Soilless crops are commonly used in rooftop agriculture because they easily adapt to building constraints. However, acceptance of the produce derived from this system may be controversial. This paper evaluates consumers’ acceptance of food from RA in Mediterranean cities, focusing on the quality of the product, production system, and consumers’ motivations. We surveyed 238 respondents on the UAB university campus as potential consumers. The survey was distributed via an Internet-link that was provided along with a sample of tomatoes from RA. (...) The results showed that most people approved the quality of RA products and perceived them to be local and fresh. The respondents exhibited acceptance of soilless-produced tomatoes and considered them to be environmentally better than conventionally produced ones. Cluster analysis revealed that consumers with high income levels and a university education had a better perception of the quality and proposed a higher price for RA products, but no difference was found regarding their environmental perception of this products. Moreover, people who possessed more information about the product also had a higher perception of the quality and production system and would pay more for them. The main concerns of consumers were related to food safety and the social impact of RA. Additional research is needed to improve the sustainability of RA, and the applied measures should be communicated to potential consumers to enhance their acceptance and success. (shrink)

This essay defends that mimesis is an inherently agonistic and paradoxical human practice. The divergent views on mimesis by Plato and Aristotle, as well as by Adorno and Benjamin, are the philosophical manifestation of an agonistic tension of human mimesis that is not resolved in the exclusive truth of one of the positions, but remains as a permanent possibility to create alternative paths in history.

A sacralidade da vida humana tornou-se um problema filosófico com desdobramentos éticos e políticos. Este ensaio apresenta uma arqueologia da sacralidade a partir dos estudos de Walter Benjamin e Giorgio Agamben, estabelecendo uma comparação com o sentido da sacralidade nas polis antigas. A sacralidade aparece como figura simbólica marcada pelo paradoxo – ao mesmo tempo que protege a vida pelo direito sagrado, o direito a captura e a ameaça com a exceção. Porém, o paradoxo é insuperável, já que constitui o (...) modo de ser do humano. (shrink)

Le livre de Loredana Mancini est le deuxième volume de la collection “Antropologia del Mondo Antico. Collana del Centro di Antropologia del Mondo Antico dell’Università di Siena”, dirigée par Maurizio Bettini. L’auteur est chercheuse spécialisée en iconographie de l’art ancien et en histoire de l’archéologie, ce qui explique l’inclusion à la fin du livre d’un catalogue de 152 monuments qui offrent des images, fragmentaires ou entières, de sirènes antiques et médiévales, accompagnées ou non de...

The aim of this article is to discuss and illustrate the grammaticalization process and the polysemic and polyfunctional nature of the Spanish and Catalan markers la verdad and la veritat, from an original objectified referential meaning of the forms to a highly subjectified procedural meaning of the markers. The pragmatic meaning of these markers stems from the loss of semantic features and the different uses that they can adopt in a variety of syntactic and pragmatic contexts, where their subjective, evaluative, (...) and intensifying modal dimensions are fully manifested. In lexical terms, they are noun phrases that can take variable and invariable forms. In morphological terms, the variable form is inflected in number and has a referential value, whereas the invariable form, prosodically extraposed, or followed by a verbal predicate when working as pragmatic marker, is always uninflected and is polyfunctional, with a procedural value. When followed by a verbal predicate, la verdad and la veritat acquire a structural dimension, besides their modal illocutionary one, being used as boundary markers that separate description of facts from first person evaluation, in a monologued stretch of discourse. In an interactional context, the marker frequently prefaces counter expectations. In order to show its grammaticalization process, I will discuss and exemplify their role as evidential marker with a truth-attesting value, epistemic modality markers used to introduce the speaker’s attitude to the content of the proposition or to the addressee in the context of an utterance, intensifiers or boosters used to modify the illocutionary force of a speech act, and discourse boundary markers used to delimit real-world facts from personal opinion. In order to account for their polysemic and polyfunctional dimensions, I will propose salient meanings and prototypical functions. (shrink)

Approaches to Nietzsche’s political philosophy abound. In this article, however, we explore the possibility of identifying not only a political philosophy, but also a political-theological reading in Nietzsche’s texts. In fact, such a political-theological reading already has something of a genealogy. In the 1960s, “radical theology” appropriated the Nietzschean topic of the death of God, which engendered a transferred radical political theology consisting in radical democracy. The first part of this article explores twentieth-century political theologies surrounding the death of God. (...) We ask herein if this is the only possible political-theological reading of Nietzsche’s texts. The second part argues that, in fact, we can ascribe to Nietzsche a “theological” intention that is transferable to his political theory in a way that differs from the attempts of radical political theology and other political theologies surrounding the death of God. We conclude that, in any case, Nietzsche’s political theology aims to counterbalance St. Paul’s nihilism more than to constitute a determined political view. (shrink)

