ObjectiveStress can play a role in the onset and exacerbation of psoriasis. Psychological interventions to reduce stress have been shown to improve psychological and psoriasis-related outcomes. This pilot randomised study investigated the feasibility of a brief interaction with a Paro robot to reduce stress and improve skin parameters, after a stressor, in patients with psoriasis.MethodsAround 25 patients with psoriasis participated in a laboratory stress task, before being randomised to either interact with a Paro robot or sit quietly for 30 min. (...) Raman spectroscopy and trans-epidermal water loss were measured at baseline, after the stressor and after the intervention as indexes of acute skin changes. Psychological variables, including self-reported stress and affect, were also measured at the three time-points.ResultsNo statistically significant differences between the two conditions were found for any of the outcomes measured. However, effect sizes suggest significance could be possible with a larger sample size. Changes in the psychological and Raman spectroscopy outcomes across the experimental session were found, indicating the feasibility of the procedures.ConclusionThis pilot study showed that a brief interaction with a Paro robot was a feasible intervention for patients with psoriasis, but future trials should broaden the inclusion criteria to try to increase recruitment rates. Studying people who are highly stressed, depressed or who are stress-responders may increase the power of the intervention to show effects using a longer-term intervention. (shrink)

Suffering, defined as a state of undergoing pain, distress or hardship, is a multidimensional concept; it can entail physical, psychological and spiritual distress that prompts the sufferer to seek medical attention. As a construct originating from and unique to each patient, no patient’s suffering is equal to another’s or completely reducible to any generalizable frame of understanding. As it happens in a common medical encounter, the suffering patient requires an anamnesis provided by attentive and comprehensive listening to both the said (...) and unsaid parts of his or her discourse interpreted through the hermeneutical skills of the physician. Suffering can then be decoded into a complex construct, which can guide the formulation of a strategy to help patient coping by attempting to find meaning in it. To help this search for meaning, one may employ philosophic therapy, bibliotherapy and counseling, among other approaches. Suffering-based medicine (SBM) thus circumvents the limitations of the reductionistic Allopathic medical frame of understanding of disease. Such an attitude should be a common goal for all scientific medicine practitioners, as it complements and does not conflict with any of its therapeutic modalities. Furthermore, medical education should include humanistic disciplines to empower physicians to better understand their patients’ experience of suffering. (shrink)

The standard argument to the conclusion that artificial intelligence (AI) constitutes an existential risk for the human species uses two premises: (1) AI may reach superintelligent levels, at which point we humans lose control (the ‘singularity claim’); (2) Any level of intelligence can go along with any goal (the ‘orthogonality thesis’). We find that the singularity claim requires a notion of ‘general intelligence’, while the orthogonality thesis requires a notion of ‘instrumental intelligence’. If this interpretation is correct, they cannot be (...) joined as premises and the argument for the existential risk of AI turns out invalid. If the interpretation is incorrect and both premises use the same notion of intelligence, then at least one of the premises is false and the orthogonality thesis remains itself orthogonal to the argument to existential risk from AI. In either case, the standard argument for existential risk from AI is not sound.—Having said that, there remains a risk of instrumental AI to cause very significant damage if designed or used badly, though this is not due to superintelligence or a singularity. (shrink)

Lo económico como espacio de indeterminación o de conflicto. Análisis de un tratado monetario bajomedieval: el De moneta de Nicolás de Oresme. Resumen de tesis de doctorado en Filosofía de Julián Giglio.

Philosophical naturalism, according to which philosophy is continuous with the natural sciences, has dominated the Western academy for well over a century, but Michael Rea claims that it is without rational foundation. Rea argues compellingly to the surprising conclusion that naturalists are committed to rejecting realism about material objects, materialism, and perhaps realism about other minds.

El presente trabajo analiza las últimas páginas del tratado De ludo globi de Nicolás de Cusa. Más específicamente, se centra en el ejemplo monetario utilizado por el Cusano, en donde el autor plantea una metáfora en donde Dios es presentado como un omnipotente acuñador de moneda, mientras que el hombre como un cambista. A partir de una propuesta inversa, que va de la gnoseología cusana al ejemplo, se propone comprender la concepción monetaria subyacente en el ejemplo. Para el análisis se (...) vincula esta obra con un sermón predicado años antes durante su obispado en Bresanona, así como rastrear importantes factores contextuales, y antecedentes teóricos. (shrink)

With his ‘event-based classification’, the late Peter Birks provided a coherent and principled framework for the civil law of obligations. In this article, ‘restitution’ is considered in the context of his taxonomy and two main propositions are advanced. The first proposition is that ‘gain-related recovery’ is the most adequate description of restitution as a legal response. The second proposition is that the term ‘restitution’ qualifies the mechanism of taking away the defendant's benefit without any direct reference to the immediate purpose (...) of the award and therefore has both a ‘giving up’ and a ‘giving back’ function. Those theories which distinguish these two functions, it is argued, confuse the mechanism of the right realized with the aim of the response awarded. Restitution as a legal response can be applied to reach different aims, such as giving back wealth mistakenly transferred by the claimant to the defendant or surrendering profits wrongfully obtained by the defendant. Yet, the right to restitution which is realized in court operates always in the same fashion: it transfers to the claimant wealth up to the level of the defendant's benefit. This interpretation tackles the criticism of those favourable to ‘disgorgement’, that is ‘giving up’, as an independent legal response and shows that their concerns are justified, but do not affect the consistency of the event-based classification. (shrink)

Varios autores han señalado las referencias explícitas e implícitas en la obra de Nicolás de Oresme al _Defensor pacis_ de Marsilio de Padua. Algunos de ellos han planteado a partir de las mismas la existencia de un “giro marsiliano”. Si bien dicha presencia es clara, no se ha explorado en profundidad el grado de apego de Oresme a los postulados marisilianos. Un análisis de factores contextuales, así como un análisis textual del _De moneta_ y del _Livre de Politique_ permiten establecer (...) algunas diferencias, de las cuales surge un modelo que presenta ciertos límites al apego de Oresme a los postulados del Paduano. (shrink)

Se presenta una Reseña del libro 'Oikonomía. Los orígenes de la reflexión económica en Grecia' de Carlos Martín, publicado por la Editorial de la Universidad de San Martín (Argentina).

