This article seeks to expose some of the themes addressed in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, especially those in which the authors use Marx’s work as a starting point for their own theses. I first present the thesis of history as mere contingency, defended by the authors from a new examination of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. I show how the authors choose some fragments of Marx’s work to support an anti-dialectical thesis, contrary to Marx’s, although they do not elaborate (...) a critique of the German philosopher. In the second place, I present the authors’ thesis with respect to the nature of capital and its development, making use of their reading of the law of tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Here too, the selective recourse to Marx results in an abandonment of the labor theory of value, with the thesis of machinic surplus value. This thesis contributes to the new ontology proposed by the authors, which dissolves the categories of subject and object, while equating and homogenizing all that exists, flattening the diversity of the social world. Finally, I critique the design of revolution proposed by the authors in close connection with their new ontology. (shrink)

It is proved that Vaught's conjecture is true for modules over an arbitrary countable hereditary noetherian prime ring.

In this paper, I discuss whether the results of loop quantum gravity (LQG) constitute a fatal blow to Humeanism. There is at least a prima facie reason for believing so: while Humeanism regards spatiotemporal relations as fundamental, LQG describes the fundamental layer of our reality in terms of spin networks, which are not in spacetime. However, the question should be tackled more carefully. After explaining the importance of the debate on the tenability of Humeanism in light of LQG, and having (...) presented the Humean doctrine, I review two cases which present serious threats to Humeanism, one concerning the fundamentality of vectorial quantities and the other concerning quantum entanglement. In particular, I recall the strategies that are usually employed in these two cases in order to save Humeanism: in the first case, the strategy consists in amending the characterization of the Humean mosaic; in the second case, it consists in adopting a realist or nomological interpretation of the wave function. These solutions will turn out to be helpful in my discussion of LQG where, after describing LQG, I show that Humeans might save their doctrine either by endorsing a realist interpretation of spin networks, or by giving them a nomological status and, at the same time, by revisiting the characterization of the Humean mosaic. However, I conclude that both solutions are wanting. (shrink)

According to the doctrine of Super-Humeanism, the world’s mosaic consists only of permanent matter points and changing spatial relations, while all the other entities and features figuring in scientific theories are nomological parameters, whose role is merely to build the best law system. In this paper, I develop an argument against Super-Humeanism by pointing out that it is vulnerable to and does not have the resources to solve the well-known problem of immanent comparisons. Firstly, I show that it cannot endorse (...) a fundamentalist solution à la Lewis, since its two pillars—a minimalist ontology and a best system account of lawhood—would generate, together, a tedious problem of internal coherence. Secondly, I consider anti-fundamentalist strategies, proposed within Humeanism, and find them inapplicable to the Super-Humean doctrine. The concern is that, since it is impossible to choose the best law system within Super-Humeanism, this doctrine may be charged with incoherence. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Generality relativism is the view that any domain of quantification can always be expanded. The view promises to resolve a broad range of paradoxes, but, without an explanation of how domains expand, it sounds very mysterious. Proponents of linguistic versions of generality relativism try to demystify the view by likening domain expansions to semantic change. They think that domains expand when we re-interpret certain terms so that, upon re-interpretation, the quantifiers range over more things. This article makes trouble for (...) linguistic approaches. According to the so-called charge of ineffability, generality relativism cannot be asserted in a coherent manner—given that asserting the view requires generalising over absolutely all domains of quantification. Generality relativists typically try to answer the charge with the help of modal operators; but linguistic approaches interpret these operators in semantically and syntactically idiosyncratic ways. I argue that, because of these commitments, linguistic approaches ultimately do not have a good response to the charge of ineffability. (shrink)

We study the set of possible sizes of maximal independent families to which we refer as spectrum of independence and denote \\). Here mif abbreviates maximal independent family. We show that:1.whenever \ are finitely many regular uncountable cardinals, it is consistent that \\); 2.whenever \ has uncountable cofinality, it is consistent that \=\{\aleph _1,\kappa =\mathfrak {c}\}\). Assuming large cardinals, in addition to above, we can provide that $$\begin{aligned} \cap \hbox {Spec}=\emptyset \end{aligned}$$for each i, \.