SUMMARYIn recent years, Ernst H. Kantorowicz's work The King's Two Bodies has been the object of both historical and philosophical research. Kantorowicz decided to subtitle his book ‘A Study in Medieval Political Theology’, but few scholars have actually recognised his work as research in ‘political theology’. The aim of this article, then, is to uncover the sense in which his book might be considered a work of ‘political theology’, especially in the sense coined by Carl Schmitt in 1922. Such a (...) discussion ultimately aims to contribute to the foundation of political-theology research, a subject that has been widespread among European intellectuals in the twentieth century and which continues to be a focus of interest. This article argues that Kantorowicz's book can be interpreted as a practice of—and also an enriching addition to—Schmitt's thesis on political theology, even if it does not mention Schmitt's name. Such a conclusion is only possible by accepting that there was a heated dialogue between Kantorowicz and Schmitt through Erik Peterson's work. The article further discusses its approach with other scholars that, even though they are based on similar hypotheses, make different conclusions. (shrink)

From the earliest days of its history, Brazil has been a favoured ‘laboratory’ for ethnic, cultural and religious hybridization. The absence or scarcity of white women and the temptations of sexual exoticism drove the Portuguese discoverers, and with them sailors from Normandy, Brittany and Poitou, to have relations with Indian women they chanced to meet, thus creating a race of coloured people, oddly called mamelucos, later cabocles (of mixed white and Indian ethnicity). Afterwards, the very substantial recourse to the Negro (...) slave trade and to manpower of African slave origin because of the requirements of the sugarcane economy (which remained predominant for a long time, especially in the Nordeste region of Bahia and Pernambuco), as well as the numerical imbalance of the sexes, characterized by a great predominance of men, popularized concubinage - all the more so because the Catholic Church was extremely reluctant to sanction interethnic unions with the sacrament of marriage. The Jesuits even recommended the despatch of white prostitutes or women condemned by common law (degredadas), for whom Brazil would furnish the opportunity for redemption, in order to avoid or reduce the number of unions of this kind. Thus, concubinage was the most common vehicle of miscegenation in Brazil. (shrink)

Background: The relationship between healthcare professionals and patients in the Spanish health sector has undergone dramatic change. One aspect of this is that the use of informed consent has become a key factor in the delivery of adequate healthcare. But although a certain period of time has already passed since informed consent started to be used, in Spain there is still doubt about how adequately informed consent is being used. Objectives: (a) To look at how patients understand the notion and (...) purpose of informed consent, and (b) how the informed consent is applied – the way patients receive such information affects their level of participation and decision making during the time they receive medical care. Methodology: We use interpretative description of interviews with patients. We developed guiding questions for the interviews with patients in two preliminary and exploratory focus groups. Then, we carried out 20 personal open-ended interviews with 20 purposive selected patients with illnesses that had a serious impact on their lives. Ethical considerations: Permission from ethical committees and institutions involved in the study, and consent and confidentiality were ensured before conducting the research. Results: The findings show that while patients agreed that their consent should be necessary for health professionals to be able to intervene, they had serious difficulty obtaining and then understanding information offered to them at the moment when they were being asked to sign informed consent documents. The participants were critical of the consent documents, which they considered were treated as merely a formality and even some of them had felt coerced to sign. Discussion: Participants confirmed that the informed consent documents that they signed did not meet their ethical objectives. Their perception of the purpose of consent indicates that informed consent document may still be largely understood as a formality rather an ethical obligation. (shrink)

The article analyzes the main manners of conceptualizing the public realm in political thinking of the late 20th century. The four principal focus of thinking are: the igualitarian liberalism of Rawls; the theory of the communicative action of Habermas; the libertarian liberalism of Nozick and Narveson and the political perfectionism of Taylor, Sandel and Walzer.

El monoteísmo musulmán insiste en dos aspectos divinos. Por una parte Dios es «todo misericordia», por otra parte es Uno y totalmente diferente del ser humano. La insistencia de los teólogos musulmanes a lo largo de la historia en este segundo aspecto aleja a Dios de los creyentes. El sentimiento religioso de los fieles ha intentado por diversas vías acercarse a la divinidad. Las vías más importantes han sido la mediación del profeta Muhammad y de los santos, así como la (...) vía del diálogo interior de los místicos. (shrink)

Almost all scholars of the Enlightenment consider Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke as the founding theorists of the “secular modern state.” In contrast to the widely held view of the modern state, I argue that far from being “secular” it was the product of the sacralization of politics, which resulted from the way these philosophers interpreted the Scriptures as part of their philosophical inquiries. The analysis of the “linguistic turn” in their biblical interpretations reveals how they tried to undermine the power (...) of the Church to claim greater freedoms for the state. Their philosophical inquiries initiated the secularization of the Christian religion and the sacralization of politics as two correlative developments, rather than the secularization of the state per se, as is usually supposed. The philosophical arguments proposed by Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke helped to resolve the religious battles of Europe’s many confessions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but are still pertinent to our c... (shrink)