Metaphysics: The Basics is a concise and engaging introduction to the philosophical study of the world and universe in which we live. Concerned with questions about reality, existence, time, identity and change, metaphysics has long fascinated people but to the uninitiated some of the issues and problems can appear very complex. In this lively and lucid book, Michael Rea examines and explains key questions in the study of metaphysics such as: • Can two things be in the same place at (...) the same time? • Do creatures of fiction exist? • Are human beings free? • Is time travel possible? • Is there just one world or many worlds? With a glossary of key terms and suggestions for further reading, the book considers key philosophical arguments around Metaphysics, making this an ideal starting point for anyone seeking a full introduction to the debates both within and about metaphysics. (shrink)

The paper gives a new light on the controversy between Popper and Carnap on the interpretation of probability and its use to solve the problem of induction. In his later work on probability and inductive logic, Carnap came nearer to the bayesian positions stressing an important shift from his ear..

Unmet legal needs contribute to housing, income, and food insecurity, along with other conditions that harm health and drive health inequity. Addressing health injustice requires new tools for the next generations of lawyers, doctors, and other healthcare professionals. An interprofessional group of co-authors argue that law and medical schools and other university partners should develop and cultivate Academic Medical-Legal Partnerships (A-MLPs), which are uniquely positioned to leverage service, education, and research resources, to advance health justice.

This book explores aspects of William H. Poteat’s philosophical anthropology, which proposes a post-critical alternative to the prevailing dualistic conception of the person and opens a path to recovery of the pre-reflective ontological ground of the person where our personhood can be recovered and re-appropriated.

A better written introduction to what the Philosophy for Children Program is meant to be like in sustained practice is not likely to be found than this book. There have been transcripts published of good philosophical discussions by children accompanied with insightful commentary in Analytic Teaching and Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children. Yet before this book, there has not been a comprehensive sampling of such discussions with a commentary that pulls it all together. What makes it even more (...) attractive is that it is written so that the primary focus is places where it should be - namely, on the children's philosophical inquiries as something worthy of the reader's attention for their own sake, rather than on some extrinsic concern such as a theory about children's thinking, a discussion of the Philosophy for Children Program, or a set of philosophical theses that the children just happen to have been exploring. (shrink)

Neisseria gonorrhoeae, the bacterium that causes the sexually transmitted disease gonorrhea, demonstrates extensive antigenic heterogeneity in its surface components. The organism has the capacity to switch on and off the synthesis of different versions of components such as pili, outer membrane proteins, and lipopolysaccharide. Recent studies have shown that the gonococcus uses novel and complex mechanisms, of types not described previously, to store different versions of genetic information for surface proteins, and to regulate expression of those genes.

In a number of recent discussions of non-standard, Philosophy programs vaarious ages have been identified as the focus for spontaneous or exceptional interest in philosophising. Such claims, supporting a particular population as naturally suited to philosophical inquiry, are based as often as not, on anecdotes that exhibit telling instances of philosophical activity. Needless to say, such motivated activity occurring spontaneously and outside of a formal classroom may occur in many contexts and at various ages. If professional educators egar to support (...) philsophical programs on the basis of the naturalness of the philosophical enterprise are to warrant their interest on the basis of claims to age-appropriateness, some reasonable attempt at gathering empirical data is required. We offer the questionaire on the following pages as a probe to be used by interested educators and others. (shrink)

The “Value Alignment Problem” is the challenge of how to align the values of artificial intelligence with human values, whatever they may be, such that AI does not pose a risk to the existence of humans. A fundamental feature of how the problem is currently understood is that AI systems do not take the same things to be relevant as humans, whether turning humans into paperclips in order to “make more paperclips” or eradicating the human race to “solve climate change”. (...) Specifically, existing approaches approaches to alignment appear to be concerned with how AI might *solve* problems in the relevant way. This paper presents and explores an approach to alignment rooted in the Enactive Theory of mind. It offers an alternative conception of the alignment as “how do we make relevant to AI what is relevant to humans?” In this conception, alignment is concerned with building AI so that it *discerns* and defines the problem in the relevant way. In this way, the Alignment Problem is shown to be the same problem as the Frame Problem. The paper concludes with a consideration of tradeoffs between these conceptions of the alignment problem. (shrink)

The “Value Alignment Problem” is the challenge of how to align the values of artificial intelligence with human values, whatever they may be, such that AI does not pose a risk to the existence of humans. Existing approaches appear to conceive of the problem as "how do we ensure that AI solves the problem in the right way", in order to avoid the possibility of AI turning humans into paperclips in order to “make more paperclips” or eradicating the human race (...) to “solve climate change”. This paper proposes an approach to Alignment rooted in the Enactive theory of mind that reconceptualises it as "how do we make relevant to AI what it relevant to humans". This conceptualisation is supported with a discussion of 4E cognition and goes on to suggest that the Alignment problem and the Frame problem are the same problem. The paper concludes with a discussion of the tradeoffs of the different approaches to value alignment. (shrink)