Religious legislation against heretics was an innovation in the Late Roman Empire and its enforcement involved great difficulties. The provincial governors who, except in the period of the persecution of Christians, had tolerated religious diversity, were to implement exclusion laws against pagans and heretical groups. This paper analyzes the form of interaction between bishops, emperors and judges in the issuing and enforcement of the laws against heretics, as well as casting light on the relevance of episcopal intervention as a method (...) of informing and shaping the imperial will. (shrink)

The expressivist account of knowledge attributions, while claiming that these attributions are nonfactual, also typically holds that they retain a factual component. This factual component involves the attribution of a belief. The aim of this work is to show that considerations analogous to those motivating an expressivist account of knowledge attributions can be applied to belief attributions. As a consequence, we claim that expressivists should not treat the so-called factual component as such. The phenomenon we focus on to claim that (...) belief attributions are non-factual is that of normative doxastic disagreement. We show through several examples that this kind of disagreement is analogous to that of the epistemic kind. The result will be a doxastic expressivism. Finally, we answer some objections that our doxastic expressivism could seem to face. (shrink)

Social and structural inequities shape health and illness; they are an everyday presence within the doctor-patient encounter yet, there is limited ethical guidance on what individual physicians should do. This paper draws on a study that explored how doctors and their professional associations ought to respond to the issue of social health inequities.

La mayoría de interpretaciones sobre la noción de comunidad en Hannah Arendt, han pasado por alto el esfuerzo por parte de la autora de deslindarse de lo que ella considera -la tradición de la filosofía política-. Arendt encuentra que dicha tradición ha sido incapaz de reconocer la pluralidad y contingencia propias de los asuntos humanos. Este libro se propone buscar en el pensamiento de la autora una posible noción de Comunidad que conciba la pluralidad como -ley de la tierra-, y (...) vea en la acción esa puesta en escena de dicha pluralidad. (shrink)

En este trabajo se plantea una perspectiva cualitativa y cuantitativa específica para el análisis de las representaciones de las luchas sociales en los medios masivos partiendo de los aportes del Análisis Crítico del Discurso. Sobre esta base metodológica, presentamos los resultados del análisis de un caso específico: las representaciones sobre el corte de ruta-pueblada de Tartagal y Mosconi (provincia de Salta) en mayo de 2000. Se atiende al contexto en que se despliegan los discursos que serán objeto de análisis específico, (...) y a partir de ahí se aborda un examen exhaustivo de los artículos informativos referidos al tema, publicados en los principales diarios a nivel nacional y provincial. De este modo, se obtiene una aproximación a las representaciones sobre los manifestantes y sus acciones desplegadas por cada periódico, que incluye el examen de las tendencias predominantes y su evolución durante el conflicto. (shrink)

Un supuesto común dentro del debate interpretativo en torno a la descripción epicúrea de la amistad es que el hedonismo que promulgaba esta escuela implicaba al egoísmo como su consecuencia conceptual y doctrinal necesaria. Este trabajo plantea que la amistad epicúrea, lejos de ser un concepto que contradice su propio sistema, ilumina zonas del hedonismo que habían sido oscurecidas por este supuesto. Por esto, el objetivo de esta investigación es disolver –y no resolver– el problema de la coherencia entre el (...) concepto epicúreo de amistad y el hedonismo supuestamente egoísta. La primera parte de este trabajo está dedicada a describir por lo menos una parte de la discusión académica en torno al concepto epicúreo de amistad. Así, la segunda parte procura cuestionar, a partir de textos epicúreos que versan sobre la amistad y la justicia, la suposición de que Epicuro y los epicúreos basaban su sistema en el egoísmo. Finalmente, en la conclusión, se sintetizan los resultados del cuestionamiento y se plantean algunas consecuencias que la disolución del mentado problema podría tener en futuras investigaciones sobre la dimensión social del placer en Epicuro. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The way we measure values is foundational to their study. This paper explores the empirical findings and theoretical discussions in the literature concerning an essential quality for any measure of values, its validity. We discuss an important debate on validity within the literature concerning the ability of value measures to predict value-related behaviour. We interrogate a key assumption behind the value-behaviour link, namely that a participant’s responses on a valid value measure will predict their behaviour. Ultimately, we make the (...) case that a better understanding of the relationship between values and behaviour may be possible if we also consider social norms. (shrink)

