El artículo presenta el análisis de las implicaciones de evaluar la comprensión de lectura y la redacción en pruebas de ingreso a la educación superior, como una consideración necesaria para el desarrollo de una política de competencia comunicativa. Se describe el diseño de un instrumento, partiendo de la concepción sociosemiótica de la lengua, del enfoque metodológico de la comprensión por niveles intra, inter y extratextual, ligado a procesos cognitivos, y la escritura como tecnología. Se incluye, además, un concepto de evaluación (...) enmarcado en el desarrollo de competencia, es decir, los resultados de la prueba se utilizan, por fuera de concepciones deterministas excluyentes, para mostrar un estado de la competencia y las acciones posibles de mejoramiento de la misma. La competencia comunicativa se demuestra como saber transversal, inter y transdisciplinario. (shrink)

Theories related to cognitive sciences, Human-in-the-loop Cyber-physical systems, data analysis for decision-making, and computational ethics make clear the need to create transdisciplinary learning, research, and application strategies to bring coherence to the paradigm of a truly human-oriented technology. Autonomous objects assume more responsibilities for individual and collective phenomena, they have gradually filtered into routines and require the incorporation of ethical practice into the professions related to the development, modeling, and design of algorithms. To make this possible, it is pertinent and (...) urgent to bring them closer to the problems and approaches of the humanities. Increasingly transdisciplinary research must be part of the construction of systems that provide developers and scientists with the necessary bases to understand the ethical debate and therefore their commitment to society. This article considers two theories as articulating axes: Blumenberg’s, coming from the field of philosophy, for whom the process of technification and especially the implementation of mathematical models in their algorithmic form leads to an emptying of meaning and therefore makes programmers who implement their functions to be alien to the concerns that gave them origin; Daston’s, belonging to the field of the history of science and according to which the division of labor in the processes of technification of the calculation implies a kind of subordination in which those who implement the inventions of a small group of privileged mathematicians ignore the procedures that put them into operation. Given these two theories, the black box models prevalent in AI development, and the urgency of establishing explanatory frameworks for the development of computational ethics, this article exposes the need to give a voice to the cultural history of consciousness for promoting the discussions around the implementation of mathematical algorithms. The paper takes as a reference the different points of view that have emerged around the study of technological ethics, its applicability, management, and design. It criticizes the current state of studies from a humanistic perspective and explains how the historical perspective allows promoting the training of software engineers, developers and creators so that they assume intuitions and moral values in the development of their work. Specifically, it aims to expose how cultural history, applied to the study of consciousness and its phenomena, makes those involved in this technological revolution aware of the effect that they, through their algorithms, have on society in general and on human beings in particular. (shrink)

Considering the transformation of educational scenarios, we recognize the need to train foreign language teachers with high pedagogical, research, and technological skills. This recognition considers the new challenges of education and aligns with the educational discourses and commitments that are shaped by the curricular proposals of foreign language programs in higher education. It is necessary to know the level of competencies of teacher trainers, university lecturers, to identify possible ongoing training needs. This research uses a mixed-methods design with an exploratory-descriptive (...) approach that contributes to the educational instructions to start continuous training plans for their teachers under the policies, global dynamics, and demands of education. The research shows that there are still challenges to confront, as teachers still have opportunities to strengthen their pedagogical, educational, and new technology competencies. This is a challenge that institutions should address in the rigorous implementation of lifelong learning programs. (shrink)

