The aim of the study was to assess the effects of visual aesthetic perception on event-related potentials . Eight subjects assigned an aesthetic judgment and a 10-step beauty estimation to the target stimuli, consisting of famous artistic pictures and geometric shapes. In a further task, the subjects performed a motor response to the previously judged pictures and geometric shapes. ERPs were recorded through 54 scalp electrodes during both tasks. The P3b amplitude was increased during the categorization of the geometric shapes (...) compared to the artistic figures and during the vision of the beautiful targets preceding the motor response. The categorization of the aesthetic qualities of geometrical shapes seems to induce a higher level of attention, while a higher arousal variation was elicited by the recognition of beauty, in any form that was presented. (shrink)

Comme ailleurs dans le monde, les courants évangéliques et pentecôtistes ont tenté dès les années 1980 de s’imposer dans l’espace public de l’Afrique de l’Ouest. Bien qu’apparus au début du XX e siècle, ce n’est que dans la deuxième moitié du siècle que l’on observe un changement dans l’engagement évangélique vis-à-vis de la société : d’un retrait du monde à une « ouverture vers l’activité politique », marquée par le thème du combat spirituel pour les territoires. En Afrique de l’Ouest, (...) cette nouvelle visibilité dans l’espace public s’est concrétisée par l’élection de présidents évangéliques, comme Matthieu Kérékou au Bénin en 1996, ou Laurent Gbagbo en Côte d’Ivoire en 2000. Mais au sein d’une même société, les relations entre évangélismes et politique peuvent ainsi être multiples. Pour les saisir, il est nécessaire d’adopter différents points de vue, depuis les instances de pouvoir jusqu’aux relations interpersonnelles de la vie quotidienne. (shrink)

On Kant's view, the feeling of respect is the mark of moral agency, and is peculiar to us, animals endowed with reason. Unlike any other feeling, respect originates in the contemplation of the moral law, that is, the idea of lawful activity. This idea works as a constraint on our deliberation by discounting the pretenses of our natural desires and demoting our selfish maxims. We experience its workings in the guise of respect. Respect shows that from the agent's subjective perspective, (...) morality is the experience of being bound and necessitated, but also of being free and emancipated from inclinations.Respect is a feeling that is generated by the agent's reflection on the nature of her own agency. It is not directed to anybody in particular, but to the very idea of rational agency, which is characterized by self-mastery and self-legislation. Contrary to animals, we do not derive our ends from nature, but we are capable of setting ends of our own, by exercising practical reason, that is, by engaging in the activity of law making. (shrink)

This publication features the stories and experiences of pharmacy professionals who identify as members of historically underrepresented groups. This collection of personal essays presents significant events in the lives of those in the pharmacy community whose experiences have been shaped by their race, ethnicity, gender or gender presentation, sexual orientation, ability, language, mental health, or other factors. The perspectives from the narratives highlight the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the healthcare sector. The authors of the narratives also reflect (...) on their experience to consider what they wish would have happened in the experience, to offer advice for others that may be faced with similar situations. Access to these stories will deepen the collective understanding among pharmacy colleagues, patients, and society of the experiences that individuals from historically underrepresented groups within pharmacy have experienced. (shrink)

