In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Latin American Existentialist Ethos: Modern Mexican Literature and Philosophy by Stephanie MerrimTadd RuetenikA Latin American Existentialist Ethos: Modern Mexican Literature and Philosophy Stephanie Merrim. SUNY Series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture. State U of New York P, 2023.If it seems like there is more turmoil in the world than usual, then existentialism seems more relevant than usual. Wars and rumors of (...) wars threaten to shift political boundaries and unsettle moral attitudes. Perhaps this is an opportunity for new philosophical investment in places not previously considered to be philosophically relevant. In the Western Hemisphere, this would mean directing attention south of the US border. [End Page 86]Stephanie Merrim's A Latin American Existentialist Ethos: Modern Mexican Literature and Philosophy encourages us to make this kind of redirection. I think the most valuable part of the book is Merrim's explanation of how Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus influenced Mexican philosophy, creating along with Catholicism a new philosophical situation. This signals an opportunity for those of us becoming productively bored with a traditional American philosophy centered on US philosophers. Merrim's work describes the birth, ascendance, and recession of the Grupo Hiperión, a creative friendship that led to the development of Mexico's philosophical and literary signature. "Hiperión's capacious existentialism sees no disjunction between freedom and advocating particular values" (58), Merrim concludes, adding later that its Latin American context produces a "theologically informed communitarianism" (59). This involves considering Sartre rather than, say, Peirce, James, and Dewey. It involves filling in "the gaps in ethics that eventuate from the French philosopher's commitment to ontology as well as from the aporias in his ethical thinking." In short, she says, "Hiperión supplements Sartre" (58).This is inspiring. The more standard view of American philosophy is that it has origins in European empiricism. Jonathan Edwards, for example, can be interpreted as one who adapts John Locke to a Puritan theological context. After this, there is a gradual dropping of the theological context. The focus remains on the United States, its development as a world power, and its leadership in advanced technology. The correlative philosophical development is thought to culminate in pragmatism, and then there seems to be an attempt to preserve it for a while by adding a "neo-" prefix.It's not that pragmatism and neo-pragmatism are bad. But their development correlates with the US domination of Latin America. As Merrim implies early in the work, existentialism is used to "shake us out of a mechanical existence, to destabilize us, awaken and prime us for happiness" (3). It is not that existentialism is used to destabilize; it's just that it appears on the scene whenever instability is present. Essence is always in creation, and all that can be said at this point is that the United States should not prescribe itself as the model for the creation of a Latin American ethos.It is on this point that I begin a small criticism of a book that is otherwise valuable in pointing many of us toward new scholarship and new interests. The problem is first evident in the translation notes, which indicate that "in order to engage a host of constituencies, this book translates into English all non-English material." This attempt by the author "to reach a broad readership" (ix) is an unnecessary accommodation. People in the United States [End Page 87] should have no less of an obligation to learn Spanish as the rest of the Hemisphere has had to learn English.When we move from language to philosophy, we see a similar over-accommodation. The author tries, but seems to have difficulty incorporating pragmatism into this new philosophical and literary movement. One example of this is the author's use of pragmatism in reference to a part of Rosario Castellanos's novel Rito de iniciación (Aguilar, 1997). One of the characters proposes a marriage of convenience that Merrim says would provide "a net pragmatism but not pragmatic authenticity" (175). If one has to contrast an authentic from a non-authentic version of a philosophy, it seems better to say that authenticity itself is... (shrink)

We applaud Domjan et al. for providing an elegant account of Pavlovian feed-forward mechanisms in social behavior that eschews the pitfall of purposivism. However, they seem to imply that they have provided a complete account without provision for operant conditioning. We argue that operant conditioning plays a central role in social behavior, giving examples from fish and infant behavior.