Dieser Text ist bereits in der Zeitschrift Intervalls « Réinventer le rythme / Den Rhythmus neu denken », N° 7, 2015 erschienen. Wir danken Vera Viehöver und Michel Delville, dem Chefredakteur der Zeitschrift, für ihre freundliche Erlaubnis, diesen Text hier wiederzugeben. Vermutlich gehört es in nahezu jeder Kunstform zum Floskelrepertoire der Kritiker, vom „Rhythmus“ eines Werkes zu sprechen : Eine Theaterinszenierung kann ebenso für ihren Rhythmus gepriesen werden wie ein Computerspiel, ein - Poétique et Études littéraires – GALERIE – (...) Nouvel article. (shrink)

We study higher analogues of the classical independence number on $\omega $. For $\kappa $ regular uncountable, we denote by $i(\kappa )$ the minimal size of a maximal $\kappa $ -independent family. We establish ZFC relations between $i(\kappa )$ and the standard higher analogues of some of the classical cardinal characteristics, e.g., $\mathfrak {r}(\kappa )\leq \mathfrak {i}(\kappa )$ and $\mathfrak {d}(\kappa )\leq \mathfrak {i}(\kappa )$. For $\kappa $ measurable, assuming that $2^{\kappa }=\kappa ^{+}$ we construct a maximal $\kappa $ -independent (...) family which remains maximal after the $\kappa $ -support product of $\lambda $ many copies of $\kappa $ -Sacks forcing. Thus, we show the consistency of $\kappa ^{+}=\mathfrak {d}(\kappa )=\mathfrak {i}(\kappa )<2^{\kappa }$. We conclude the paper with interesting open questions and discuss difficulties regarding other natural approaches to higher independence. (shrink)

In a time marked by the development of innovative treatments in healthcare and the need for health professionals to deal with resulting ethical dilemmas in clinical practice, this study was developed to determine the influence of the bioethics teaching on the moral competence of medical and nursing students. The authors conduct a longitudinal study using the Moral Competence Test extended version before and after attending the ethics curricular unit, in three nursing schools and three medical schools of Portugal. In this (...) questionnaire the participant is confronted with three ethical dilemmas and asked to evaluate arguments for and against the attitude of the main character. For both nursing and medical students, C-score was lower after the attendance of the ethics curricular units, with a statistically significant decrease in the total score for nursing students and a decrease not statistically significant for medical students. A multivariate analysis did not find any association between this decrease and gender, course, or age. The phenomenon of moral segmentation was observed, with better performance in the worker and judge dilemma, than in the doctor dilemma. These results highlight the need to reflect on the curricular strategies that can be implemented for health professionals to better develop moral competence and decision-making, allowing for the provision of humanized health care. (shrink)

We study two ideals which are naturally associated to independent families. The first of them, denoted \, is characterized by a diagonalization property which allows along a cofinal sequence of stages along a finite support iteration to adjoin a maximal independent family. The second ideal, denoted \\), originates in Shelah’s proof of \ in Shelah, 433–443, 1992). We show that for every independent family \, \\subseteq \mathcal {J}_\mathcal {A}\) and define a class of maximal independent families, to which we refer (...) as densely maximal, for which the two ideals coincide. Building upon the techniques of Shelah we characterize Sacks indestructibility for such families in terms of properties of \\) and devise a countably closed poset which adjoins a Sacks indestructible densely maximal independent family. (shrink)

Although Chinese law imposes informed consent for medical treatments, the Chinese understanding of this requirement is very different from the European one, mostly due to the influence of Confucianism. Chinese doctors and relatives are primarily interested in protecting the patient, even from the truth; thus, patients are commonly uninformed of their medical conditions, often at the family’s request. The family plays an important role in health care decisions, even substituting their decisions for the patient’s. Accordingly, instead of personal informed consent, (...) what actually exists is ‘family informed consent’. From a Western perspective, these features of Chinese law and Chinese culture might seem strange, contradicting our understanding of doctor-patient relationship and even the very essence of self-determination and fundamental rights. However, we cannot forget the huge influence of cultural factors in these domains, and that ‘Western’ informed consent is grounded on the individualistic nature of Western culture. This article will underline the differences between the Western and the Chinese perspectives, clarifying how each of them must be understood in its own cultural environment. But, while still respecting Chinese particularities, this paper advocates that China adopt patient individual informed consent because this is the only solution compatible with human dignity and human rights. (shrink)