Background Ethical decision making in intensive care is a demanding task. The need to proceed to ethical decision is considered to be a stress factor that may lead to burnout. The aim of this study is to explore the ethical problems that may increase burnout levels among physicians and nurses working in Portuguese intensive care units . A quantitative, multicentre, correlational study was conducted among 300 professionals.Results The most crucial ethical decisions made by professionals working in ICU were related to (...) communication, withholding or withdrawing treatments and terminal sedation. A positive relation was found between ethical decision making and burnout in nurses, namely, between burnout and the need to withdraw treatments , to withhold treatments and to proceed to terminal sedation . This did not apply to physicians. Emotional exhaustion was the burnout subdimension most affected by the ethical decision. The nurses' lack of involvement in ethical decision making was identified as a risk factor. Nevertheless, in comparison with nurses , it was the physicians who more keenly felt the need to proceed to ethical decisions in ICU.Conclusions Ethical problems were reported at different levels by physicians and nurses. The type of ethical decisions made by nurses working in Portuguese ICUs had an impact on burnout levels. This did not apply to physicians. This study highlights the need for education in the field of ethics in ICUs and the need to foster inter-disciplinary discussion so as to encourage ethical team deliberation in order to prevent burnout. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s practical incursions on the domain of art were many and well known. It is worth drawing attention to the design that he did together with Paul Engelmann for his sister Margarethe Stonborough-Wittgenstein’s house and the bust he made for, and was inspired by, the sculptor Michael Drobil. To attribute just an anecdotal character to Wittgenstein’s few artistic projects is a misunderstanding. The Austrian philosopher devoted himself to them with the fervor and rigor that characterize his philosophical writings. He (...) took care of every detail in his sister’s house, which sometimes ended up in difficult changes, although quite minimal (as when he had the ceilings lowered a few centimeters just before .. (shrink)

Research on children’s ability to attribute false mental states to others has focused exclusively on false beliefs. We developed a novel paradigm that focuses instead on another type of false mental state: false perceptions. From approximately 4 years of age, children begin to recognize that their perception of an illusory object can be at odds with its true properties. Our question was whether they also recognize that another individual viewing the object will similarly experience a false perception. We tested 33 (...) preschool children with a task in which distorting lenses caused a small object to appear large and a large object to appear small. To succeed, children needed to recognize that a naive agent would falsely perceive the relative size of the objects and to correctly anticipate the agent’s actions on that basis. Children performed significantly better than chance in our false perception test, and there was a developmental progression in performance from 4 to 5 years of age similar to that seen in standard false belief tests. Our findings demonstrate that preschool children are capable of understanding that other individuals will be perceptually misled by illusory objects and that these false perceptions will influence their actions in predictable ways. (shrink)

This article explores twelve short narrative films created by women and trans people living with disabilities and embodied differences. Produced through Project Re•Vision, these micro documentaries uncover the cultures and temporalities of bodies of difference by foregrounding themes of multiple histories: body, disability, maternal, medical, and/or scientific histories; and divergent futurities: contradictory, surprising, unpredictable, opaque, and/or generative futures. We engage with Alison Kafer's call to theorize disability futurity by wrestling with the ways in which “the future” is normatively deployed in (...) the service of able-bodiedness and able-mindedness, a deployment used to render bodies of difference as sites of “no future”. By re-storying embodied difference, the storytellers illuminate ongoing processes of remaking their bodily selves in ways that respond to the past and provide possibilities for different futures; these orientations may be configured as “dis-topias” based not on progress, but on new pathways for living, uncovered not through evoking the familiar imaginaries of curing, eliminating, or overcoming disability, but through incorporating experiences of embodied difference into time. These temporalities gesture toward new kinds of futures, giving us glimpses of ways of cripping time, of cripping ways of being/becoming in time, and of radically re-presencing disability in futurity. (shrink)

Neoliberal ideology and exclusionary policies based on racialized identities characterize the current contexts in North America and Western Europe. Nursing knowledge cannot be abstracted from social, political and historical contexts; the task of examining the influence of race and racial ideologies on disciplinary knowledge and inquiry therefore remains an important task. Contemporary analyses of the role and responsibility of the discipline in addressing race‐based health and social inequities as a focus of nursing inquiry remain underdeveloped. In this article, we examine (...) nursing's engagement with ideas about race and racism and explore the ways in which nursing knowledge and inquiry have been influenced by race‐based ideological discourses. Drawing on Henry and Tator's framework of democratic racism, we consider how strategic discursive responses—the discourses of individualism, multiculturalism, colour‐blindness, political correctness and denial—have been deployed within nursing knowledge and inquiry to reinforce the belief in an essentially fair and just society while avoiding the need to acknowledge the persistence of racist discourses and ideologies. Greater theoretical, conceptual and methodological clarity regarding race, racialization and related concepts in nursing inquiry is needed to address health and social inequities. (shrink)

