The question of how we should engage with a philosopher’s racial thought is of particular importance when considering Kant, who can be viewed as particularly representative of Enlightenment philosophy. In this article I argue that we should take a stance of deep acknowledgment when considering Kant’s work both inside and outside the classroom. Taking a stance of deep acknowledgment should be understood as 1) taking Kant’s racial thought to be reflective of his moral character, 2) Kant being accountable for his (...) racial thought and 3) being willing to consider the possibility that Kant’s racial thought is consistent with and inextricable from his moral philosophy. Alternative forms of engaging with Kant’s racial work have either moral or pedagogical failings, which range from simply teaching the history of philosophy uncritically to outright deception. A stance of deep acknowledgement will allow philosophers to understand how Kant’s racial thought interacts with his moral philosophy and allow instructors to teach philosophy in a historically contextualized approach so as to not alienate students whose demographic was disparaged by Kant. (shrink)

BackgroundThe Patient Health Questionnaire-9 is the most well-known self-report measure to screen for depressive symptomatology, although discerning which is the factor structure that represents the best fit remains a challenge.ObjectiveThe aim of this study was to analyze the psychometric properties and factorial structure of the Spanish version of the PHQ-9 in a large sample of Ecuadorian college students.MethodsA total of 5,394 students from three Ecuadorian universities were surveyed using a computerized questionnaire within a 4-week assessment period. The PHQ-9 was tested (...) for factorial structure, reliability, and correlations with other mental health-related measures.ResultsThe hierarchical model that included a general factor and three nested factors had a better fit, and such a hierarchical structure remained invariant across sex and age. Total omega value was 0.90 for the total scale and hierarchical omega values were 0.68 for the general factor, as well as 0.34, 0.38, and 0.44 for the respective nested factors. Moreover, PHQ-9 scores were significantly higher among women, although effect sizes of comparison of those sex differences were very small. Finally, the PHQ-9 scores correlated with multiple mental health indicators.DiscussionThe Spanish version of the PHQ-9 showed good psychometric properties among Ecuadorian college students. The hierarchical structure showed the best fit for the data, including not only a dominant general factor, but also the somatic, cognitive/affective and concentration/motor subcomponents. In conclusion, the PHQ-9 tool seems to represent an easy-to-implement screening questionnaire to design preventive programs for those Ecuadorian college students at risk of developing depressive disorders. (shrink)

Collective apologies on behalf of governments to historically mistreated minorities have become more common. It is unclear, however, how we should respond to these apologies and other practices that invoke collective responsibility for oppression (chapter 1). I review the current literature on collective responsibility to better understand the obstacles facing an account of collective responsibility for oppression (chapter 2). I then argue that we can make sense of these practices by holding powerful organized collectives (chapter 3) and privileged disorganized collectives (...) (chapter 4) responsible for oppression. These practices then can be what I call “morally legitimate” if they are confessions of self-blame, and this self-blame contains an element of collective-self protest (chapter 5). (shrink)

Many historically-influential philosophers had profoundly wrong moral views or behaved very badly. Aristotle thought women were “deformed men” and that some people were slaves “by nature.” Descartes had disturbing views about non-human animals. Hume and Kant were racists. Hegel disparaged Africans. Nietzsche despised sick people. Mill condoned colonialism. Fanon was homophobic. Frege was anti-Semitic; Heidegger was a Nazi. Schopenhauer was sexist. Rousseau abandoned his children. Wittgenstein beat his young students. Unfortunately, these examples are just a start. -/- These philosophers are (...) famous for their intellectual accomplishments, yet they display serious moral or intellectual flaws in their beliefs or actions. At least, some of their views were false, ultimately unjustified and, perhaps, harmful. -/- How should we respond to brilliant-but-flawed philosophers from the past? Here we explore the issues, asking questions and offering few answers. Any insights gained here might be applicable to contemporary imperfect philosophers, scholars in other fields, and people in general. (shrink)