Some recent uses of artificial intelligence for facial recognition, evaluating resumes, and sorting photographs by subject matter have revealed troubling disparities in performance or impact based on the demographic traits of subject populations. These disparities raise pressing questions about how using artificial intelligence can work to promote justice or entrench injustice. Political theorists and philosophers have developed nuanced vocabularies and theoretical frameworks for understanding and adjudicating disputes about what justice requires and what constitutes injustice. The interdisciplinary community committed to understanding (...) and conscientiously using big data could benefit from this work. Thus, in the spirit of encouraging cross-disciplinary dialogue and collaboration, this piece examines contemporary scholarship in political theory and philosophy to illustrate some of the vocabularies and frameworks political theorists and philosophers have developed for thinking about justice and injustice. It then draws on these frameworks to illuminate how the use of artificial intelligence can implicate questions of justice, with a focus on institutional discrimination, structural injustice, and epistemic injustice. Ultimately, the piece argues that the use of artificial intelligence—far from representing a decision to take power out of human hands—represents a novel way of harnessing human power, making questions of justice central to its conscientious undertaking. (shrink)

This essay explores the return of the subject in the computational context, which I address as a digital subject. This digital subject encompasses a digital identifier, correlations in data or a data profile, moving between biological characteristics and symbolic expression. I focus on the processes through which digital subjects are constructed by matching, correlating, modelling, as well as how they become enactive. The ways of pulling data together into a digital subject is often presented as a logic of fact, where (...) data is equated with documentary evidence. Instead, I propose the notion of the distance in which digital subjects are produced. Indexicality comes from outside of data, whereas the regard for the thick distance becomes a mark of the form of knowledge. I conclude by arguing for a posthumanities approach that establishes the distance while allowing for different subjects to be called upon. (shrink)

If a state commits injustice, who is responsible for compensating its victims and safeguarding against future wrongdoing? Do the state’s citizens bear this responsibility? Do they all bear it equally? Avia Pasternak's and Holly Lawford-Smith's recent books address these pressing questions. Each book represents a thought-provoking attempt to derive an account of citizen responsibility for state wrongs from an account of state agency understood as group agency. Though the books demonstrate the promise of this approach to produce action-guiding advice for (...) real policymakers, they also demonstrate its limitations—in particular, its lack of attention to social structures. Here, I argue that Pasternak's and Lawford-Smith's views would be enriched by further engagement with the literature on structural injustice, which takes individuals’ perpetuation of social systems (not their implication in acts of group agency) as a central source of their remedial obligations. Through critical engagement with Pasternak and Lawford-Smith, I illustrate how a structural injustice framework could yield more attractive conclusions than a group agency framework in certain cases, better explain non-culpable forms of citizen responsibility, and allow us to theorize citizen responsibility for state action without making questionable claims about the metaphysics or social ontology of group agency. (shrink)

Ancient critics reproached Xenocrates for beginning his work on the dialectic with a discussion of voice, and until now the question why he did so has never been systematically explored. Neither do we know why Xenocrates counted syllables, as Plutarch reports, and how he arrived at such an implausibly high number. In the first part of this paper, I show that Xenocrates’ interest in voice was suggested by Plato’s discussion of letters in his later dialogues, such as the Theatetus, the (...) Sophist, the Statesman, and the Philebus. Second, a fragment from Sextus attributed to Xenocrates confirms that Xenocrates allowed for various ‘levels’ of elements, and that explains why Theuth’s method, recommended in the Philebus, is applied to syllables. Finally, I address the very possibility of knowing the actual number of syllables and words, and address some of the problems connected to the reconstruction of the mathematical argument. (shrink)