Ketamine is a dissociative drug that has been used medically since the 1970s primarily as an anesthetic agent but also for various psychiatric applications. Anecdotal reports and clinical research suggest substantial potential for ketamine as a treatment in conjunction with psychological interventions. Here, we review historical and modern approaches to the use of ketamine with psychotherapy, discuss the clinical relevance of ketamine’s acute psychoactive effects, propose a unique model for using esketamine with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and suggest considerations for (...) moving medication-assisted psychotherapy forward as a field. (shrink)

Objectivity plays a central role in Western news media, being considered the cornerstone of professionalism and quality. However, as traditionally and passively practiced, critiques of objectivity include journalists overlooking inherent subjectivities in newsgathering, the impacts of journalists’ ideology on news representation, replication of existing power structures, and portrayals of false balance. These critiques have led to increasing scholarly and professional interest in alternative forms of journalism, including constructive journalism – an approach intended to improve the quality and usefulness of news (...) content. We position constructive journalism as a series of techniques: solutions, future orientation, inclusiveness and diversity, empowerment, context, and co-creation, and consider the relationship of each to an active form of objectivity, clarifying the contested relation of constructive journalism to objective reporting. Further, we describe how constructive techniques help journalists ethically and transparently navigate subjectivity in news reporting, with an aim toward improving the accuracy and quality of news. (shrink)

PurposeThis paper aims to investigate behavioural changes related to self-censorship (SC) in social networking sites (SNSs) as new methods of online surveillance are introduced. In particular, it examines the relationships between SC and four related factors: privacy concerns (PC), privacy awareness (PA), perceived vulnerability (PV) and information management (IM).Design/methodology/approachA national wide survey was conducted in the UK (N= 519). The data were analysed to present both descriptive and inferential statistical findings.FindingsThe level of online SC increases as the level of privacy (...) concern increases. The level of privacy concern increases as the levels of PA and PV increase and the level of effective IM decreases.Originality/valueThis study extends the literature on online SC, showing that PCs increase the level of SC in SNSs. It provides support for three antecedent factors to PC which impact upon levels of SC when communicating in SNSs. (shrink)

This study explores professional footballers’ perceptions of where banter crosses the conceptual line into bullying. The study’s focus is of importance, given the impact that abusive behaviors have been found to have on the welfare and safeguarding of English professional footballers. A phenomenological approach was adopted, which focused on the essence of the participants’ perceptions and experiences. Guided by Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, individual semi-structured interviews were conducted with 18 male professional footballers from three Premier League and Championship football clubs. The (...) findings from this study revealed several key superordinate themes in relation to the dividing line between bullying and banter. These themes included “perception,” “intentionality,” “detecting the line,” and “having a bit of banter.” The findings demonstrate how perceptions of bullying and banter are nuanced by individual differences among the players and the culture of the professional football context. Specifically, it was found that the professional football context can legitimize forms of humor blurring the lines between bullying and banter, challenging the typically positive view of the concept of banter in this environment. From an applied perspective, these findings highlight the need for coaches, players, and football clubs more broadly to address cultural expectations around banter in their environment, while educating individuals around their own perceptions of bullying and banter. (shrink)