Most current modeling for evolution of communication still underplays or ignores the role of local action in spatialized environments: the fact that it is immediate neighbors with which one tends to communicate, and from whom one learns strategies or conventions of communication. Only now are the lessons of spatialization being learned in a related field: game-theoretic models for cooperation. In work on altruism, on the other hand, the role of spatial organization has long been recognized under the term ‘viscosity’. Here (...) we offer some simple simulations that dramatize the importance of spatialization for studies of both cooperation and communication, in each case contrasting a model dynamics in which strategy change proceeds globally, and a spatialized model dynamics in which interaction and strategy change both operate purely locally. Local action in a spatialized model clearly favors the emergence of cooperation. In the case of communication, spatialized models allow communication to arise and flourish where the global dynamics more typical in the literature make it impossible. Simulations make a dramatic case for spatialized modeling, but analysis proves difficult. In a final section we outline some of the surprises of spatial dynamics but also some of the complexity facing attempts at deeper analysis. (shrink)

Il est convenu de considérer dans la littérature scientifique que Delphes a eu, comme Délos, « Apollon pour rempart ». De l’arrivée des Amphictions, au plus tard au moment de ce qu’il est convenu d’appeler la Première Guerre sacrée (début du vie s. av. J.‑C.), jusqu’à la fin du paganisme, le sanctuaire et la cité de Delphes ont en effet été protégés par l’interdit religieux que les membres de l’Association internationale étaient chargés de faire respecter. Cette configuration politico-religieuse a évité (...) à la petite cité des Delphiens d’avoir à assumer la charge de défendre le riche sanctuaire. De cet idéal antique a résulté un vide scientifique et bibliographique, alors même que les études sur les fortifications ou, plus largement, sur les systèmes défensifs, ont été nombreuses ces dernières décennies. Les fouilles menées en 2017 et 2018 ont cependant permis en quelques semaines de renouveler entièrement le questionnement sur les fortifications de Delphes dans l'Antiquité. (shrink)

The goal of this study is to characterize observers’ abilities to detect gradual changes and to explore putative dissociations between conscious experience of change and behavioral adaptation to a changing stimulus. We developed a new experimental paradigm in which, on each trial, participants were shown a dot pattern on the screen. Next, the pattern disappeared and participants had to reproduce it. In some conditions, the target pattern was incrementally rotated over successive trials and participants were either informed or not of (...) this change. We analyzed both awareness of the changes and the dynamics of behavioral adaptation, in a way that makes it possible to assess both variability and accuracy as they change over time. Results indicate a dissociation between change awareness and behavioral adaptation to the changes, and support the notion that unconscious representations of visual stimuli are more precise and detailed than previously suggested. We discuss the implications of these results for theories of change detection. (shrink)

Taking care of a hyperactive child at school gives 2 meanings to the word ‘care’: worrying about a vulnerable person and health care with the recognition of his behaviour disorder, the unruly pupil becomes a disabled pupil. But how does an undisciplined pupil become a psychiatric case? How do you recognise a hyperactive child at school, that is, from a medical point of view, a child with ADD/ADHD (Attention Deficient Disorder with or without Hyperactivity)? Teachers contribute to the medical diagnosis (...) by filling in behavioural tests. Then, in order to be taken care of, the child will need to have his hyperactivity recognised as a disability. To help the teacher, the doctor will give them advice on how to teach the child. Nevertheless, this desirable partnership raises difficulties. Between a paramedical support teacher and an educationalist doctor isn’t there a risk of witnessing a dilution of roles? The lifting of doctor-patient confidentiality called for by some teachers is emblematic of this confusion. Canguilhem’s distinction between normal and pathological will guide our reflection on the medical care of the hyperactive child at school. This case arouses an ethical issue about the medicalisation of our society. (shrink)

Why do some global health initiatives receive priority from international and national political leaders while others receive minimal attention? We propose a framework for analyzing this question consisting of four categories of factors: the strength of the actors involved in the initiative, the power of the ideas they use to frame the issue, the nature of the political contexts in which they operate, and characteristics of the issue itself.We apply this framework to the case of a global initiative to reduce (...) maternal mortality, launched in 1987. Using a process-tracing methodology commonly employed in qualitative research, we conducted archival research and interviewed actors involved in the initiative. We find that despite two decades of effort the initiative remains in an early phase of development, hampered by difficulties in all these categories. However, the initiative's twentieth anniversary year, 2007, presents opportunities to build political momentum. To generate political priority advocates will need to address several challenges, including the creation of effective institutions to guide the initiative and the development of a public positioning of the issue that convinces political leaders to act.We draw on the framework and case study to suggest areas for future research on the determinants of political priority for global health initiatives, a subject that has attracted much speculation but little scholarship. (shrink)