At the bedside, nurses are expected to be precise when they read indications on screens and on the bodies of patients and decide on the meaning of words framed by the context of acute care. In academia, although there is no incident report to fill when we misread or misrepresent complex philosophical ideas, the consequences of inaccurate reading include misplaced epistemological claims and poor scholarship. A long and broad convention of nursing phenomenological research, in its various forms, claims a philosophical (...) grounding in the ideas of Husserl, Heidegger, and other thinkers. But for nearly two decades, nurse phenomenologists' knowledge claims have been challenged by well‐informed criticisms, most notably by John Paley. At the heart of criticism lies an observation that Continental phenomenological thought is misrepresented in many nursing sources and that nursing phenomenology, both descriptive and interpretive, cannot appeal to the authority of either Husserl or Heidegger. Taking these criticisms seriously, I am asking, Is phenomenology after Paley possible? If misreading seems to be an issue, how can – or should – we read rigorously? My thinking through these questions is influenced by the ideas of Jacques Derrida. Under a condition of a play of language, of Derridian différance, when meaning is never self‐identical and never fully arrives, I suggest that one has to negotiate meanings through reading for differences. I develop this idea in relation to the methodological conventions of phenomenological nursing research and argue for a careful rereading of the whole field of phenomenological nursing research. Such rereading presupposes and necessitates interdisciplinary engagement between nursing and the humanities and interpretive social sciences. Greater familiarity with research practices of those disciplines that stress theoretical and writing rigour might make visible the limits of nursing research approaches and their quality criteria. An understanding of philosophical and theoretical works – a condition of quality scholarship – depends on our reading of both originary texts and contemporary literature from the humanities and the social sciences. This understanding, far from obliging researchers to always trace (often erroneously) their work to its philosophical roots, opens other, often more sound, methodological possibilities. (shrink)

Political theorists have written a great deal about the ethics of “intervention,” defined as states using coercion or force to interfere in foreign societies’ politics. But this work leaves much of global politics un-analyzed—both because non-state actors play an increasingly significant role in it and because its practitioners use many tactics besides force and coercion.We need an ethics of foreign influence to help us navigate the global political arena in all its complexity. Here, I begin to develop a unified theory (...) of the ethics of deliberate attempts to promote justice in foreign societies, whether undertaken by state or non-state actors, and whatever tactics they employ. I identify two important but under-appreciated dimensions along which instances of foreign influence can differ and argue that, once we appreciate the full range of forms foreign influence can take, we’ll see it’s often immune to the common moral objections against intervention. (shrink)

Enaction, as put forward by Varela and defended by other thinkers (notably Alva Noë, 2004; Susan Hurley, 2006; and Kevin O’Regan, 1992), departs from traditional accounts that treat mental processes (like perception, reasoning, and action) as discrete, independent processes that are causally related in a sequen- tial fashion. According to the main claim of the enactive approach, which Thompson seems to fully endorse, perceptual awareness is taken to be a skill-based activity. Our perceptual contact with the world, according to the (...) enactionists, is not mediated by representations but is enacted, and the notion of representation, belonging to the classic computational paradigm, has no place in this alternative approach. Though Thompson does not pronounce directly on the issue of representationalism, he is most definitely keeping the company of anti-representationalists, and in that context it is not unreasonable to take his silence for consent. In this paper, we will argue that the enactive approach to imagery is unworkable unless it makes appeal to representations, understood in a particular way. Not understood as pictures, to be sure. Or sentences for that matter. But those aren’t the only options. (shrink)

The role of bacterial variation in the waxing and waning of epidemics was a subject of lively debate in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century bacteriology and epidemiology. The notion that changes in bacterial virulence were responsible for the rise and fall of epidemic diseases was an often-voiced, but little investigated hypothesis made by late nineteenth-century epidemiologists. It was one of the first hypotheses to be tested by scientists who attempted to study epidemiological questions using laboratory methods. This paper examines how (...) two groups of experimental epidemiologists, the British group led by W. W. C. Topley and Major Greenwood, and an American group directed by Leslie T. Webster at the Rockefeller Institute, studied the role of variations in bacterial virulence in the course of laboratory epidemics of mouse typhoid. Relying on Ludwik Fleck’s concept of thought styles and thought collectives, the paper analyzes the fundamental conceptual differences between these two groups of researchers and analyzes the kinds of innovations they introduced as they attempted to integrate bacteriological and epidemiological approaches. The paper shows that the stylistic differences between the two groups can be understood better in the context of the institutional histories and disciplinary relations of epidemiology and bacteriology in the two countries. (shrink)