A comienzos de 1970, con ayuda del Movimiento Rural de Acción Católica y la Juventud Cooperativista, miles de familias rurales dieron a luz a las Ligas Agrarias en distintas provincias de Argentina en reclamo por la tenencia de las tierras y mejores condiciones en la producción y comercialización de los productos agropecuarios. Emergían al calor de una serie de transformaciones histórico-políticas que sacudían por aquella época al país y a América Latina. Consideramos que las familias ocuparon un lugar protagónico en (...) las Ligas. En este sentido, se propone ahondar en la estructura y organización de las Ligas, en particular las que se desarrollaron en la región del Litoral, a partir de las estrategias de construcción política que llevaron adelante. Así, se traza el objetivo de indagar sobre los sentidos que los sujetos construyen en torno a la institución. Por último, en tanto se infiere que las mujeres debieron de ser las garantes del proceso de participación de toda la familia, analizamos la participación política y el lugar que ocuparon en la organización política agrarista. Ante un contexto dictatorial de persecución política y avanzada imperialista (1960-1970), las Ligas fueron una de las experiencias de resistencia política-cultural más importantes de América Latina. Se desplegaron y ampliaron su organización a lo largo de la década de 1970, hasta su abrupta disolución en 1976, con la última dictadura cívico-militar. Pese a los estragos que esta provocó, aún persisten en la memoria de sus participantes huellas de aquella experiencia de lucha. Esto obliga a posicionarnos desde un enfoque que se centra en los sentidos que los sujetos les imprimen a sus historias, a los modos en que narran y construyen memorias. De modo que el trabajo de campo constituye el eje articulador del oficio antropológico y las entrevistas en profundidad son una herramienta privilegiada para dar cuenta del valor testimonial de la palabra. Implícita, se encuentra la reflexión respecto de la construcción de conocimientos. Consideramos que las familias ocuparon un lugar protagónico en las Ligas. En este sentido, se propone ahondar en la estructura y organización de las Ligas, en particular las que se desarrollaron en la región del litoral, a partir de las estrategias de construcción política que llevaron adelante. Así, se traza el objetivo de indagar sobre los sentidos que los sujetos construyen en torno a la institución. Por último, en tanto se infiere que las mujeres debieron de ser las garantes del proceso de participación de toda la familia, analizamos la participación política y el lugar que éstas ocuparon en la organización política agrarista. Ante un contexto dictatorial de persecución política y avanzada imperialista, las Ligas fueron una de las experiencias de resistencia política-cultural más importantes de América Latina. Pese a los estragos que la última dictadura cívico-militar provocó, aún persiste en la memoria de sus participantes, aquella experiencia de lucha. Esto obliga a posicionarnos desde un enfoque que se centra en los sentidos que los sujetos le imprimen a sus historias, a los modos en que narran y construyen memorias. De modo que el trabajo de campo constituye el eje articulador del oficio antropológico y las entrevistas en profundidad, una herramienta privilegiada para dar cuenta del valor testimonial de la palabra. Implícita se encuentra la reflexión respecto a la construcción de conocimientos. (shrink)

This book is the first monograph fully devoted to analyzing the philosophical aspects of affordances. The concept of affordance, coined and developed in the field of ecological psychology, describes the possibilities for action available in the environment. This work offers a systematic approach to the key philosophical features of affordances, such as their ontological characterization, their relation to normative practices, and the idea of agency that follows from viewing affordances as key objects of perception, while also proposing an innovative philosophical (...) characterization of affordances as dispositional properties. The Philosophy of Affordances analyzes the implications that a proper understanding of affordances has for the philosophy of mind and the cognitive sciences, and aims to intensify the dialogue between philosophy and ecological psychology in which each discipline benefits from the tools and insights of the other. (shrink)

Context: Affordances are gaining momentum as a key object of study in the cognitive sciences and the philosophy of mind. In The Philosophy of Affordances I propose a new way to understand ….

Resumen La lingüística abarca una amplia gama de fenómenos que evolucionan a la misma velocidad que las lenguas lo hacen. Algunos fenómenos lingüísticos como la atrición han sido confundidos con otros fenómenos y han recibido nombres distintos en el transcurso de la historia debido al contacto entre varias lenguas. Por ese motivo, un estudio sobre dicho fenómeno se estima oportuno. Esto engloba la elección de la palabra atrición como traducción de attrition, su definición, las circunstancias que deben producirse para que (...) surja, los tipos de atrición que pueden darse y una comparación de la atrición lingüística con otros fenómenos lingüísticos. Esta exploración concluye con el hecho de que la atrición es el término apropiado, ya que delimita este fenómeno lingüístico que, aunque no es un fenómeno nuevo, sí es cada vez más actual debido a las migraciones y a la globalización. (shrink)

: I offer a response to some criticisms raised by the commentators on the basis of the following claims: Disagreements and publicness are not counterexamples to my view on normativity, ….

