This article addresses the sacredness of Ayahuasca from the perspective of the global shamanic vocation. If encounters with Ayahuasca are said to revitalize forms of sacredness in contemporary societies, this is perhaps clearest in cases where individuals understand themselves to be called to lead ceremonies. Recognizing the global scale of Ayahuasca shamanism, we compare facilitators of ceremonies in two societies to discern differences and similarities in how Ayahuasca vocations exist in differently modernized societies: Peru, a predominantly Catholic society with a (...) substantial Indigenous Amazonian population and an active Ayahuasca shamanism tourism sector, and Denmark, a secular society in Northern Europe, where Ayahuasca is illegal. Building on recent reappraisals of Weber’s reflection on vocation and Durkheim’s theory of the sacred, we argue that being called by Ayahuasca to follow shamanic vocations in contemporary societies leads to tensions around the need to both justify and resist the rationalization of Ayahuasca. (shrink)

Do laypeople think that moral responsibility is compatible with determinism? Recently, philosophers and psychologists trying to answer this question have found contradictory results: while some experiments reveal people to have compatibilist intuitions, others suggest that people could in fact be incompatibilist. To account for this contradictory answers, Nichols and Knobe (2007) have advanced a ‘performance error model’ according to which people are genuine incompatibilist that are sometimes biased to give compatibilist answers by emotional reactions. To test for this hypothesis, we (...) investigated intuitions about determinism and moral responsibility in patients suffering from behavioural frontotemporal dementia. Patients suffering from bvFTD have impoverished emotional reaction. Thus, the ‘performance error model’ should predict that bvFTD patients will give less compatibilist answers. However, we found that bvFTD patients give answers quite similar to subjects in control group and were mostly compatibilist. Thus, we conclude that the ‘performance error model’ should be abandoned in favour of other available model that best fit our data. (shrink)

En un tiempo de profundas transformaciones, conflictos y resistencias, desde una aproximación filosófico-política, pondremos el foco en la emergencia de la Naturaleza como sujeto de derechos, de los pueblos indígenas y de las mujeres indígenas en los procesos de lucha, negociación y representación, como nuevos sujetos políticos en los distintos niveles de la esfera pública. Desde esta perspectiva, examinaremos la incorporación de la Naturaleza como sujeto de derechos en la Constitución de Ecuador en 2008 y las luchas y métodos del (...) Pueblo Originario Kichwa de Sarayaku (Ecuador), a nivel nacional e internacional, frente al extractivismo petrolífero, atendiendo al papel que desempeñan las mujeres, a su interpretación del Sumak Kawsay (Buen Vivir) y del Kawsak Sacha (Selva Viva), y a sus aportaciones para la resolución de los conflictos ecológicos y políticos. Además de dar a conocer y presentar Sarayaku como un caso ejemplar, se concluye afirmando que la irrupción de estos «nuevos sujetos» nos sitúan ante un nuevo y complejo escenario, interpelándonos desde el Sur Global. (shrink)

This book discusses the role of the trickster figure in contemporary film against the cultural imperatives and social issues of modernity and postmodernity, and argues that cinematic tricksters always reflect psychological, economic and social change in society. It covers a range of films, from Charlie Chaplin’s classics such as _Modern Times_ and _The Great Dictator_ to contemporary comedies and dramas with ‘trickster actors’ such as Jim Carrey, Sacha Baron-Cohen, Andy Kaufman and Jack Nicholson. _The Trickster in Contemporary Film_ offers (...) a fresh perspective on the trickster figure not only in cinema but in Western culture in general. Alongside original film analyses, it touches upon a number of psychosocial issues including sovereignty of the individual, tricksterish qualities of the media, and human relationships in the mercurial digital age. Further topics of discussion include: common motifs in trickster narratives the trickster and personal relationships gonzo-trickster and the art of comic insurrection. Employing a number of complementary approaches such as Jungian psychology, film semiotics, narrative structure theories, Victor Turner’s concept of liminality and Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of film, as well as anyone with an interest in analytical psychology and wider critical issues in contemporary culture. (shrink)