BackgroundPreprint usage is growing rapidly in the life sciences; however, questions remain on the relative quality of preprints when compared to published articles. An objective dimension of quality that is readily measurable is completeness of reporting, as transparency can improve the reader’s ability to independently interpret data and reproduce findings.MethodsIn this observational study, we initially compared independent samples of articles published in bioRxiv and in PubMed-indexed journals in 2016 using a quality of reporting questionnaire. After that, we performed paired comparisons (...) between preprints from bioRxiv to their own peer-reviewed versions in journals.ResultsPeer-reviewed articles had, on average, higher quality of reporting than preprints, although the difference was small, with absolute differences of 5.0% [95% CI 1.4, 8.6] and 4.7% [95% CI 2.4, 7.0] of reported items in the independent samples and paired sample comparison, respectively. There were larger differences favoring peer-reviewed articles in subjective ratings of how clearly titles and abstracts presented the main findings and how easy it was to locate relevant reporting information. Changes in reporting from preprints to peer-reviewed versions did not correlate with the impact factor of the publication venue or with the time lag from bioRxiv to journal publication.ConclusionsOur results suggest that, on average, publication in a peer-reviewed journal is associated with improvement in quality of reporting. They also show that quality of reporting in preprints in the life sciences is within a similar range as that of peer-reviewed articles, albeit slightly lower on average, supporting the idea that preprints should be considered valid scientific contributions. (shrink)

Reseña del libro: Miguel Saralegui, The Politics of Time. Introduction to Carl Schmitt’sPolitical Thought, Cantabria University Press, Santander, 2021, 273 pp.

O presente texto é um esforço de reunir, em torno do conceito de necropolítica, questões que atravessam a obra de Achille Mbembe e estão ausentes ou são pouco trabalhadas no texto “Necropolítica”. O foco será especialmente em distinguir o poder de matar do necropoder, mostrando como este produz uma espacialidade e um espaço onde ele pode circular livremente, destruindo e constituindo realidades e mundos de morte, articulando os elementos que compõem a necropolítica como formação de terror inaugurada na guerra (...) colonial: i) o exercício do poder soberano como poder de matar e transgredir qualquer normatividade para além de si; ii) a normalização do estado de exceção pelo enquadramento de partes do corpo social como inimigas para além das fronteiras da civilização; iii) a militarização do cotidiano e submissão de zonas sitiadas a uma lógica de guerra sem lei. Essa articulação será analisada em termos de sua instrumentalidade e de seu poder de reencenação infinita em variados contextos após o fim da colônia, levando em consideração o papel fundamental da raça na mobilização desses recursos de guerra e morte. Por fim, a ideia é trazer a necropolítica para o centro do dilema ético maior da obra de Mbembe: a demanda pela derrubada violenta da realidade pós-colonial e o risco da circulação infinita da morte na forma do fratricídio. (shrink)

La presente contribución intenta una ontología de la decisión política sobre la guerra y la paz a partir del pensar rememorante. Se toma como motivo narrativo el Ballet de la Paz de Descartes (1649); modelo nostálgico de una modernidad alternativa, adviene del olvido contra los presupuestos conceptuales individualistas y violentistas de la filosofía política moderna. Una hermenéutica política del Discurso del Método busca un Descartes teólogo político, contramoderno, partidario de una política destinal. Una silenciosa Reina, Belicosa y Pacífica, es (...) su vocera. (shrink)

El artículo es una presentación de una de las obras más emblemáticas del pensamiento político peruano de inicios del siglo XX: Carácter de la literatura del Perú independiente, la primera obra de José de la Riva-Agüero y Osma. La historiografía ha considerado este texto como una obra de historia de la literatura; también como un trabajo “liberal”. Carácter de la literatura sería en realidad una obra de filosofía social positivista. Pero sería además una versión peruana del positivismo monarquista royaliste. Riva-Agüero (...) habría tenido un referente oculto: el libro de filosofía social positivista de Javier Prado, Estado social del Perú durante la dominación española, que habría puesto de cabeza. Tres temas básicos eran el eje de una oculta polémica político-conceptual: la religión, la monarquía y la tradición. Una oculta teoría de psicología colectiva le serviría de sustento: los peruanos tendrían un carácter pragmatista y un sentimiento social empático con el pasado, más apropiado para reivindicar la tradición que para condenarla. La Guerra del Pacífico y un baile social de la aristocracia de la Lima de 1904 serán el escenario de la controversia. (shrink)

A pandemia do novo coronavírus oferece um desafio ao pensamento: pensar a disrupção nos assuntos humanos causado por um agente inumano. Nossa capacidade coletiva de lidar com o problema dependerá dos enquadramentos conceituais que seremos capazes de mobilizar. Esse breve ensaio, busca analisar a metáfora da guerra e sua pertinência epistêmica, abordando tanto os discursos a mobilizam quanto as críticas que a rejeitam. Concluímos que a metáfora carrega um momento de verdade em sua forma, apesar do sinal trocado quanto (...) ao conteúdo. Se a guerra é uma suspensão temporária da lógica de acumulação pela lógica da destruição, sugerimos uma substituição da lógica da acumulação pela lógica do cuidado. (shrink)