This paper argues that it is possible to combine enactivism and ecological psychology in a single post-cognitivist research framework if we highlight the common pragmatist assumptions of both approaches. These pragmatist assumptions or starting points are shared by ecological psychology and the enactive approach independently of being historically related to pragmatism, and they are based on the idea of organic coordination, which states that the evolution and development of the cognitive abilities of an organism are explained by appealing to the (...) history of interactions of that organism with its environment. It is argued that the idea of behavioral or organic coordination within the enactive approach gives rise to the sensorimotor abilities of the organism, while the ecological approach emphasizes the coordination at a higher-level between organism and environment through the agent’s exploratory behavior for perceiving affordances. As such, these two different processes of organic coordination can be integrated in a post-cognitivist research framework, which will be based on two levels of analysis: the subpersonal one and the personal one. If this proposal is on the right track, this may be a promising first step for offering a systematized and consistent post-cognitivist approach to cognition that retain the full potential of both enactivism and ecological psychology. (shrink)

In this paper, we offer a criticism, inspired by Wittgenstein’s rule-following considerations, of the enactivist account of perception and action. We start by setting up a non-descriptivist naturalism regarding the mind and continue by defining enactivism and exploring its more attractive theoretical features. We then proceed to analyse its proposal to understand normativity non-socially. We argue that such a thesis is ultimately committed to the problematic idea that normative practices can be understood as private and factual. Finally, we offer a (...) characterization of normativity as an essentially social phenomenon and apply our criticisms to other approaches that share commitments with enactivism. (shrink)

This paper takes an organicist perspective of W. Harvey’s conception of epigenesis in his work Exercitationes de generatione animalium (1651). In line with this reading, I provide a critical assessment of the different interpretations (mechanistic or vitalist) of Harvey’s idea of epigenesis. The English physician develops his conception of embryogenesis as a process that cannot be understood from the categories of human art, as is apparent in his criticisms towards his teacher, Fabricius. Nor is it accurate to say that his (...) position is animistic. An immersion in this last question will show us his organic conception of the soul, as an extension of the Aristotelian-Galenic tradition. (shrink)

Using the guise of a simple supper of commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of the birth of a charismatic Protestant pastor, who had gathered around him a community of devoted disciples in a small village in Norway, Babette’s Feast by Isak Dinesen shows us a banquet in which, through the food prepared with the eye of an artist, the senses are awakened for the first time to a kind of experience where what is corporal and what is spiritual cease to (...) be at odds with each other. Thus, a reconciliation of a lost unity between the body and the soul, matter and spirit, is celebrated and achieved. From this first step, with which the fundamental internal fragmentation is overcome, the other levels of unity (unity with others, with the cosmos, and with God) occur in a chain sequence, so to speak. As in all religious situations, there occurs here the coming together of two orders that seem unreconciliable: the temporal and the eternal, the limited and the infinite, the profane and the sacred. The mediator between both orders is Babette, who takes on a genuine sacerdotal function. However, there is an unexpected inversion, and paradoxically what is profane and mundane comes to the rescue of what is spiritual and sacred. (shrink)

It is worthy the observing that there is no passion in the mind of man so weak but it mates and masters the fear of death.... Revenge triumphs over death, love slights it, honour aspireth to it, grief flieth to it, fear preoccupateth it. Francis Bacon, “Of Death”This fight being the more cruel, since both Love and Hatred conspired to sharpen their humours, that hard it was to say whether Love with one trumpet, or Hatred with another, gave the louder (...) alarum to their courages. Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia. (shrink)

This paper is divided into two parts. In Section 1, I explore and defend a “regulative view” of folk-psychology as against the “standard view”. On the regulative view, folk-psychology is conceptualized in fundamentally interpersonal terms as a “mind-making” practice through which we come to form and regulate our minds in accordance with a rich array of socially shared and socially maintained sense-making norms. It is not, as the standard view maintains, simply an epistemic capacity for coming to know about the (...) mental states and dispositions already there. Importantly, the regulative view can meet and beat the standard at its own epistemic game. But it also does more. In Section 2, I show how the regulative view makes progress on two other problems that remain puzzling on the standard view: the problem of “first-person authority” – accounting for the special features of self-knowledge; and the problem of “reactive.. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Perception-Action Mutuality Obviates Mental Construction” by Martin Flament Fultot, Lin Nie & Claudia Carello. Upshot: This commentary highlights some controversial aspects of enactivism and ecological psychology, specifically the notions of subjectivity and ecological information. I argue that, instead of choosing between them, both theories could complement each other at different levels of analysis in a single research framework for explaining cognition from a situated perspective.

