral intent. The author wrote to disabuse the many “galanes y enamorados mancebos [handsome young men and enamored youth]” of his country from the cruel and evil fires of love, but also to expose “engaños de las alcahuetas y malos y lisonjeros siruientes [the deceptions of procuresses and evil sycophantic servants].” In the Celestina, the deceits of the bawd and servants Sempronio and (later) Pármeno complicate the narrative and move it to its tragic conclusion. As Celestina and Sempronio set out to profit by Calisto’s lovesickness, they are met with opposition from Pármeno. The initial resistance Pármeno puts up to defend himself and his master from the economic lust felt by Celestina and Sempronio serves to expose a conflict in social class. The heedless attainment of wealth demonstrated by the servants contradicts a more aristocratic principle that was perceived to guide economic thought in the Middle Ages [Maravall 60]. Celestina’s spoken adage, “[a] tuerto o a derecho, nuestra casa hasta el techo [by hook or by crook, our house [End Page 147] through the roof],” exposes her unmitigated greed and contrasts sharply with Calisto’s more courtly (if yet parodic) examples of largesse. The alcahueta’s greed is not merely opportunistic, it belies a certain Schadenfreude felt for Calisto’s woes. Like “cirurjanos [ante] los descalabrados [surgeons before patients with head trauma],” Celestina pursues Calisto in search of money, which at this particular moment in history was slipping through the hands of her real-life counterparts and into those of state-appointed brothel keepers. As Lacarra notes, the granting of royal mercedes for the incomes derived from prostitution to royal towns or notable persons became prevalent during the reign of Ferdinand and Isabel [40]. One must imagine women such as Celestina doubly feeling the pinch from this seemingly “catholic” imposition. Income from the alcahueta livelihood from all of Castile certainly must have been dwindling. At the same time, the alcahueta’s dishonest way of living was being usurped by speciously honorable citizens who no doubt maligned the prostitutes on whom their wealth was gained. Despite the growing danger of her increasingly clandestine profession, Celestina shows little shame or fear. Indeed, her sense of “honor” for the putería is so brightly and enthusiastically expressed in the work bearing her name that one wonders if it might not stem from... (shrink)

Background: The high level of satisfaction of users of a health service is largely due to the fact that they receive excellent care from healthcare professionals. Compassionate care is an essential component of excellent care. But what do nurses understand compassion to be? Research objectives: To analyse the concept of compassion from the perspective of nurses in the Andalusian Public Health System, Spain. Research design: This is a qualitative study following the grounded theory model. Four focus groups and 25 in-depth (...) interviews were conducted. Participants and research context: A total of 68 nursing professionals working in the Andalusian Public Health System (Spain) participated. Theoretical sampling was used, with participants being recruited using the snowball technique. Ethical considerations: This research was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the Centro-Almería Health District (CEICA 27/9/17). Findings: From the analysis of the data, four themes emerged that helped to understand the concept of compassion according to nurses: ‘Negative perception of the term compassion’, ‘Compassion and empathy as synonyms’, ‘Beyond empathy’, and ‘Effects of having a compassionate attitude’. Discussion: Nurses perceive the concept of compassion differently to each other and even contradictorily. This concept is imbued with cultural elements, which adds confusion to understanding it, and is even perceived as something negative similar to pity. Conclusion: Nurses confuse the concepts of empathy and compassion as if they were synonymous. Before considering training in compassion for healthcare professionals, it is essential to clarify the concept of compassion through educational interventions. (shrink)

One of the sectors for which Artificial Intelligence applications have been considered as exceptionally promising is the healthcare sector. As a public-facing sector, the introduction of AI applications has been subject to extended news coverage. This article conducts a quantitative and qualitative data analysis of English news media articles covering AI systems that allow the automation of tasks that so far needed to be done by a medical expert such as a doctor or a nurse thereby redistributing their agency. We (...) investigated in this article one particular framing of AI systems and their agency: the framing that positions AI systems as replacing and outperforming the human medical expert, and in which AI systems are personified and/or addressed as a person. The analysis of our data set consisting of 365 articles written between the years 1980 and 2019 will show that there is a tendency to present AI systems as outperforming human expertise. These findings are important given the central role of news coverage in explaining AI and given the fact that the popular frame of ‘outperforming’ might place AI systems above critique and concern including the Hippocratic oath. Our data also showed that the addressing of an AI system as a person is a trend that has been advanced only recently and is a new development in the public discourse about AI. (shrink)