I investigate the reciprocal relationship between social accounts of knowledge production and efforts to increase the representation of women and some minorities in the academy. In particular, I consider the extent to which feminist social epistemologies such as Helen Longino’s critical contextual empiricism can be employed to argue that it is in researchers’ epistemic interests to take active steps to increase gender diversity. As it stands, critical contextual empiricism does not provide enough resources to succeed at this task. However, considering (...) this view through an employment equity lens highlights areas where such theories need to be further developed. I argue that views such as Longino’s ought to attend to nuances of community structure and cultural features that inhibit critical social interactions, if we are to maximize the epistemic as well as the ethical improvements associated with a social approach to knowing. These developments advance these epistemic theories for their own sake. They also help develop these theories into a tool that can be used by those calling for increased diversity in the academy. (shrink)

ABSTRACT As we strive for a more polyvocal history of science, historians have placed increasing emphasis on local case studies as a way to globalize the field. This tension between the local and the global extends to the practice as well as the content of the history of science, as the field has begun to pay more attention not just to local case studies, but also to local cultures of historiography. Many historians of science want multiple historiographical voices that take (...) seriously the concerns and literatures in different linguistic and national contexts. As more journals urge translation into what are perceived as the dominant languages in “global” humanities discourses and scholars are encouraged to facilitate the Englishing of their historical research, many questions remain: In what ways does it make sense to nationalize or culturally locate individual cultures of the history of science? Is translation a democratic and positive force in the discipline, and/or does it kill local difference? Will it continue to be meaningful to talk about the history of science? A collective dialogue within the field depends on finding a way to take local diversity in historiography and epistemology seriously while translating that local difference into a meaningful common conversation. This essay considers the challenges of embracing multiple ways of knowing that might fall under the purview of the history of science, while wondering what that means for the coherence of the field as we move forward into the next century of work in Isis. (shrink)

Este artigo pretende investigar algumas dimensões da filosofia de Jacques Derrida e Jean-Luc Nancy em relação aos temas do niilismo, da ética e da política. PALAVRAS-CHAVE – Niilismo. Ética. Filosofia política. Filosofia francesa.

O objetivo desse texto é apresentar e discutir o conceito do Nada no pensamento e na filosofia moral de Giacomo Leopardi. Esse Nada (Nihil), que é algo mais radical e profundo do que a noção moderna de Niilismo do qual de alguma maneira deriva, atravessa o “sistema” de pensamento leopardiano a partir das suas perspectivas ontológicas, morais e sociais. “Tudo é Nada (...). Tudo é Mal” escreveu o nosso Autor no Zibaldone, oferecendo um enigmático portal para compreender o sentido de (...) toda a sua reflexão. (shrink)

Este artigo é dedicado à investigação filosófica do sentido do Nada com o objetivo de indicar uma possível chave hermenêutica para compreender as dinâmicas do poder político, jurídico e médico-científico sobre a vida e os corpos na Idade da Biotécnica e da Biopolítica.: This paper is dedicated to the philosophical investigation of the meaning of Nothing. The aim is to indicate a possible hermeneutic way to understand the dynamics of power about the lives and bodies in our contemporary culture, in (...) the Biotech and Biopolitics age. Keywords: History of Nothing. Biopolitics. Humanitas. Contemporary Philosophy. (shrink)

In symmetrical moral dilemmas, the agent faces a choice between two incompatible actions, which are equally justified on the basis of the same value. These cases are generally discounted as spurious or irrelevant on the assumption that, when there is no failure of commensurability, choice between symmetrical requirements is indifferent and can be determined by randomization. Alternatively, this article argues that the appeal to randomization allows the agent to overcome a deliberative impasse, but it does not really resolve the moral (...) dilemma. This is because randomization fails to provide the agent with a genuine reason for action. The argument is based on an account of arbitrariness as a threat to the agent’s authorship on action. By focusing on lack of authorship, rather than on failure of commensurability, we gain the adequate perspective to assess the philosophical significance of moral dilemmas, their impact on the agential integrity, and their consequences for ethical theory. (shrink)