Cuerpo físico y cuerpo vivido no deben interpretarse como dos realidades separadas, sino que representan dos aspectos distintos de la misma experiencia corporal descrita en términos fenomenológicos. La experiencia de la corporalidad puede seguir dos direcciones: a) la primera es una dirección ascendente, que implica el desarrollo de las posibilidades de movimiento, acción y expresión del cuerpo en toda su plenitud; b) el otro camino o dirección, en contraste con el anterior, toma una senda descendente, y se halla estrechamente relacionado (...) con la experiencia del dolor, de la limitación, de la resistencia corporal que es experimentada como oposición a la propia voluntad: es el cuerpo vulnerable. Aquí reaparece un nuevo dualismo: el cuerpo poético de la expresión frente al cuerpo vulnerable de la enfermedad y el dolor. Mi contribución trata de cuestionar la idea de que el cuerpo poético de la expresión artística y el cuerpo vulnerable de la vejez, de la discapacidad o de la enfermedad, pertenezcan a esferas completamente separadas. Con este propósito, se intenta poner de relieve los múltiples puntos de intersección entre ambas perspectivas, al tiempo que se sostiene que tales intersecciones pueden llegar a ser interesantes puntos de partida de la investigación interdisciplinar. (shrink)

In the last years, we have attended to different attempts to extend the notion of affordance to include mental or cognitive actions. In short, the idea is that our capacity to perform some cognitive functions such as counting, imagining, mathematical reasoning, and so on, is preceded by our awareness of cognitive or mental affordances. In this paper, we analyze two of these attempts, Mental Affordance Hypothesis, and cognitive horizons, and conclude that they fail to deliver their promise. Our argument is (...) two-fold. First, we show that both proposals lack an explanation for how these affordances can be perceived or experienced by the individuals. Second, we argue, focusing on the examples provided by the authors, that the introduction of cognitive affordances is not justified on explanatory grounds. In other words, neither of these proposals offers a compelling justification for thinking that performing said “mental acts” requires the perception of mental or cognitive affordances. Hence, the existence of mental or cognitive affordances remains both scientifically mysterious and explanatorily unjustified. (shrink)

In this paper we explore in what sense we can claim that affordances, the objects of perception for ecological psychology, are related to normativity. First, we offer an account of normativity and provide some examples of how it is understood in the specialized literature. Affordances, we claim, lack correctness criteria and, hence, the possibility of error is not among their necessary conditions. For this reason we will oppose Chemero’s normative theory of affordances. Finally, we will show that there is a (...) way in which taking advantage of affordances could be considered as possessing a normative character, but only when they are evaluated within the framework of social normative standards in particular situations. This reinforces our claim that affordances, per se, lack normativity and can only be taken to be rule-governed in relation to established normative practices. (shrink)

In this paper we reject the nature–culture dichotomy by means of the idea of affordance or possibility for action, which has important implications for landscape theory. Our hypothesis is that, just as the idea of affordance can serve to overcome the subjective–objective dichotomy, the ideas of landscape and ecological niche, properly defined, would allow us to also transcend the nature–culture dichotomy. First, we introduce an overview of landscape theory, emphasizing processual landscape theory as the most suitable approach for satisfying both (...) cultural and naturalist approaches. After that, we introduce the idea of affordance and we analyze a tension between sociocultural and transcultural affordances (affordances that depend on cultural conventions and affordances that depend on lawful information and bodily aspects of agents). This tension has various implications for landscape theory and ecological niches. Our proposal is that sociocultural and transcultural aspects of affordances could be systematically accommodated if we apply niche construction theory (the theory that explains the process by which organisms modify their selective environments) as a methodological framework for explaining the emergence of ecological niches. This approach will lead us to an integrative account of landscapes as the products of the interaction between human and environmental elements, making it a clear example of a concept that transcends the nature–culture dichotomy. (shrink)