The "Dark Side" of Humour. An Analysis of Subversive Humour in Workplace Emails Although a substantial amount of research has investigated the various functions of humour in a workplace context, electronic means of communication have largely been ignored. This is particularly surprising since electronic communication in the workplace is increasingly gaining significance. This seems to be especially true for email, which in many workplaces is the preferred medium for communicating transactional as well as relational topics. Drawing on a corpus of (...) about 100 emails collected in an academic setting, we explore how humour is used in workplace emails. Our specific focus is on subversive humour, which often functions as a tool to express frustration and dissent, and ultimately to challenge existing power relations. Our analysis illustrates that subversive humour is an excellent means to make fun of established and normative workplace practices by exaggerating and ridiculing them, and to re-define organisational reality by offering alternative interpretations. These functions of subversive humour appear to be particularly useful for those in relatively powerful positions: by employing humour to convey critical and potentially threatening messages in acceptable ways, the senders manage to express their dissent and frustration with the wider organisational system while, at the same time, escaping the scrutiny of the very organisation that they are symbolically challenging. (shrink)

“Antibiotic resistance is usually associated with a fitness cost” is frequently accepted as common knowledge in the field of infectious diseases. However, with the advances in high‐throughput DNA sequencing that allows for a comprehensive analysis of bacterial pathogenesis at the genome scale, including antibiotic resistance genes, it appears that this paradigm might not be as solid as previously thought. Recent studies indicate that antibiotic resistance is able to enhance bacterial fitness in vivo with a concomitant increase in virulence during infections. (...) As a consequence, strategies to minimize antibiotic resistance turn out to be not as simple as initially believed. Indeed, decreased antibiotic use may not be sufficient to let susceptible strains outcompete the resistant ones. Here, we put in perspective these findings and review alternative approaches, such as preventive and therapeutic anti‐bacterial immunotherapies that have the potential to by‐pass the classic antibiotics. (shrink)

Sarah Grand was one of the most prominent New Women of the 1890s and a notable social purity feminist and suffragist. This collection offers important insights into the full range of her journalistic output and lesser-known fictional writings. It also makes available biographical and autobiographical material, and previously unpublished manuscript sources. The first volume reproduces Grand's articles and the contemporary critical reception of her work. The letters in volume two, written mostly in the 1920s and 1930s, shed light on Grand's (...) genesis as a writer and her interaction with 1890s artistic and feminist circles. The third and fourth volumes contain a selection of short stories from three collections published at and after the turn of the century. These comment on some of the explosive issues of that time: feminism, decadence, eugenics, class, race and war. They also reflect Grand's exploration of the interplay between gender and genre. (shrink)

La réaffirmation des constantes de la responsabilité dans les différents projets de réforme de cette matière marque la fonction réparatrice de cette institution, bien que les auteurs des propositions se soient, pour la plupart, contentés d’une codification à droit constant, loin de grandes ruptures conceptuelles, marquant la stabilité des conditions relatives au préjudice et au lien de causalité.

This paper explores how power relations are enacted and negotiated in the largely under-researched non-hierarchal leadership constellation of distributed leadership. Drawing on more than 300 hours of audio-recorded interactions of a corpus of interdisciplinary research group meetings, we analyse how members of a team that does not have an officially assigned leader or chair regularly draw on teasing thereby enacting and reflecting, as well as sometimes challenging existing power relations. Findings show that the highly ambiguous discursive strategy of teasing enables (...) all members, regardless of their official role or position, to contribute to the team’s leadership performance. However, findings also show that although teasing has the potential to facilitate more collaborative approaches to leadership, the ways in which power is actually enacted in our data resembles more traditional hierarchical leadership constellations. (shrink)

Studies of corporate social performance (CSP) research indicate the critical importance of research design and methodology in developing and testing CSP theories. In this paper we analyze data from a study of environmental performance in the U.S. wine industry to demonstrate how the research methodologies can cause researchers to reach different theoretical conclusions from the same data. We conclude that structural equation modeling (SEM) offers CSP researchers valuable tools that can accommodate critical theory development needs.