This paper challenges the view that contentment leads to personal freedom and autonomy and argues for a relational and exercise concept of de facto freedom in the Zhuangzi 莊子. I first review influential interpretations of freedom in the Zhuangzi that equate freedom with contentment and nonfrustration, starting with Guo Xiang's 郭象 (d. 312 CE). By putting these interpretations in dialog with contemporary social philosophy (Christman, Meyers, Pettit, Elster, and Khader), I reflect on the two seminal problems of the psychologizing causal (...) and procedural approaches that allow the interpretation of freedom as contentment: the “happy slave” problem and the “sour grapes” problem. Proving this account of freedom inadequate, I argue for a different interpretation of freedom in the Zhuangzi that resembles a weakly substantive and constitutive account of freedom and autonomy in modern‐day social philosophy terms, such as Marina Oshana's. The theory of freedom that I analyze in the Zhuangzi, however, helps us correct the risk of material determinism of the constitutive account, offering a description of relational freedom and autonomy as constituted by socio‐material conditions but not determined by them. (shrink)

This article tackles the construction of an exemplary image of the modern man in the 15th century. The corpus is centered on a fundamental work in the history of Western thought: Oration on the Dignity of Man, by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, which represents the “spirit of a period” and projects an exemplary image of the human being through the rewriting of the origin myth. The manner in which Adam was created and how that defines the new way in which (...) he is fashioned will be the basis for a new way of being, free from the doctrine of original sin and without seeing his capacities as a human being diminished. Through the analysis of this mythological reconstruction and also through modifications of the biblical account, several characteristics of the man about to come will be uncovered. Special attention will be given to the displacement suffered by man in relation to the world, as Pico establishes man as a contemplator of the universe, the consequences of the liberation from the scala naturae, and the prominence of desire in Pico’s conception of man. (shrink)

Kaarlo Tuori’s latest book aims to provide an examination of modern law’s main properties – as he puts it, a ‘legal-theoretical recapitulation’. Three properties in particular characterise modern l...

This paper presents an empirical study that analyzes everyday practices regarding the health care and education of middle class families grounded in a phenomenological perspective. Everyday practices are linked to the system of expectations and goals built around practices, constituting a configurations of meaning that involves both aspects of the Life-World, which is affected by social class and other social determinants that define areas of experiences and opportunities for social interaction. In this sense, we see that social class and gender (...) intersect each other, enabling and limiting horizons of expectations for children, raising specific jurisdictions to males and females. Finally, we reflect on how the constitution of meanings and everyday practices influences the construction of social relations of the educational and health environments. (shrink)

ArgumentThis paper analyzes the public fasts of two Italian “hunger artists,” Giovanni Succi and Stefano Merlatti, in Paris in 1886, and their ability to forego eating for a long period (thirty and fifty days respectively). Some contemporary witnesses described them as clever frauds, but others considered them to be interesting physiological anomalies. Controversies about their fasts entered academic circles, but they also spread throughout the urban public at different levels. First, Succi and Merlatti steered medical debates among physicians on the (...) “scientific” explanations of the limits of human resistance to inanition, and acted as ideal mediators for doctors’ professional interests. Second, they became useful tools for science popularizers in their attempt to gain authority in drawing the boundaries between “orthodox” and “heterodox” knowledge. Finally, in the 1880s, Succi and Merlatti’s contest, the controversy around the liquids they ingested, and their scientific supervision by medical doctors, all reinforced their own professional status as itinerant fasters in a golden decade for that kind of endeavor. For all those reasons, Succi and Merlatti can be viewed as useful, epistemologically-active charlatans. (shrink)

La Guerra Civil fue una experiencia decisiva en la evolución del pensamiento de María Zambrano. Entendida y vivida como una tragedia cuyo sujeto es el pueblo, personificación de lo más elemental de la condición humana en su lucha contra el fascismo, esa experiencia abolió cualquier razón en clave idealista y reductora de la vida. En su lugar y en diálogo íntimo con la poesía de Antonio Machado, Zambrano elaborará una razón amorosa que retoma su reflexión anterior a la guerra y (...) la proyecta hacia una razón poética que, ya en el exilio y ante la imposibilidad de una redención de la tragedia, tendrá que orientarse hacia una interioridad radical. (shrink)

Entre las teorías de Thomas Hobbes y Baruch de Spinoza hay destacadas coincidencias y también importantes diferencias. Inician y revelan cambios en la teoría y la práctica políticas que ocurren en corto espacio de tiempo pero que son decisivos. Antecesores del positivismo, ambos compartieron bases ontológicas y metodológicas, lo que suele interpretarse, por razones cronológicas, como una influencia de Hobbes en Spinoza. Las diferencias entre ambos versan sobre el sentido de la religión en relación con su papel en la política; (...) las relaciones entre la revelación divina, la ley y la razón naturales y el orden moral; el iusnaturalismo como fundamento del sistema jurídico-político; el sentido y contenido del contrato social como fundamento de la obligación civil. Todas estas divergencias conducen a la más importante de todas, y es que Hobbes se enroca en un absolutismo que desconoce los derechos de la conciencia, mientras que Spinoza se erige en defensor del fuero interno. (shrink)