This essay traces the changing relationship between horticulture, agriculture, and philosophy across the seventeenth century, as the personae of the philosophical husbandman and the philosophical gardener intertwined and competed. At stake in the dynamics between them was the relationship between abstruse researches and practical applications in evolving experimental philosophy, as well as the aesthetic of experimental practices and rhetoric. Early seventeenth-century promoters of colonial projects, such as Virginian sericulture, situated the metropolitan pleasure garden, a place of whimsy and fantastical reasoning, (...) as a realm of trial that presumed eventual utility and application to large-scale husbandry. Such views informed relationships between fanciful trials, speculative proposals, and presumptions of future utility in the development of the persona of the philosophical gardener and attendant notions of experimental philosophy over the course of the century. (shrink)

Let V be a finite relational vocabulary in which no symbol has arity greater than 2. Let be countable V‐structure which is homogeneous, simple and 1‐based. The first main result says that if is, in addition, primitive, then it is strongly interpretable in a random structure. The second main result, which generalizes the first, implies (without the assumption on primitivity) that if is “coordinatized” by a set with SU‐rank 1 and there is no definable (without parameters) nontrivial equivalence relation on (...) M with only finite classes, then is strongly interpretable in a random structure. (shrink)

Este estudo apresenta as principais ideias de Pierre Bourdieu referentes à análise sociológica da literatura, quando discute as seguintes questões: as relações entre a literatura e a ciência, as possibilidades de análise sociológica da literatura, a definição do campo literário, as relações do campo literário com o campo econômico e os demais campos do espaço social, as relações de oposição no interior do campo, a análise das obras literárias considerando as relações entre o código literário e os que se referem (...) à vida cotidiana, a proposição de um estudo histórico da literatura, a crítica à análise imanente da literatura. (shrink)

PROGRAMA DE AGRESSORES COMO PARTE DA RESPOSTA COORDENADA DA COMUNIDADE – A EXPERIÊNCIA DO GRUPO REFLEXIVO DE HOMENS NO MINISTÉRIO PÚBLICO DO RIO GRANDE DO NORTE.

One dimension of cognitive success concerns getting it right: having many true beliefs and no false ones. Another dimension of cognitive success concerns using the right concepts. For example, using a concept of a person that systematically excludes people of certain demographics from its extension is a sort of cognitive deficiency. This view, if correct, tasks inquirers with critically examining the concepts they are using and perhaps replacing those concepts with new and better ones. This task is often referred to (...) as “conceptual engineering”. However, so far it is unclear what exactly happens in cases of conceptual engineering. How does language change when we engineer a concept? This article offers an answer. I propose a view on which, when speakers assess the truth of propositions, they often rely on assumptions with regard to what is required for their truth. For example, when speakers assess whether unborn fetuses are people, they rely on assumptions with regard to what is required to be a person. Based on this idea, I develop a model of conceptual engineering according to which speakers “engineer concepts” when they change how they assess the truth of propositions. For example, speakers engineer the concept of a person when they change how they assess the truth of the proposition that unborn fetuses are people. (shrink)