Views that say corporations can be agents in their own right, metaphysically distinct from their individual members, are increasingly popular. Given the moral significance usually attributed to agency, this raises the question of whether corporate agents have moral rights comparable with those of individual agents. In this article, I argue that, even if we accept corporations can be agents, we must conclude that their moral rights are more limited than, because they are derivative of, the rights of their individual members. (...) In so doing, I offer a version of normative individualism even those who reject methodological individualism should accept. I then apply my findings to criticize the US Supreme Court’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. (shrink)

Our analysis in this paper unfolds on two levels: a critique of the ‘realities’ of graduate nursing education and an argument to sustain its ‘ideals’. We open for discussion an aspect of graduate nursing education dominated by instrumental reason, namely the research industry, using an internal critique approach developed by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno of the Early Frankfurt School. As we explain, internal critique arises out of, and relies on, the mismatch between goals, or ‘ideals’, and existing realities. Thinking (...) about ‘ideals’ of the academy, we draw on Hans-Georg Gadamer's view of the university as a place to think freely, creatively, and critically. The contemporary realities of the university, on the other hand, that emphasize the market values of the research industry forcefully shape nursing academic scholarship in a particular direction. In our attempt to recognize and disrupt the forces of the research industry with its instrumental reason, we consider Judith Butler's writings on how norms operate in society. We show that our growing involvement in the research industry makes it very difficult to disentangle ourselves from that situation. The values of the research industry actually suppress the very ideals of education and scholarship that we would like to uphold. As a contra-force, the internal critique of the ‘existing realities’ in the graduate nursing education unmasks the tyranny of the research industry and makes visible the importance of sustaining the higher goals and ideals in nursing scholarship. (shrink)

In the aftermath of the Fukushima power plant disaster, autoradiography became an increasingly widespread artistic technique for producing cameraless photography. By exposing photographic film directly using contaminated objects and materials, contemporary artists autoradiograph the geopolitics and local histories of atomic contamination due to bombing, testing, nuclear reactor explosions, mining or uranium disposal cells. In my article, I discuss the implications these autoradiographic works have for the concept of photography by drawing on Timothy Morton’s notion of hyperobjects. Being hyperobjective, radioactivity confronts (...) human beings with a vast non-human temporality, which, in turn, necessitates a shift in our understanding of photography. While photo theory has often been modelled on snapshot photography, privileging instantaneity and pastness, autoradiography is a durational and pluri-temporal procedure that points emphatically towards the future and invites us to reconceptualize the basis of photographic ontology. (shrink)

Since the beginning of signed language research, the linguistic units have been divided into conventional, standard and fixed signs, all of which were considered as the core of the language, and iconic and productive signs, put at the edge of language. In the present paper, we will review different models proposed by signed language researchers over the years to describe the signed lexicon, showing how to overcome the hierarchical division between standard and productive lexicon. Drawing from the semiotic insights of (...) Peirce we proposed to look at signs as a triadic construction built on symbolic, iconic, and indexical features. In our model, the different iconic, symbolic, and indexical features of signs are seen as the three sides of the same triangle, detectable in the single linguistic sign. The key aspect is that the dominance of the feature will determine the different use of the linguistic unit, as we will show with examples from different discourse types. (shrink)

Self-medication behaviour is the use of natural materials or chemical substances to manipulate behaviour or alter the body’s response to parasites or pathogens. Self-medication can be preventive, performed before an individual becomes infected or diseased, and/or therapeutic, performed after an individual becomes infected or diseased. We summarized all available reports of self-medication in mammals and reconstructed its evolution. We found that reports of self-medication were restricted to eutherian mammals and evolved at least four times independently. Self-medication was most commonly reported (...) in primates. Detailed analyses of primates suggest that self-medication is a life-history trait associated with body size, absolute brain size and longevity, but we found no support for the hypothesis that self-medication evolved to reduce the costs of social living. Large, longer-lived species might thus benefit uniquely from self-medication. (shrink)