"The world of perception, that is to say that which is revealed to us by our senses and by the use of life, seems at first sight the best known to us, since there is no need for instruments or calculations to access it, and it suffices, apparently, to open our eyes and let ourselves live to enter it. Yet this is only a false appearance. I would like to show in these talks that it is largely ignored by us (...) as long as we remain in the practical or utilitarian attitude, that it has taken a great deal of time, effort and culture to bring it to fruition, naked, and that it is one of the merits of modern art and thought (by that I mean art and thought for 50 or 70 years) to make us rediscover this world where we live but which we are always tempted to forget. ” Maurice Merleau-Ponty. (shrink)

Securing the internet has arguably become paradigmatic for modern security practice, not only because modern life is considered to be impossible or valueless if disconnected, but also because emergent cyber-relations and their complex interconnections are refashioning traditional security logics. This paper analyses European modes of governing geared toward securing vital, emergent cyber-systems in the face of the interconnected emergency. It develops the concept of ‘bureaucratic vitalism’ to get at the tension between the hierarchical organization and reductive knowledge frames of security (...) apparatuses on the one hand, and the increasing desire for building ‘resilient’, dispersed, and flexible security assemblages on the other. The bureaucratic/vital juxtaposition seeks to capture the way in which cybersecurity governance takes emergent, complex systems as object and model without fully replicating this ideal in practice. Thus, we are concerned with the question of what happens when security apparatuses appropriate and translate vitalist concepts into practice. Our case renders visible the banal bureaucratic manoeuvres that seek to operate upon security emergencies by fostering connectivities, producing agencies, and staging exercises. (shrink)

Nancy Cartwright's charge against horizontal reductionism leads to a claim about how the world is, namely "dappled." By proposing a simple thought-experiment, I show that Cartwright's division of the world into "nomological" machines and "messy" systems for which no law applies is meaningless. The thought-experiment shows that for a system, having the property of being a nomological machine depends on what kind of questions you ask about it. No metaphysical conclusion about the world being unruly or not can be drawn (...) from a division that is question-dependent. Moreover, I argue that this predicament undermines Cartwright's attempt to provide an illustration of how bad metaphysics of science translates into bad scientific methodologies and policies. (shrink)

My main aim in this paper is to show that influential antireductionist arguments such as Fodor's, Kitcher's, and Dupré's state stronger conclusions than they actually succeed in establishing. By putting to the fore the role of metaphysical presuppositions in these arguments, I argue that they are convincing only as 'temporally qualified argument', and not as 'generally valid ones'. I also challenge the validity of the strategy consisting in drawing metaphysical lessons from the failure of reductionist programmes. What most of these (...) antireductionist standpoints have in common is a pretension to methodological imports. I conclude by explaining why, in order to remain relevant for scientific practice, antireductionist arguments should stay clear of metaphysics, for the latter, I argue, does not mix well with a taste for methodological prescriptions. (shrink)

ExcerptExisting analyses of Carl Schmitt's account of representation tend to treat together Roman Catholicism and Political Form (1923), which is concerned with the Catholic Church's “representation,” and Constitutional Theory (1928), which touches on representation vis-à-vis more traditional political questions.1 Such treatments typically lean heavily on a particular passage from the later text to explicate the earlier: To represent means to make an invisible being visible and present through a publicly present one. The dialectic of the concept is that the invisible (...) is presupposed as absent and nevertheless is simultaneously made present. That is not possible with just…. (shrink)