Past research on folk aesthetics has suggested that most people are subjectivists when it comes to aesthetic judgment. However, most people also make a distinction between good and bad aesthetic taste. To understand the extent to which these two observations conflict with one another, we need a better understanding of people's everyday concept of aesthetic taste. In this paper, we present the results of a study in which participants drawn from a representative sample of the US population were asked whether (...) they usually distinguish between good and bad taste, how they define them, and whether aesthetic taste can be improved. Those who answered positively to the first question were asked to provide their definition of good and bad taste, while those who answered positively to the third question were asked to detail by what means taste can be improved. Our results suggest that most people distinguish between good and bad taste, and think taste can be improved. People's definitions of good and bad taste were varied, and were torn between very subjectivist conceptions of taste and others that lent themselves to a more objectivist interpretation. Overall, our results suggest that the tension Hume observed in conceptions of aesthetic taste is still present today. (shrink)

This study explores the capacity of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to revolutionize educational pedagogy, aiming to foster a more personalized and effective learning experience. Methodology: Through a bibliometric analysis of publications in Scopus and Web of Science, the research examines AI's impact on adaptive learning, personalized instruction, and effective teaching methods. It also evaluates AI's role in assessment, creation of simulated learning environments, and widening access to education, while addressing the integration challenges. Conclusions: The investigation demonstrates that AI has considerable potential (...) to improve teaching and learning. AI-driven tools like intelligent tutoring systems, machine learning algorithms, and virtual simulations can facilitate a learner-centric approach. Nonetheless, it also highlights the necessity to confront issues such as technological overdependence, privacy concerns, and the potential displacement of teachers. A thoughtful adoption of AI in education could lead to a more equitable and engaging learning system. The advent of this educational revolution demands a focus on augmenting human capabilities with AI and transforming pedagogical strategies to enhance student outcomes. The research advocates for further development of ethical standards and informed policies to guide AI integration in the educational sector. (shrink)

Psychologists and neuroscientists have recently been unearthing the unconscious processes that give rise to moral intuitions and emotions. According to skeptics like Joshua Greene, what has been found casts doubt on many of our moral beliefs. However, a new approach in moral psychology develops a learning-theoretic framework that has been successfully applied in a number of other domains. This framework suggests that model-based learning shapes intuitions and emotions. Model-based learning explains how moral thought and feeling are attuned to local material (...) and social conditions. Philosophers can draw on these explanations, in some cases, in order to vindicate episodes of moral change. Explanations can support justifications by showing that they are not mere rationalizations. In addition, philosophical justifications are a fertile source for empirical hypotheses about the rational learning mechanisms that shape moral intuitions and emotions. (shrink)

Intellectualist theories attempt to assimilate know how to propositional knowledge and, in so doing, fail to properly explain the close relation know how bears to action. I develop here an anti-intellectualist theory that is warranted, I argue, because it best accounts for the difference between know how and mere “armchair knowledge.” Know how is a mental state characterized by a certain world-to-mind direction of fit (though it is non-motivational) and attendant functional role. It is essential of know how, but not (...) propositional knowledge, that it makes possible performance errors and has the functional role of guiding action. The theory is attractive, in part, because it allows for propositional, non-propositional and perhaps even non-representational varieties of know how. (shrink)

The complex issue of fake news has been approached extensively by many disciplines in academia. Despite this variety of approaches, the concept of fake news still lacks a reasonable degree of definitional unicity. This paper critically analyzes a sample of definitions from the current literature. By diving into the set of definitions, it will exhibited a total of ten necessary conditions that scholars generally consider: imitation, falsity, deception, bullshit, purpose, morality, assessability, virality, channel, and appeal. Current definitions of fake news (...) have certain blindspots and leave too much leeway for interpretation. This leeway is utterly problematic because it creates a grey zone in which articles are left stranded halfway between fake news and factual news articles. However, it has the crucial advantage of opening up new epistemic paths of inquiry regarding fake news. As a conclusion, we will summarize the conditions one can accept or reject to define fake news. (shrink)

Central to Watts and Newson’s argument in their seminal paper ‘ Is there a duty to routinely reinterpret genomic variant classifications? ’ is that diagnostic laboratories are not morally obligated to actively reinterpret variants of uncertain significance (VUS) due to the superior outcomes offered by next-generation sequencing (NGS) compared with traditional methods.1 NGS technologies can identify, analyse and interpret millions of genetic variations at once. For example, ‘the use of conventional molecular assays in clinical contexts could require doing a lot (...) of assays for various mutations. Using these different assays, more tissue may be required. These targets can accurately be questioned using NGS technology in a single test.’2 If NGS-based genomic sequencing is reliable and its output outweighs the potential harm of uncertainties, then, it is plausible to say that those test providers cannot incur a moral duty to actively reinterpret VUS because there won’t be any need to do so.1 Despite its seeming reliability, diagnostic laboratories face enormous challenges in implementing NGS-based …. (shrink)