The article addresses the question of whether Derrida in his political theology can be considered an “unfaithful” reader of Schmitt. While Derrida does not quote Schmitt’s Political Theology, some of his assertions are reminiscent of Schmitt’s disciplinary use of political theology. Indeed, Schmitt’s account of the relationship between exception, decision, and sovereignty was abundantly discussed in Derrida’s last seminar, The Beast and the Sovereign. Derrida attempts in this seminar to deconstruct the sovereignty of the nation-state and its onto-theologico-political foundation. The (...) question I raise in this article is whether, in previous years, Derrida himself had not implicitly made a different political theology that, considering the negative theological path, develops an alternative idea of power. The hypothesis explored is that this alternative paradigm is derived from one of the names of the impossible: the gift. (shrink)

Despite secular trends in some countries, prestige-based authority in the form of religious leadership remains hugely influential in the everyday lives of millions of people around the world. Here, the costs and benefits of religious leadership are explored in an urban setting in northeastern Brazil. An economic game, within-group cooperation questionnaires, and social network analyses were carried out among adherents of an Afro-Brazilian religion. Results reveal that leaders display high levels of religious commitment and disproportionally provide cooperative services to group (...) members. On the other hand, initiates cooperate less than leaders but do not differ in levels of received cooperation or social cohesion measures. This may indicate some level of exploitation or free-riding. Demographic and group variables also appear to play an important role in the degree of social cohesion a group achieves. These findings are discussed in the context of non-Western urban settings where religious leadership may represent both an alternative to social advancement and a crucial source of material aid, social support, and a strong sense of community. (shrink)

This book presents the idea of Nomos of the Earth as the key idea that organizes the whole of Schmitt’s discourse about politics.

De Bie et al. (2023) introduces a framework to conceptualize ethical issues based on four different domains, but the problem lies in the domains being falsely bounded. Apart from the step from doma...

Je me propose ici d’esquisser une certaine position ontologique subjectiviste sui generis en esthétique et de la justifier contre ses opositeurs. Je vais soutenir que cette position est liée à une métaesthétique normativiste modérée, où les propriétés esthétiques, même si elles sont pas considerée comme indépendates de l’esprit face aux propriétés descriptives, ne sont pas relatives à chaque psychologie individuelle ou à une institution intersubjective déterminée. Contre le subjectivisme indi-vidualiste, cette position ne s’avère pas antinormativiste, en ce qu’elle n’accepte pas (...) ce que j’appelle ‘la thèse de l’égalité du jugement esthéti-que’, issue de l’argument de la divergence. D’un autre côté, contre le normativisme extrême de l’objectivisme, elle rejette l ‘existence de nor-mes esthétiques universelles, bien qu’elle reconnaisse l’existence de rela-tions de survenance entre des propriétés non-esthétiques et des proprié-tes esthétiques. Or, en partant d’une métaesthétique normativiste mini-maliste comme celle-ci, on peut soutenir que les jugements esthétiques , s’ils sont relatifs à un certain type de réaction psychologique, appartiennent cependant à ‘l’espace des raisons’sans devoir payer les conséquences d’affirmer, comme les partisans du normativisme extrême qu’il y a des normes esthétiques stricte-ment universelles. (shrink)

The Great Palace of Constantinople has been subject to several investigations since the second half of the nineteenth century. All of them have been mostly concerned with the topographical, architectural and typological development of the imperial residence, leaving aside questions such as toponymics. This paper will deal with this issue taking into consideration the name of the complex of buildings that once was the core of the Constantinian Palace, the Daphne. Doing so, we will better understand the denomination of the (...) Palace, and shed light on the functions related to several spaces, the courtly ritual and, in short, the representation of power through architecture in an imperial context. Besides, the present enquiry will challenge some topographical assumptions on the complex. (shrink)

La palabra cultura tiene, por lo menos, un doble sentido, uno primario y otro suplementario. El primero hace referencia a habilidades básicas y el segundo a destrezas adquiridas. El presente trabajo se ocupa de la cultura en el primer sentido, de la cultura que adquirimos con sólo nacer y criarnos en un determinado medio humano, en el medio particular donde nos hacemos individuos y capacitamos como personas. Existe un derecho a la cultura propia. Los Estados amparan las culturas con las (...) que se identifican y, por lo tanto, el derecho a las mismas de las gentes individuadas y socializadas gracias a ellas, al tiempo que han podido perfectamente acometer políticas genocidas con el resto. He ahí en definitiva la razón esquizofrénica por la que un derecho tan esencial como el derecho a la cultura propia no se ha cualificado hasta hoy como derecho humano. El problema no es la falta de algún derecho que debiera añadirse, sino la articulación del conjunto de los derechos humanos y, particularmente, los de carácter individual con los colectivos. Es un problema que no se plantea con los derechos humanos en sí, sino con el actual orden internacional y su correspondiente filosofía. (shrink)