The main aim of this paper is to introduce an approach for understanding social cognition that we call the normative approach to social cognition. Such an approach, which results from a systematization of previous arguments and ideas from authors such as Ryle, Dewey, or Wittgenstein, is an alternative to the classic model and the direct social perception model. In section 2, we evaluate the virtues and flaws of these two models. In section 3, we introduce the normative approach, according to (...) which human, socio-cognitive competences rely on a myriad of social norms and routines that mediate our social interactions in such a way that we can make sense of each other without taking into consideration their mental states. In sections 4 and 5, we find some common premises shared by the two prior models and offer some arguments against them. In section 6, we advance some possible arguments against our approach and offer some responses against them. (shrink)

This paper aims to examine the evolutionary role of affordances, that is, the possibilities for action available in our environments. There are two allegedly competing views for explaining the evolutionary role of affordances: the first is based on natural selection; the second is based on niche construction. According to the first, affordances are resources that exert selection pressure. The second view claims that affordances are ecological inheritances in the organism’s niche that are the product of a previous alteration of the (...) environment. While there seems to be a mutually exclusive definition of affordances in each of these views, I argue in this paper that the views are not competing but, rather, complementary. In this sense, affordances play the role of either resources or ecological inheritances depending on the temporal stage of the evolutionary process. I make this argument by analyzing how natural selection and niche construction affect each other even when they function independently from each other. In this light, if these two evolutionary mechanisms exert their power in parallel but at two different stages in the evolutionary history of a given econiche, then there is room to claim that affordances can be understood as both resources and ecological inheritances. This dual aspect of affordances shows their evolutionary role. (shrink)

A widely shared assumption in the literature about skilled motor behavior is that any action that is not blindly automatic and mechanical must be the product of computational processes upon mental representations. To counter this assumption, in this paper we offer a radical embodied (non-representational) account of skilled action that combines ecological psychology and the Deweyan theory of habits. According to our proposal, skilful performance can be understood as composed of sequences of mutually coherent, task-specific perceptual-motor habits. Such habits play (...) a crucial role in simplifying both our exploration of the perceptual environment and our decision-making. However, we argue that what keeps habits situated, precluding them from becoming rote and automatic, are not mental representations but the agent's conscious attention to the affordances of the environment. It is because the agent is not acting on autopilot but constantly searching for new information for affordances that she can control her behavior, adapting previously learned habits to the current circumstances. We defend that our account provides the resources needed to understand how skilled action can be intelligent (flexible, adaptive, context-sensitive) without having any representational cognitive processes built into them. (shrink)

El objeto del siguiente texto es la exposición y el análisis de la obra de las Disputaciones Metafísicas bajo la idea de medir el alcance que el pensamiento de Francisco Suárez pueda tener en la modernidad filosófica. Para cumplir con tal objeto me centraré en un pequeño pero significativo número de cuestiones: la noción de materia y de causalidad, en relación a los requisitos que ha de cumplir el entendimiento para captar la realidad particular; la concepción de lo individual, que (...) vemos repetirse continuamente en cada asunto abordado por Suárez; y por último, la teoría de la distinción modal, sin la cual no podría entenderse el tratamiento y la solución que el filósofo propone para las dos cuestiones anteriores. (shrink)

This paper argues that the normative character of our unreflective situated behaviour is not factual. We highlight a problematic assumption shared by the two most influential trends in contemporary philosophy of cognitive science, reductionism and enactivism. Our intentional, normative explanations are referential, descriptive or factual. Underneath this assumption lies the idea that only facts can make true or false our attributions of cognitive, mental and agential abilities. We will argue against this view by describing the main features and problems of (...) reductionism and enactivism and then we will offer two arguments against this shared factualist assumption: (1) normative vocabulary is ineliminable if we want a complete explanation of our situated practices; and (2) the factualist assumption is a species of the is-ought fallacy. Finally, we will claim that a folk psychological explanation of our normative practices is fully compatible with ontological naturalism when such descriptivist or factualist assumption is rejected. (shrink)