This second volume completes the biography of the influential philosopher, following Whitehead's move first from Trinity College, Cambridge to London, and then, at the age of 63, to America, where the focus of his work shifted from mathematics to philosophy. Lowe (philosophy emeritus, Johns Hopkins U.) died in 1988 with this biography not quite completed. Vol.2 was edited and seen through publication by J.B. Schneewind, chairman of the Philosophy Department at Johns Hopkins. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Long after its alleged demise, phlogiston was still presented, discussed and defended by leading chemists. Even some of the leading proponents of the new chemistry admitted its ‘absolute existence’. We demonstrate that what was defended under the title ‘phlogiston’ was no longer a particular hypothesis about combustion and respiration. Rather, it was a set of ontological and epistemological assumptions and the empirical practices associated with them. Lavoisier's gravimetric reduction, in the eyes of the phlogistians, annihilated the autonomy of chemistry together (...) with its peculiar concepts of chemical substance and quality, chemical process and chemical affinity. The defence of phlogiston was the defence of a distinctly chemical conception of matter and its appearances, a conception which reflected the chemist's acquaintance with details and particularities of substances, properties and processes and his skills of adducing causal relations from the interplay between their complexity and uniformity. (shrink)

The promises of nanotechnology have been framed by a variety of metaphors, that not only channel the attention of the public, orient the questions asked by researchers, and convey epistemic choices closely linked to ethical preferences. In particular, the image of the ‘therapeutic missile’ commonly used to present targeted drug delivery devices emphasizes precision, control, surveillance and efficiency. Such values are highly praised in the current context of crisis of pharmaceutical innovation where military metaphors foster a general mobilization of resources (...) from multiple fields of cutting-edge research. The missile metaphor, reminiscent of Paul Ehrlich’s ‘magic bullet’, has framed the problem in simple terms: how to deliver the right dose in the right place at the right moment? Chemists, physicists and engineers who design multi-functional devices operating in vitro can think in such terms, as long as the devices are not actually operating through the messy environment of the body. A close look at what has been done and what remains to be done suggests that the metaphor of the “therapeutic missile” is neither sufficient, nor even necessary. Recent developments in nanomedicine suggest that therapeutic efficacy cannot be obtained without negotiating with the biological milieu and taking advantage of what it affords. An ‘oikological’ approach seems more appropriate, more heuristic and more promising than the popular missile. It is based on the view of organism as an oikos that has to be carefully managed. The dispositions of nanocapsules have to be coupled with the affordances of the environment. As it requires dealing with nanoparticles as relational entities (defined by their potential for interactions) rather than as stable substances (defined by intrinsic properties) this metaphor eventually might well change research priorities in nanotechnology in general. (shrink)

Despite appearing side by side as keynote speakers at a congress in 1962 devoted to the question of progress, Löwith’s and Adorno’s accounts of progress have never been linked. This paper is an attempt to establish this missed connection, to reveal important connections, striking similarities, and a fundamental difference between these two eminent thinkers’ work on progress. For one, Löwith diagnoses the three main problems that Adorno attempts to solve with his dialectical account of progress. Moreover, each is sympathetic towards (...) crucial aspects of the other’s account: Löwith towards Adorno’s claim that progress is dialectical, Adorno towards Löwith’s claim that progress necessarily has a redemptive aspect. A fundamental disagreement nevertheless divides them: whether the problem of suffering in history is part of our ontological condition, or something we must struggle against and overcome through political action. By establishing this missed connection, I hope to show how progress might still have an important role to play in our present-day historical and political consciousness. (shrink)

All the social sciences are now in flux and Soviet studies even more so. Many traditional approaches prove to be useless for understanding the changed world and there is a search for new explanatory models, and even for “alternative organizing myths.” All this fosters confusion and during such periods of “paradigm change” debates assume predictable characteristics. First of all, there appears a large gap between, in John Stuart Mill's words, “the meaning which a term bears in common acceptation” and that (...) which the writer “intends to annex to it.” It provides a great opportunity for sniping and passionately accusing opponents of lack of conceptual rigor. (shrink)

This work is a sequel to our [16]. It is shown how Theorem 4 of [16], dealing with the translatability of HA(Heyting's arithmetic) into negationless arithmetic NA, can be extended to the case of intuitionistic arithmetic in higher types.