Diversas teorías contemporáneas de la democracia han puesto el acento en las tensiones que produce al ciudadano vivir en una comunidad política democrática y, sin embargo, pasar la mayor parte de su vida en espacios no democráticos. En este trabajo se analiza el persistente déficit democrático que en España arrastra una institución pública especial, la universidad. Según Thomas Hobbes la competencia, la desconfianza y el deseo de gloria originan las guerras entre ciudadanos; hoy se asume de manera natural su presencia (...) dominante en la universidad. Se procederá así al estudio de diversas patologías políticas producto del desgobierno originado, precisamente, al confundir de esta manera el sentido último de la institución. Se trataría de la envidia, la calumnia, la ambición destructiva y el narcisismo. Por último se estudiará la conformación de grupos como hermandades. (shrink)

In October 2019, the so-called ‘social outbreak’ took place in Chile, a major socio-political conflict that led to an unprecedented constitutional change in the country. Under this context, the feminist movement takes on a prominent role, not only because of the massiveness of its demonstrations but also because of its influence on the achievement of gender parity in the constitutional process.The experiences of the protests were captured in the countless graffiti that have propagated in urban spaces since the social outbreak (...) and which, even today, abound in certain areas. The aim of this study is to analyse the conceptual metaphors expressed in graffiti related to the Chilean protest. The methodology includes three instances of analysis: the identification of linguistic metaphors; their semantic-discursive grouping; and the conceptual analysis of the established groups, in which the ‘Basic Scene’ component is considered. As a result, the conceptual metaphor PROTEST IS WAR is proposed, which conceptualises Chileans as warriors fighting against an enemy, represented by the political institutionality, the economic model and the patriarchal system. It is concluded that the established metaphor sets out a cognitive dichotomy that highlights the opposition between the participants in the Chilean social conflict and the demonstrators’ discomfort with the current system, emphasising its commitment and unity with the reasons to protest. (shrink)

Este artigo contextualiza o nazismo como projeto de degradação da multiplicidade humana a partir da instrumentalização da língua alemã e consequentemente da linguagem como experiência humana. Tal contextualização se inicia apresentando os projetos amplamente conhecidos do nazismo, que se dão à sombra de Auschwitz, para, em seguida, partir à análise das observações de Victor Klemperer sobre a aplicação da LTI na sociedade alemã no período que envolveu o entreguerras e o final da Segunda Guerra Mundial, precisamente na cidade (...) de Dresden, onde Klemperer viveu e repensou sua condição judaica. Por meio do uso estratégico da linguagem, o nazismo interveio nos hábitos da sociedade alemã, o que implicou a adesão popular à ideologia do Terceiro Reich, bem como provocou a legitimação da reprodução do mal naquela sociedade, enquanto projeto pervertido de cidadania. Disso resulta uma compreensão biopolítica da linguagem, na medida em que se reconhece o nazismo como doutrina do fanatismo. (shrink)

Parsa-Parsi et al systematically discuss and elucidate contentious and non-controversial ethical issues that emerged during the ICoME (International Code of Medical Ethics) revision process and the consensus they achieved. The ethical issues discussed include the physician’s duty to act in the best interests of patients and to ensure they are protected from the unjustifiable risk of harm, respect for patient autonomy and the duties of physicians during emergencies, among others. This paper examines paragraph 26, which requires doctors to provide only (...) medically justified remote treatment, ensure patients offer informed consent and adequately protect their confidentiality.1 At the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries in Europe and America implemented remote-by-default healthcare policies. At that time, the policy aimed to ensure that patients enjoyed continued access to care while protecting healthcare professionals’ health and well-being. After the COVID-19 pandemic, this policy remained in place. Regardless of the nature of their ailment, patients have consistently preferred in-person care out of concern that their health issues might not be accurately diagnosed and that they may not receive quality care …. (shrink)

The denial of voting rights to certain types of persons continues to be a moral problem of practical significance. The disenfranchisement of persons with mental impairments, minors, noncitizen residents, nonresident citizens, and criminal offenders is a matter of controversy. This book makes a contribution to this largely neglected yet key topic.

This book examines leadership strategies that allow administrators to be proactive, visionary, and flexible while increasing collaboration, open communication, and closely integrating theory and practice to ensure successful administration in higher education settings.