This article develops the argument that the interplay between emotions and cognitive biases influences corporate decision-making on climate change adaptation. Our theoretical analysis examines how emotions can change the effect of cognitive biases on adaptation decisions by influencing how firms select, access, and process complex and uncertain climatic information. We draw on research on climate adaptation, social psychology, and managerial cognition and focus on three forms of bias: availability heuristic, framing, and anchoring. We explain how each bias shapes the decision-making (...) process on adaptation and theorize how emotions of different valence and arousal affect this process. We shed light on the underlying mechanisms that explain how emotions influence the effect of cognitive biases as a source of inaction on adaptation in firms. Our analysis provides a new perspective on how firms approach the strategic decision to adapt to climate change by considering both cognitive and emotional aspects. (shrink)

Analizamos dos momentos constitucionales en la obra de Juan Bautista Alberdi a partir de sus lecturas de Théodore Jouffroy y Benjamin Constant. En el primer caso, ponemos en relieve la concepción filosófico- moral del derecho así como el modelo de publicista que fue Jouffroy para el “joven” Alberdi de 1837. En el segundo, analizamos el modo en que, en 1852, adoptó la postura de Constant para pensar la autoridad política a partir de las diversas teorizaciones del “poder neutral” plasmado en (...) la figura presidencial de la Constitución Nacional de la República Argentina sancionada en 1853. (shrink)

Este ensayo trata de un tema esencial en el surgimiento de la conciencia moderna: la cuestión litigiosa entre la libertad y la gracia, en «La controversia entre Erasmo y Lutero acerca del libre albedrío», —asunto poco estudiado pese a su alcance en la historia de las ideas religiosas y morales—. Analiza con detalle la tensión entre el humanismo moderno y la religión reformada, y la desarrolla en los diversos planos implicados en la misma: en la metafísica, el conflicto entre predestinación (...) y libertad; en teología, la relación entre razón y fe, en antropología, la oposición entre la carne y el espíritu, y en moral, el problema del mal y la liberación de la servidumbre. Sostiene, además, como conclusión, que la recta comprensión de esta controversia y su superación constituye la médula del humanismo cristiano, tal como se acuñó en el Renacimiento. (shrink)

Alejandro Tiana Ferrer es catedrático de historia de los Sistemas Educativos de la UNED. Ha ocupado entre otros cargos los de director del Centro de Investigación y Documentación Educativa (CIDE), creador y primer director del Instituto Nacional de Evaluación Educativa (INCE), presidente de la Asociación Internacional para la Evaluación del Rendimiento Educativo (IEA) y, hasta hace unos meses, Secretario General de Educación del Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia, donde ha diseñado y empezado a implementar una nueva ley de educación. Es (...) pues, la persona más adecuada para hablar de evaluaciones internacionales y sistemas educativos. Porque tiene una visión global y rigurosa de la educación en el mundo, una experiencia en primera persona, desde la toma de decisiones, de la realidad del sistema educativo español y un conocimiento profundo, desde dentro de las instituciones, de lo que son las evaluaciones internacionales y cuál es su sentido para mejorar la educación. (shrink)

This article reflects on the school's role in the building of citizenship, especially in socially vulnerable contexts. We argue, and try to show, that effective participation in decision-making processes is a key tool to promote conditions that help in social transformation and the formation of active citizenship. We offer a brief description of the current socio-educational scene, characterised by poverty and school failure, both emerging from the profound social, economic and cultural crises that affected Argentina in 2001. The resulting need (...) for social integration, links between State and civil society, people's empowerment and political development make it necessary for the school to become an institution of community development, promoting opportunities for political socialisation and moral education. We describe a two-year action-research project in a secondary school in the north east of Argentina that aimed to enhance the bond between the school and the community and to democratise relationships in the school. Based on that experience, we critically analyse the way in which the school offers or denies opportunities for genuine participation and, as a consequence, the way in which the formation of citizenship is managed, and make some recommendations for rethinking the school from a social and political point of view. (shrink)

The main goal of this research which is summarized in this article is to analyze the influence of the Neoliberal discourse on the constitution of Colombian´s subjectivity, from the late 20th Century to the early 21th Century. A Foucaultian interpretative analysis method was adopted to analyze the enunciations of the television and internet advertisements, in contrast to the enunciations of the Neoliberalism. The whole of this research was developed from an interdisciplinary focus guided by the Lacanian psychoanalysis framework.