The study examines a problematic hypothesis of possible approaches to identifying the quantum physical foundations of the functioning of consciousness. The authors proceed from the fact that in modern conditions, not a single science, nor all sciences taken together, gives a final answer to the question of the “mechanism” of the origin of thought. However, this does not mean at all that research in this direction needs to be stopped. The authors express confidence that modern and subsequent research into the (...) “quantum concept of consciousness” will lead to the identification of previously unknown patterns, opening the way to the formation of new principles and approaches. As an example, the corresponding Penrose - Hameroff concept is considered. Quantum mechanics complements the tools of neurobiology and other branches of neuroscience, which together form an interdisciplinary field of knowledge that is dynamically growing and developing. The authors are not apologists for the omnipotence of quantum physics. Quantum correlates of consciousness actually mean that it is not today’s quantum mechanics itself that explains the emergence of mental states, but the fact that in the birth of these states it is essential that in the very process of the formation of neurodynamic impulses in the neurons of the cerebral cortex that generate mental states, there are processes of quantum nature. It should also be recognized that the quantum-molecular level (nanolevel) of processes in the neurons of the brain really exists and it is this that is the source of proto-consciousness. Science strives to move forward, new research programs are emerging within the framework of quantum biology, quantum psychology, quantum information science, which in turn can shed light on the hypothesis of the “quantum concept of consciousness.”. (shrink)

A physical theory is a construction of thought which is founded on experience so as to constitute knowledge of the natural world. Propositions in physics are constituted of concepts which express the properties and processes of the physical world. For purposes of record and communication concepts are designated by the terms of a language, such as mathematical symbols, and philosophical discussion may be based on linguistic forms. In this essay, however, the element of discussion will be the concept as a (...) mode of thought through which are grasped the attributes of physical things and the relations exemplified in physical processes. The present philosophical analysis of a physical theory, quantum mechanics, is to be carried out by critical analysis of its basic concepts. In particular, the program is to show that in quantum mechanics the concept of physical objects exhibits the characters of discontinuity, complementarity, and relativity. (shrink)

CRISPR is currently viewed as the central tool for future gene therapy. Yet, many prominent scientists and bioethicists have expressed ethical concerns around CRISPR gene therapy. This paper provides a critical review of concerns about CRISPR gene therapy as expressed in the mainstream academic literature, paired with replies also generally found in that literature. The expressed concerns can be categorised into three types depending on whether they stress risk/benefit ratio, autonomy and informed consent, or concerns related to various aspects of (...) justice. In the reviewed literature, we found no intrinsic objections to CRISPR gene therapy, even though many such objections were present in discussions of gene editing in the 1990s. The paper then proposes a brief outline for a practically applicable moral framework for public decision-making about CRISPR gene therapy and suggests how such a framework might be supported. We also suggest that this framework should govern public engagement about CRISPR gene therapy in order to reduce the risk that we make decisions about CRISPR gene therapy based on misperceptions, inflated views of risk, or unreasonable moral or religious views. (shrink)

Within a weak system \ of intuitionistic analysis one may prove, using the Weak Fan Theorem as an additional axiom, a completeness theorem for intuitionistic first-order predicate logic relative to validity in generalized Beth models as well as a completeness theorem for classical first-order predicate logic relative to validity in intuitionistic structures. Conversely, each of these theorems implies over \ the Weak Fan Theorem.

Despite extensive research and a multitude of computer systems, there is no viable computerized system that is even remotely capable of approaching the skill of an expert human physician. Minor obstacles in the design of a practical system include imprecise medical terminology, the use of nonindependent clinical parameters, incorrect or inaccurate information supplied to the computer, and static representation of a patient's medical history. Major problems that go beyond computer manipulation of data include the requirement for a massive data base, (...) representation of medical knowledge in general rather than specific terms, and physician fallibility in the design of a computer system. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Monica A. Coleman achieves remarkable rigor in bringing together in one volume her long-standing interests in process philosophy and theology, womanist theology and ethics, African diaspora studies, West African religions, and African American women’s literature. Making a way out of No Way (2008) is a tour de force in contemporary African American constructive theology and especially in womanist discourse on the religious experience(s) of African American women. Coleman insists on understanding black women’s religious experience through the lens of their complex (...) subjectivity, which is irreducible to singularity or totality. As typically found in academic womanist theology, Coleman does not begin her theology with .. (shrink)

In this comparative study the author accounts for the interpretative bases of 2 Corinthians 13:5. The process of the study follows the following structure: A. Approaching the genesis of the work; B. Diachronic and synchronic reading of the text; C. Pragmatic reading and philosophical applications; D..