The issue of benefits in international clinical research is highly controversial. Against the background of wide recognition of the need to share benefits of research, the nature of benefits remains strongly contested. Little is known about the perspectives of research populations on this issue and the extent to which research ethics discourses and guidelines are salient to the expectations and aspirations existing on the ground. This exploratory study contributes to filling this void by examining perspectives of people in low-income South (...) African communities on benefits in international clinical research. Twenty-four individuals with and without experience of being involved in clinical research participated in in-depth interviews. Respondents felt that ancillary care should be provided to clinical research participants, while a clinical study conducted in particular community should bring better health to its members through post-trial benefits. Respondents' perspectives were grounded in the perception that the ultimate goal of international clinical research is to improve local health. We argue that perspectives and understandings of the respondents are shaped by local moral traditions rather than clinical research specificities and require attention as valid moral claims. It is necessary to acknowledge such claims and cultural worlds from which they emerge, thus building the foundation for equal and embracing dialogue to bridge different perspectives and handle contradicting expectations. (shrink)

This book explores when, and using what means, global political actors are morally justified in promoting their own ideas of justice in foreign societies. It develops ethical principles we can use to judge when such activities (“reform interventions”) are justified. In so doing, it re-conceives the traditional boundaries of politics and lays the foundation for a politically-engaged cosmopolitanism.

The intentionality of improvisation represents surely one of the most pressing and controversial issues in contemporary action theory: how do we find the way to characterize the proper intentionality of improvisation, which is an unplanned yet intentional action? This article will address this question bringing together Merleau-Ponty’s motor intentionality and Bergson’s conception of duration. My argument will unfold in three main stages. First, I will briefly describe the traditional scheme that is used to think of intentional action in contemporary action (...) theory and discuss how the phenomenon of improvisation casts doubts on it. Second, I will outline an initial, and provisional account of improvisation by crossing the descriptions of musical improvisation provided by Jankélévitch with the testimonials of two improvisatory composers—Enrico Pieranunzi and Keith Jarrett—and reports from Charles Rosen, an American pianist and Roger Sessions, an American composer. Finally, I will refine the basic concepts and lay out a phenomenological account of improvisation, by extending and applying the phenomenological notion of motor intentionality to the examples and testimonials gathered from the observation of a specific kind of improvisatory activity—musical composition. This methodology is intended to contrast both with more standard philosophical approaches based on hypothetical examples, and with more standard laboratory-based methodologies in cognitive sciences, psychology, and experimental philosophy. Overall, this approach is intended to redress the balance of action theory—one-sided directed towards planning, as a key aspect of human agency—with an analysis of the bodily and responsive aspect of intentionality. (shrink)

In this paper I present a way of formally representing proper names in accordance with a description theory of reference–fixing and show that such arepresentation makes it possible to retain the claim about the rigidity of proper names and is not vulnerable to Kripke’s modal objection.

The essay deals with the mechanism of interpretation for legal metaphorical expressions. Firstly, it points out the perspective the cognitive approach induced about legal metaphors; then it suggests that this perspective gains in plausibility when a new bilateral model of language understanding is endorsed. A possible sketch of the meaning-making procedure for legal metaphors, compatible with this new model, is then proposed, and illustrated with some examples built on concepts belonging to the Italian Civil Code. The insights the bilateral model (...) of understanding provides are compared with the practice followed by legal communities for dealing with the metaphorical expressions they coin and use. (shrink)

During early embryonic development in several metazoans, accurate DNA replication is ensured by high number of replication origins. This guarantees rapid genome duplication coordinated with fast cell divisions. In Xenopus laevis embryos this program switches to one with a lower number of origins at a developmental stage known as mid‐blastula transition (MBT) when cell cycle length increases and gene transcription starts. Consistent with this regulation, somatic nuclei replicate poorly when transferred to eggs, suggesting the existence of an epigenetic memory suppressing (...) replication assembly origins at all available sites. Recently, it was shown that histone H1 imposes a non‐permissive chromatin configuration preventing replication origin assembly on somatic nuclei. This somatic state can be erased by SSRP1, a subunit of the FACT complex. Here, we further develop the hypothesis that this novel form of epigenetic memory might impact on different areas of vertebrate biology going from nuclear reprogramming to cancer development. (shrink)