This article compares the ‘enfranchisement lottery’, a novel method for allocating the right to vote, with universal suffrage. The comparison is conducted exclusively on the basis of the expected consequences of the two systems. Each scheme seems to have a relative advantage. On the one hand, the enfranchisement lottery would create a better informed electorate and thus improve the quality of electoral outcomes. On the other hand, universal suffrage is more likely to ensure that elections are seen to be fair, (...) which is important for political stability. This article concludes that, on balance, universal suffrage is prima facie superior to the enfranchisement lottery. Yet the analysis shows that the instrumental case for the ‘one person, one vote’ principle is less conclusive than democratic theorists usually suppose. (shrink)

This article advances three claims. The first is that the standard instrumentalist case for minimal age and sanity requirements for voting is weak and inconclusive in such a way that the evaluation of such requirements should be made exclusively on the basis of procedural fairness considerations. The second claim is that fairness requires the inclusion of all and only those persons who have the franchise capacity: the minimum necessary cognitive and moral powers to experience the benefits of enfranchisement. The third (...) and final claim is that current age and sanity prerequisites for voting in most places fail to comply with the demands of fairness and ought to be revised. (shrink)

Este artículo supone una aproximación a la práctica de la pintura como medio privilegiado para suspender nuestra habitual reducción de lo visible al mundo predeterminado de las categorías y funcionalidades, potenciando la apertura de una mirada atenta al aparecerse mismo de las cosas. A partir de la correspondencia entre autor y espectador a través de una mirada formadora, buscamos reivindicar la experiencia estética del mundo para tomar consciencia de nuestra relación sensible con lo observado en su desnuda extrañeza, donde nuestro (...) papel no es el de la dominación cognoscitiva, sino el de la participación y la diferencia. (shrink)

This article compares the ‘enfranchisement lottery’, a novel method for allocating the right to vote, with universal suffrage. The comparison is conducted exclusively on the basis of the expected consequences of the two systems. Each scheme seems to have a relative advantage. On the one hand, the enfranchisement lottery would create a better informed electorate and thus improve the quality of electoral outcomes. On the other hand, universal suffrage is more likely to ensure that elections are seen to be fair, (...) which is important for political stability. This article concludes that, on balance, universal suffrage is prima facie superior to the enfranchisement lottery. Yet the analysis shows that the instrumental case for the ‘one person, one vote’ principle is less conclusive than democratic theorists usually suppose. (shrink)

Desde la visión de Ortega y Gasset y Julián Marías aparece el pensador Árabe Ibn Jaldún como uno de los principales puentes tendidos entre Oriente y Occidente, tanto que es considerado por ambos como el primer filósofo de la historia. Según afirmaciones de Ortega, el pensador árabe es el cimiento que heredaron las generaciones de ambos pensadores españoles.

This article explores the possibility of a notion of left-wing populism that is conceptually opposed to the identitarian logic of embodiment that characterises right-populist interpellations of ‘th...