The Light Subject Constraint in Spoken Spanish The purpose of this study is to explore Chafe's hypothesis that grammatical subjects obey the light subject constraint. The data consists of six half-an-hour semiformal interviews with Caracas native speakers recorded in 1987. Chafe's hypothesis is based on the claim that in any given clause one of the referents receives the unique and special status of grammatical subject. Subjects show two types of restrictions: i) from the information load perspective, they tend to code (...) given or accessible rather than new information; and ii) from a referential viewpoint, they can have three degrees of importance: primary, secondary or trivial. Information load and referential importance combined constitute the LSC: Chafe's findings prove that in English subjects tend, on the one hand, to be given or accessible and, on the other, of primary or secondary importance. Heavy subjects, on the contrary, tend to be of trivial importance. Broderick 1999 confirms the LSC's existence in a conversational English corpus. All subjects in the corpus have been coded according to information load and referential importance. The results of the analysis show that spoken Spanish also conforms to LSC. (shrink)

Spontaneity is an almost inevitable commonplace in discussions of Daoism, especially the Zhuangzi. The idea that spontaneity is one of the most important values in the Zhuangzi was presented by Angus Graham for the Anglo-European audience, and divulged among Chinese readers by Liú Xiàogǎn 劉笑敢 and Chén Gǔyīng 陳鼓應. Hungarian psychologist Csikszentmihalyi popularly combined Daoist spontaneity with the idea of flow. In the state of flow the person carries out an activity for the sake of the activity itself--autotelically--and acts with (...) complete spontaneity given that none of their movements requires thought or mediation. My study consists of three parts: First, I deal with different definitions of “spontaneous” and of the term that is commonly translated as “spontaneous” in Chinese texts, zìrán 自然 (literally, so-of-itself), as well as its use in the Zhuangzi. I conclude that spontaneity is not part of the axiological project of the Zhuangzi. Instead, we find that the idea of adapting is related to normative human values and behaviors, whereas spontaneity is a term merely descriptive of natural objects. Second, I analyze the famous Zhuangzian stories of skills, which are often quoted to argue for the value of spontaneity. I conclude that the goal of these stories is to develop a new type of vital attitude as “second nature” or “background ability” (John Searle). Since this attitude is mediated and achieved through effort, it is not spontaneous. Third, I explain the confusion between this “second nature” with “spontaneity” in recent scholarship has led to the so-called paradoxes of non-action and spontaneity (Edward Slingerland). I argue that these paradoxes disappear when we understand the different layers of meaning of wú-wéi and zìrán in the early Chinese textual context. (shrink)

A dragon needs the clouds and the wind in order to fly. What happens when we too relinquish individualistic reasoning?

The Escuela Feminista de Teología de Andalucía [the Andalusian School of Feminist Theology], held a conference titled ‘Feminine Mysticism and Counterculture: A Rebellious Genre’ October 15-17, 2009 at the University of Seville. This annual seminar is held thanks to an agreement between the University of Seville and EFETA, with the direct support of the research group ‘Escritoras y Escrituras,’ whose principal researcher is Mercedes Arriaga. The guest of honour at this year’s conference was Lisa Isherwood, who kindly presented EFETA (...) with the opportunity to publish some of the seminar’s papers in Feminist Theology, and who we here in Spain thank wholeheartedly for her contributions. Before presenting the texts that were selected for this edition, we would like to take this opportunity to explain a little about the EFETA project. (shrink)

ArgumentThis paper analyzes the political dimension of Miguel Masriera's (1901–1981) science popularization program. In the 1920s, Masriera worked at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich – with Hermann Staudinger, the luminary of polymer chemistry – to later become a lecturer of theoretical and physical chemistry at the University of Barcelona. After living in exile in Paris, at the end of the Civil War he returned to Spain but never recovered his position. Instead, Masriera became an active popular (...) science writer and adapted to the severe constraints of General Franco's military dictatorship (1939–1975). Inspired by the astronomer Arthur Eddington's world view, Masriera wrote and translated popular science books, and published articles in daily newspapers and journals. By examining Masriera's popular works, in particular his program for spreading “atomic culture” in Spain during the Cold War, this paper aims to contribute to the assessment of the role of science popularization in the domestic legitimization of that dictatorial regime and also its use as a vehicle for international recognition abroad. (shrink)

In this article, the author compares two Spanish translations of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. Taking into account that Spanish is a language in which words referring to human beings have a feminine and a masculine form, and grammatical gender corresponds to sex, all translators must interrogate the sex of the referent in order to translate gendered words. They are thus compelled to assign sex to genderless forms in the source text. Patriarchal translation has a long tradition of (...) devaluing and excluding the feminine in this process, as the author demonstrates here by revealing how Jorge Luis Borges translated the pronouns you and we in Woolf’s essay. In contrast, in her feminist translation of the essay, María Milagros Rivera-Garretas not only chooses the gender which most accurately represents the likely intended meaning of the source text, but recovers its message and legacy. (shrink)