This paper is a novel attempt at reconstructing Kant’s account of self-consciousness in the first Critique by making evident its gradual expository progression, and at identifying the epistemic status of the two modes of self-consciousness: pure and empirical. I trace the gradual exposition of theoretical self-consciousness across three crucial parts of the book: the Transcendental Deduction, the Refutation of Idealism, and the Paralogisms of Pure Reason. In doing so, I show that the account of theoretical self-consciousness is not presented to (...) us all at once, but is progressively expanded and filled in. I also emphasize the importance of the distinction between the subject’s awareness of its existence, “Dasein”, and of its existence, “Existenz”. I conclude by discussing Kant’s preliminary remarks about practical self-consciousness in the Paralogisms, which bear an important relation to theoretical self-consciousness. (shrink)

In 1929 Ludwig Wittgenstein met Raffaello Piccoli, the Serena Professor of Italian, with whom he arranged several meetings in the following terms. For a long time their intellectual friendship was suggested only by the occurrences of Piccoli’s name in Wittgenstein’s Cambridge Pocket Diaries, then a paper about Piccoli including hypothesis on his meetings with Wittgenstein was published (Marjanović 2005), and more recently, the diaries of a student of both Piccoli and Wittgenstein in 1929 – 1930 were discovered. The new material, (...) on the background of data now available about Piccoli’s life and works, throws new light onto his relationship with Wittgenstein, and hypothesis on the topics of their conversations are also advanced. Piccoli’s perspective on the difference between ethics, religion and philosophy on the one hand and science on the other was in tune with Wittgenstein’s view and similar was also their aversion towards scientism; furthermore, Piccoli had read many of the authors for which Wittgenstein showed an interest in 1930 – 1931 – Freud, Spengler, Frazer, Augustine, and also James. (shrink)

Two hypotheses concerning the relative importance of agentic versus communal traits as predictors of selfesteem were tested. The perspective hypothesis assumed that self-esteem is dominated by agency over communion because self-perceptions are formed from the agent perspective. The culture hypothesis assumed that self-esteem is dominated by communal concerns in collectivistic cultures and by agentic concerns in individualistic cultures. Study 1 involving three samples from collectivistic countries and three from individualistic ones found that self-esteem was better predicted from self-ratings of agentic (...) than communal traits, with the exception of collectivistic women for whom the two predictors were equal. Study 2 primed the interdependent or independent self and found self-ratings of agency to be better predictors of self-esteem than self-ratings of communion, with the exception of interdependence priming,where the two predictors were equal in strength. (shrink)

The article is dedicated to highlighting the concepts of humanism, neohumanism, posthumanism, transhumanism, their reading through the prism of pedagogical science and practice. The text is based on analysis of Ukrainian, French, and Polish sources, as well as own considerations. It has been found that the classical interpretation of humanism during the last decades has been subject to revision by various researchers due to the growing contradictions between the social, economic, and spiritual needs of society and the consideration of humanism (...) with its anthropocentric attitude towards man as the measure of all things. It was found that they led to an expanded and modified understanding of it, which was called neohumanism (new humanism). The article describes the researchers’ interpretation of neohumanism, which is based on moral and ethical ideas and ideals that relate to philosophical, ecological, pedagogical and other aspects of human life. It was noted that because of the sharp growth of new technologies, two concepts critical to humanism/ neohumanism emerged – posthumanism and transhumanism. The text reveals the concept of posthumanism, which, according to the researchers, considers man in unity, merging with machines, technological devices, that is, human and non-human. The main characteristics of post-humanist trends are provided, which testify to the gradual disappearance of man as an active and self-sufficient effective person. It is noted that, accordingly, transhumanism, as a radicalized branch of posthumanism, is focused on the use of technologies with the aim of creating a physically and mentally perfect person (Homo Perfectus), when the difference between man and machine is erased. It is shown how these processes affect the modern education system, which absorbs new technologies at an accelerated pace, replacing its traditional tools for teaching reading, writing, arithmetic, aimed at the formation of «long» memory, with technological devices. The article also raises the issue of neo-humanism, which is biocentric in nature, and in the pedagogical aspect manifests itself as a humane attitude towards nature, living beings, primarily animals. Such a trend becomes especially relevant in the context of ecocide caused by Russia’s military actions against Ukraine. A conclusion was made about the need to get acquainted with these processes, taking them into account for the development of the modern domestic educational space. (shrink)