This paper examines the culture, the dynamics and the financial underpinnings that determine how medical research is being conducted on children in the United States. Children have increasingly become the subject of experiments that offer them no potential direct benefit but expose them to risks of harm and pain. A wide range of such experiments will be examined, including a lethal heartburn drug test, the experimental insertion of a pacemaker, an invasive insulin infusion experiment, and a fenfluramine "violence prediction" experiment. (...) Emphasis, however, is given to psychoactive drug tests because of the inherent ethical and diagnostic problems involved in the absence of any objective, verifiable diagnostic tool. Effort is made to provide readers comprehensive reference sources to evidence-based reports about the serious risks these drugs pose for adults and children so that the reader may judge whether the benefits (if any) outweigh the risks for children. The first ethical issue raised by these experiments is: did the severity of illness in these children justify their exposure to short and long-term risks? The ethics of the experiments will be evaluated by referring to existing codes of medical research ethics-the Nuremberg Code, the Declaration of Helsinki, and the federal Code of Regulations. The thirteen cases presented will demonstrate that children are being used in ever more speculative experiments, often in the absence of a therapeutic intent, but a significant chance for causing harm and / or discomfort. Some of the experiments were designed to explore the mechanisms of pathology and pharmacological interventions, or the response of neurological brain receptors to chemical provocation ("challenge"). Others were designed to test the safety or efficacy of new drugs, even to test these drugs on healthy children who were hypothesized to be "at risk." Children and adolescents have been subjected to "forced dose titration" experiments that induced a spectrum of severe adverse effects, including insomnia, extreme restlessness, agitation, (akathisia) and self-injurious behavior. FDA reports show that suicide is a significant issue in psychotropic drug trials-in pediatric trials the problem is even greater. The paper aims to demonstrate how the enactment of the Better Pharmaceuticals for Children Act (incorporated into the Food and Drug Administration Modernization Act, FDAMA), set in motion a radical shift in public policy by providing huge financial incentives to pharmaceutical companies to test new or patented drugs in children. Federal policy shifted from one aimed at protecting children by setting limits on permissible research risks, to a policy aimed at broadening the inclusion of children as test subjects. It will be shown how the FDA and the Department of Health and Human Services lifted regulatory restrictions to permit research involving greater than minimal risk to be conducted on healthy children, claiming that all children are potentially "at risk" of a future condition. Children were in this way deprived of regulatory protections. An argument will be made that the approval of nontherapeutic, harmful experiments-such as exposure of toddlers to lead poison-under the current gate keeping system raises serious doubts about the sustainability of institutional review boards (IRBs) as protectors of human research subjects. Children, who are precluded from exercising the adult human's right to informed consent, are being exploited as commodities for commercial ends. It is the position of the author that nothing less than the enactment of a federal law mandating a radical overhaul of the current research review system, with independent checks and balances, will provide children the legal protections they need. Ten specific recommendations are offered to protect children from harmful experiments. (shrink)

Abstract:Can the claim "Sherlock Holmes is a detective" be true if no object exists that has this property? Is it true that he is a fictional character and that he does not exist? My answers are based on Alexius Meinong's theory of objects. In contrast to other Meinongians, I argue that employing other possible worlds poses ontological problems and that existence is not a property of objects. Since we think of objects by means of only some, but not all, of (...) their properties, incomplete objects function as auxiliaries. Holmes can thus be both, detective and fictional character, while not existing. (shrink)

Health care often involves ethically difficult situations that may disquiet the conscience. The purpose of this study was to develop a questionnaire for identifying various perceptions of conscience within a framework based on the literature and on explorative interviews about perceptions of conscience (Perceptions of Conscience Questionnaire). The questionnaire was tested on a sample of 444 registered nurses, enrolled nurses, nurses’ assistants and physicians. The data were analysed using principal component analysis to explore possible dimensions of perceptions of conscience. The (...) results showed six dimensions, found also in theory and empirical health care studies. Conscience was perceived as authority, a warning signal, demanding sensitivity, an asset, a burden and depending on culture. We conclude that the Perceptions of Conscience Questionnaire is valid for assessing some perceptions of conscience relevant to health care providers. (shrink)

Most courts around the world have been refusing wrongful life actions. The main argument invoked is that the supposed compensable injury cannot be classified as such, since life is always a blessing no matter how hard and painful it is.In opposition to mainstream scholars and the dominant case law, this article sustains that life must be distinguished from living conditions, the former being the real injury at stake, since some living conditions are so intolerable that in themselves they justify a (...) compensation within wrongful life actions. (shrink)

La influencia de la microbiota en el comportamiento, la percepción y diversas facultades cognitivas se ha estudiado en diferentes especies, incluidos el humano. Mas directamente se observa por alteraciones en la microbiota intestinal de pacientes con enfermedades neuropsiquiátricas. Los aportes que el estudio de signos y significado enriquecen la información producida por la metagenómica. Este trabajo presenta una introducción al tema de la microbiota/microbioma desde la biosemiótica, usando la teoría del Umwelt y el circulo funcional Uexkülliano como plataforma, no porque (...) sean las únicas, sino por ser parte de los pilares de esta disciplina. (shrink)

Chaos, considered a generating principle since Hesiod, is the basis in which we think the existence of the body as a locus of wisdom - but also vulnerability. Language represents a shelter for this fragility, and its place in books molds the way to express wisdom as intelligibility which projects itself into said chaos. Books speak for trees and Earth for them, in this metaphor the idea of caring for the body is the same as caring for Earth. Human species (...) in contract with nature must protect it, for its own perpetuation. The house that shelters life is expressed philosophically in this essay joined to science and poetry. (shrink)