In this article I argue that there are two different types of understanding: the understanding we get from explanations, and the understanding we get from unification. This claim is defended by first showing that explanation and unification are not as closely related as has sometimes been thought. A critical appraisal of recent proposals for understanding without explanation leads us to discuss the example of a purely classificatory biology: it turns out that such a science can give us understanding of the (...) world through unification of the phenomena, even though it does not give us any explanations. The two types of understanding identified in this paper, while strictly separate, do have in common that both consist in seeing how the individual phenomena of the universe hang together. Explanations give us connections between the phenomena through the asymmetric, ‘vertical’ relation of determination; unifications give us connections through the symmetric, ‘horizontal’ relation of kinship. We then arrive at a general definition of understanding as knowledge of connections between the phenomena, and indicate that there might be more than two types of understanding. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Phenomenology of Superstition or a Phenomenological Superstition?Elena Ibáñez-Guerra (bio)KeywordsBehaviorism, constructionism, intentionality, operant behaviorWhen the editors of Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology asked me to make some brief comments on two articles for the special issue edited by Pérez-Álvarez and Sass, I was delighted to accept, thinking that the task would be a straightforward one, and that I could easily meet the agreed deadline. But nothing could be further (...) from the truth. The articles were of such density and their content of such profundity that it took months of interpretation and study, and of bringing my own knowledge up to date, before I was in a position to understand the concepts, adjust my beliefs, and make some comments. I could certainly have delivered some kind of eulogy about the brilliance of their content; I might have countered with my own article. However, what seemed most coherent to me was to meet their arguments head on and deal with what I consider to be their principal weaknesses, leaving the bouquets for the end.The articles set out, as I understand them and within the clinical context, to relate phenomenology, in its most traditional form, with the most current form of Skinnerian behaviorism, situating themselves in a contextualism that is, at the same time, close to and removed from the most radical type of social constructionism.But let us begin by looking more closely at “Phenomenology and Behaviorism.” It is novel for me, though Professor Pérez-Álvarez had already proposed it several years ago (Pérez-Álvarez 1992), to view operant behavior as intentionality, or at least as involving final causality according to the Aristotelian classification. It is a surprising contention, not least because, as I recall, Skinner lived in a time and a context (historical reason) in which the basic goal of psychology was to convert itself into a natural science, comparable in all respects to physics, which it took as a model, focusing therefore on efficient causality (also according to Aristotle’s terminology), so that behavior was considered as the immediate consequence of a stimulus, and the stimulus–response association became the cornerstone of the discipline. It is true that the operant behavior concept refers to the functional relationship between behavior and reinforcement, but it is no less true that Skinner’s definition of reinforcement is totally empirical—“all that which increases or decreases the probability”—meaning that reinforcement can be considered neither as a motive nor as a reason for behavior, unless it be in the eyes of the observer. [End Page 251]Furthermore, even though Yela (1987) refers to Ortega y Gasset’s formula “I am myself and my circumstances” as a Skinnerian approach, the truth is that Yela himself argues that it is precisely the self that constitutes personality, such that I have a personality because I am me, and not vice versa, as Skinner would appear to argue. In this regard, Ortega’s celebrated formula has generally been interpreted, from the most personalist perspectives, as “the circumstances are myself”—to highlight the denial of the psychological subject by radical behaviorism (Mischel’s [1968] criticism of the concept of personality is relevant here). On top of this, Skinner’s rejection of all that was not directly observable, or at least, that could not be operationalized, calls into question the admissibility of anything called final cause or intentionality of behavior. In his philosophy, all the indications are that contingencies are what determine behavior; and that there would be no room for a structural causality, as Althusser would argue, or of a reciprocal determinism, in Bandura’s terms, or even of an interaction between subject and environment, as modern interactionists would maintain. “I am myself and my circumstances” seems in Skinner to become “the circumstances are me”, and indeed, the reinforcement history – which in the article in question is considered as something akin to the Sartrian idea of “life project” – is for Skinner nothing more than a continuous association of events. In my view, Ortega’s perspectivism would perhaps be closer to the sociology of the American action theorists, Merton, Parsons, etc., than to Skinnerian behaviorism, since “action”—as the action theorists... (shrink)

The distinction between the body schema and the body image has become the stock in trade of much recent work in cognitive neuroscience and philosophy. Yet little is known about the interactions between these two types of body representations. We need to account not only for their dissociations in rare cases, but also for their convergence most of the time. Indeed in our everyday life the body we perceive does not conflict with the body we act with. Are the body (...) image and the body schema then somehow reshaping each other or are they relatively independent and do they only happen to be congruent? On the basis of the study of bodily hallucinations, we consider which model can best account for the body schema/body image interactions. (shrink)

J. L. Mackie famously argued that a commitment to non-existent objective values permeates ordinary moral thought and discourse. According to a standard interpretation, Mackie construed this commitment as a universal and indeed essential feature of moral judgments. In this paper I argue that we should rather ascribe to Mackie a form of semantic pluralism, according to which not all moral judgments involve the commitment to objective values. This interpretation not only makes better sense of what Mackie actually says, but also (...) renders his error theory immune to a powerful objection. (shrink)

In this article I give a unified account of three phenomena: bullshit, pseudoscience and pseudophilosophy. My aims are partly conceptual, partly evaluative. Drawing on Harry Frankfurt's seminal analysis of bullshit, I give an account of the three phenomena and of how they are related, and I use this account to explain what is bad about all three. More specifically, I argue that what is defective about pseudoscience and pseudophilosophy is precisely that they are special cases of bullshit. Apart from raising (...) interesting philosophical issues, gaining a clearer understanding of these phenomena is also of practical importance, in that it bears on how best to tackle the threat that they pose. (shrink)

Western scholarship on religion and gender has devoted considerable attention to women’s entry into leadership roles across various religious traditions and denominations. However, very little is known about the dynamics of women’s religious authority and leadership in developing settings, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, a region of powerful and diverse religious expressions. This study employs a combination of uniquely rich and diverse data to examine women’s formal religious authority in a predominantly Christian setting in Mozambique. I first use survey data to (...) test hypotheses regarding the prevalence and patterns of women’s formal leadership across different denominational groups. I then support and extend the quantitative results with insights on pathways and consequences of women’s ascent to formal congregation authority drawn from qualitative data. The analysis illustrates how women’s religious authority both defies and reasserts the gendered constraints of the religious marketplace and the broader gender ideology in this developing context. (shrink)