This essay places psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon’s anti-colonial, anti-racist message from Peau Noire, Masques Blancs/Black Skin, White Masks in conversation with the new diagnoses of “Gender Dysphoria” and “Transvestic Disorder” in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Specifically, the essay discusses sexologist Ray Blanchard’s controversial theory of autogynephilia alongside Fanon’s ambivalent rendering of transgender desire and interracial trans phenomenology in a crucial but frequently overlooked passage in Black Skin. Fanon’s anti-colonial critique of psychiatry (...) allows us to reconsider how Blanchard’s theories on paraphilia engage with the foundational psychoanalytic concepts of identification and desire, as identified by the Freudian and Lacanian models and explored in the writings of Judith Butler, Catherine Millot, Charles Shepherdson, and others. By offering a fresh interpretation of the French text, this essay argues that a “trans of color critique” can benefit from Black Skin’s unexpected insight into trans desire: Fanon’s “man of color,” who simultaneously undergoes a gender transition and a racial transformation, represents the literal embodiment of his critique of colonial racism. Given the role of the new paraphilias in the DSM-V, this essay concludes that a trans of color critique is well positioned to reinforce the anti-colonial message Fanon addressed to the psychiatric and psychoanalytical fields, which have tended to diagnose psychic injury while ignoring its causation, and which continue to neglect the fact that medical access is just as important as material support and security for minority subjects, in particular. (shrink)

With the growth of precision medicine research on health data and biospecimens, research institutions will need to build and maintain long-term, trusting relationships with patient-participants. While trust is important for all research relationships, the longitudinal nature of precision medicine research raises particular challenges for facilitating trust when the specifics of future studies are unknown. Based on focus groups with racially and ethnically diverse patients, we describe several factors that influence patient trust and potential institutional approaches to building trustworthiness. Drawing on (...) these findings, we suggest several considerations for research institutions seeking to cultivate long-term, trusting relationships with patients: Address the role of history and experience on trust, engage concerns about potential group harm, address cultural values and communication barriers, and integrate patient values and expectations into oversight and governance structures. (shrink)

Addressing the contradictions surrounding modern-day femininity and its complicated relationship with feminism and postfeminism, this book examines a range of popular female/feminist icons and paradigms. It offers an innovative and forward-looking perspective on femininity and the modern female self.

Doctors form an essential part of an effective response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue they have a duty to participate in pandemic response due to their special skills, but these skills vary between different doctors, and their duties are constrained by other competing rights. We conclude that while doctors should be encouraged to meet the demand for medical aid in the pandemic, those who make the sacrifices and increased efforts are owed reciprocal obligations in return. When reciprocal obligations are (...) not met, doctors are further justified in opting out of specific tasks, as long as this is proportionate to the unmet obligation. (shrink)

There is disagreement in the literature about the exact nature of the phenomenon of empathy. There are emotional, cognitive, and conditioning views, applying in varying degrees across species. An adequate description of the ultimate and proximate mechanism can integrate these views. Proximately, the perception of an object's state activates the subject's corresponding representations, which in turn activate somatic and autonomic responses. This mechanism supports basic behaviors that are crucial for the reproductive success of animals living in groups. The Perception-Action Model, (...) together with an understanding of how representations change with experience, can explain the major empirical effects in the literature. It can also predict a variety of empathy disorders. The interaction between the PAM and prefrontal functioning can also explain different levels of empathy across species and age groups. This view can advance our evolutionary understanding of empathy beyond inclusive fitness and reciprocal altruism and can explain different levels of empathy across individuals, species, stages of development, and situations. Key Words: altruism; cognitive empathy ; comparative; emotion; emotional contagion; empathy ; evolution; human; perception-action; perspective taking. (shrink)

Moralists hold that art criticism can and should take stock of moral considerations. Though moralists disagree over the proper scope of ethical art criticism, they are unified in their acceptance of the consistency of valence thesis: when an artwork fares poorly from the moral point of view, and this fact is art critically relevant, then it is thereby worse qua artwork. In this paper, I argue that a commitment to moralism, however strong, is unattractive because it requires that we radically (...) revise our art critical practices in contexts where revision seems ill advised. I will consider two such cases, Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and Balthus’ Alice. When we further reflect on our actual art critical practices in cases like these, we find that we do not have an unfailing commitment to the consistency of valence thesis. That is, some artworks are (artistically) good because they are (morally) bad. (shrink)