The paper elaborates the classical pragmatist understanding of cognition as a transformational process. The pragmatists’ emphasis on the situatedness of cognition, on abductive moves and feeling will also be discussed in the light of the contemporary debate on conceptuality and givenism. Our inquiry on a classical pragmatist approach shifts today’s emphasis on knowledge qua justification of belief and suggests ways to transcend the dualism of conceptuality vs. non-conceptuality. Reconsidering the Peircean category of Firstness, Dewey’s quality of situations and Gendlin’s felt (...) sense as subtle tacit moments in cognitive processes enhance a fine-grained and contextualized understanding of cognition in terms of a transformative process. (shrink)

El presente artículo quiere acercarse al misterio del mal en la obra de S. Kierkegaard. Tomando como punto de partida la obra lanzada al mundo en vida del autor, tanto la pseudónima como la firmada por él mismo, este texto aborda el misterio del mal y su relación con el Amor de Dios, misterio central del citado pensador. Aquí se pone en valor la importancia de acercarse al misterio de la iniquidad también desde los discursos edificantes así como en Las (...) obras del amor. Al hacer esto aportamos una aproximación diferente al misterio del mal en la recepción kierkegaardiana y se pone de relevancia el amor como la manera de abordar el mal sin hacernos cómplices del mismo. Esto se hace posible, entre otros elementos, porque Dios y el que ama, mutatis mutandis, no ven lo malo del mal. (shrink)

Lists foreground multiplicity: both of objects to be pursued and, for distant objects, of far-flung networks enabling their pursuit. The future-oriented or projective list stretches such networks not only around the world but forward through time. Research agendas are one kind of future-oriented, projective list. Sketching how such lists have functioned over time, from Francis Bacon's “The New World of Sciences, or Desiderata” to today's desiderata lists, suggests how an early modern model of imperial expansion has shaped, in unintended ways, (...) a scientific rhetoric of collaborative advance on shared targets. (shrink)

Do numbers exist? Carnap (1956 [1950]) famously argues that this question can be understood in an “internal” and in an “external” sense, and calls “external” questions “non-cognitive”. Carnap also says that external questions are raised “only by philosophers” (p. 207), which means that, in his view, philosophers raise ”non-cognitive” questions. However, it is not clear how the internal/external distinction and Carnap’s related views about philosophy should be understood. This paper provides a new interpretation. I draw attention to Carnap’s distinction between (...) purely external statements, which are independent from all frameworks, and pragmatic external statements, which concern which framework one should adopt, and argue that the latter express noncognitive mental states. Specifically, I argue that “frameworks” are systems of rules for the assessment of statements, which are utterances of ordinary language sentences. Pragmatic external statements express noncognitive dispositions to follow only certain rules of assessment. For instance, “numbers exist” understood as a pragmatic external statement expresses a noncognitive disposition to use only rules of assessment according to which numbers do exist. Carnap can thereby be understood as proposing a distinctive form of noncognitivism about ontology that is in some respects analogous to norm-expressivism in metaethics. (shrink)

We show that Hechler’s forcings for adding a tower and for adding a mad family can be represented as finite support iterations of Mathias forcings with respect to filters and that these filters are $${\mathcal {B}}$$ B -Canjar for any countably directed unbounded family $${\mathcal {B}}$$ B of the ground model. In particular, they preserve the unboundedness of any unbounded scale of the ground model. Moreover, we show that $${\mathfrak {b}}=\omega _1$$ b = ω 1 in every extension by the (...) above forcing notions. (shrink)

In this article, I want to ponder one particular aspect of Michel Serres as a writer: the peculiar impression that his texts are written as if “in many tongues.” Serres’s ambition with writing was to “travel light,” and indeed “lightning fast.” His style, I will argue, is characterized by a chiastic crossing of light and time whose proportioning is cosmic and architectonic, and figures canons of how embodied knowledges can cohabit in a domain of wisdom and ethical respect.

In this article, I try to go beyond the traditional objections to strict liability public welfare offenses and confront other possible justifications for punishing non-culpable conduct. Specifically, I consider the following arguments:Penalties for public welfare offenses are punishment by name only, thus traditional justifications for punishment are not needed;Even if those penalties are punishment, punishing those who produce or threaten significant harm to others is not necessarily unjust; andEven if such punishment is not entirely just, it is consistent with other (...) widely accepted criminal law doctrines. (shrink)