In this article, the relationship between ethics in general and business ethics in particular to Stoic philosophy is investigated. Stoic ethics is used as a research tool, which step-by-step deciphers the position of the human as a functional part of a larger organization, such as the natural environment or civil society. Ethics is inextricably linked to the rational, free choice of what is right for both the individual and the total organism. Ethical rightness imposes a form of rational order within (...) the organization, in the sense that each part must perform the function appropriate to its abilities. At the maximum degree of ethical integration stands the paradigm of the Stoic sage as a model of a virtuous leader, who is able to understand the causes of each decision or action and direct the organization towards the set goal. From this perspective, concepts such as leadership, organizational ethics, or corporate social responsibility acquire an objective status and view the philosophical cosmopolitanism of the Stoic sage as a timeless example of ethical rightness. (shrink)

Here, I reply to three commentaries on my recent book, Promoting Justice Across Borders: The Ethics of Reform Intervention. The main topics include the scope of the category “reform intervention,” to what extent it is appropriate to evaluate economic activity using moral criteria, the meaning of collective self-determination and its relationship to democracy, and the limits of toleration as a moral ideal.

Throughout history, religion has had a significant and lasting influence on the structure of human civilizations. Its effect shapes people's and communities' collective consciousness on a cultural, ethical, and political level. The complex relationship between religion and the different aspects of modern life changes as societies do. In order to better understand the complex relationship between tradition and modernity and the effects of religious rituals, institutions, and beliefs on social cohesiveness, identity formation, and ethical frameworks, this article will explore the (...) many facets of religion in contemporary society. Setting this research within the larger historical framework is crucial to comprehending the function of religion in modern society. Since the beginning of human society, religion has played a crucial role in shaping political systems, ethical standards, and cultural norms. However, the importance of religion is prone to change as the world experiences significant shifts, such as globalization and technological advancements. By exploring the complicated ways in which religion continues to shape and be molded by the intricate fabric of modern society, this study aims to close knowledge gaps. This paper has two goals in mind. In order to create a full understanding of the relationship between religion rituals in fostering community cohesion, it first attempts to provide a thorough survey of the literature, drawing on multidisciplinary viewpoints from sociology, anthropology, psychology, and religious studies. Second, it aims to provide insightful information to the continuing discussion over how religion either promotes or undermines social harmony. This research aims to shed insight on the various ways that religion continues to be a powerful factor in creating the society we live in by observing at the historical development of this relationship and investigating modern manifestations. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that descriptive content associated with a proper name can serve as a truth-conditionally relevant adjunct and be an additional contribution of the name to the truth-conditions. Definite descriptions the so-and-so associated by speakers with a proper name can be used as qualifying prepositional phrases as so-and-so, so sentences containing a proper name NN is doing something could be understood as NN is doing something as NN (which means as so-and-so). Used as an adjunct, the descriptive (...) content of a proper name expresses the additional circumstances of an action (a manner, reason, goal, time or purpose) and constitute a part of a predicate. I argue that qualifying prepositional phrases should be analyzed as predicate modifiers and propose a formal representation of modified predicates. The additional truth-conditional relevance of the descriptive content of a proper name helps to explain the phenomenon of the substitution failure of coreferential names in simple sentences. (shrink)