Studies have found that academic dishonesty is widespread. Of particular interest is the case of business students since many are expected to be the leaders of tomorrow. This study examines the cheating behaviors and perceptions of 819 business and engineering students at three private Lebanese universities, two of which are ranked as the top two universities in the country. Our results show that cheating is pervasive in the universities to an alarming degree. We first analyzed the data by looking at (...) the variables gender, college, GPA, and whether the students had taken the business ethics course. We then supplemented this analysis by building an ordered logistic regression model to test whether these independent variables affect the level of engagement in cheating behavior when we control for the other variables. The results show that males engage in cheating more than females and that students with a lower GPA engage in cheating more. We initially find a difference between business and engineering students, but once we control for the other variables, this difference ceases to exist. Our most surprising result is that the business ethics course seems to have a detrimental effect on the cheating behavior of students. Finally, we find that perception plays a key role in defining the behavior of students. The more that students perceive that others are engaging in a certain behavior, the higher the probability that they will engage in the behavior, even if they believe that this behavior constitutes cheating. (shrink)

Theory of Mind (ToM, also referred to as mentalising; Fonagy, 1991; Frith & Frith, 2006) was coined by primatologists, Premack and Woodruff (1978) and adapted in developmental psychology to refer t...

Understanding the role of emotion in moral judgment has been an active area of investigation and debate. Here we comment on this topic by examining the interaction between emotion and moral judgment in certain psychopathological groups that are characterized by abnormalities in emotion processing, such as psychopaths and sexual offenders with paraphilic disorders.

While foregrounding the historiography of HIV and AIDS in the South African context, this article analyses AIDS as simultaneously existing in three spheres: first, virtually – as the subject matter of electronically measurable research; second, academically – as a topic of research in the discipline of History; and third, actually – as a complex health concern and signifier that, via the field of Medical and Health Humanities, could allow for new collaborations between historians and others interested in understanding AIDS. Throughout, (...) the central focus is the discipline of History and the global trends that become evident when examining metrics about AIDS research, particularly those that show the hierarchies of knowledge ‘production’, the reinforcement of disciplinary boundaries, and the discrepancy between the amount of research ‘produced’ by scientific and humanities disciplines. Overall, the article suggests that ‘post-AIDS’ is not currently helpful to health historians working on South African and other majority world contexts. More specifically, the article reflects on what AIDS histories still need to be written, and I argue that Medical and Health Humanities could provide a space for historians to work within and across disciplinary boundaries given the ever evolving remit of AIDS histories, temporalities, and narratives. (shrink)

The evolution of sexual reproduction is a case of explanatory pluralism, meaning that there is more than one explanation for this phenomenon. I use the concept of a domain to more clearly explicate the various explananda that can be found in this case. I argue that although pluralism with respect to some types of domains can be decreased using van Fraassen's pragmatics of explanation, there remains an important class of domain, an orthogonal domain, for which this is not the case.

Although Cultural Studies has directed sustained attacks against sexism and racism, the question of the animal has lagged behind developments in broader society with regard to animal suffering in factory farming, product testing, and laboratory experimentation, as well in zoos, rodeos, circuses, and public aquariums. The contributors to Animal Subjects are scholars and writers from diverse perspectives whose work calls into question the boundaries that divide the animal kingdom from humanity, focusing on the medical, biological, cultural, philosophical, and ethical concerns (...) between non-human animals and ourselves. The first of its kind to feature the work of Canadian scholars and writers in this emergent field, this collection aims to include the non-human-animal question as part of the ethical purview of Cultural Studies and to explore the question in interdisciplinary terms. (shrink)

Este artículo asocia la actividad tallerística de varios grupos contemporáneos de cine comunitario cordobés a una dinámica de legitimación de la “pedagogía decolonial”. Entiendo esta última como praxis de un “dispositivo” que identifico como el dispositivo decolonial pues sus relaciones de saber/poder son una práctica contra-hegemónica dentro de las dinámicas onto-epistemológicas de reproducción de aquello que Aníbal Quijano llamó “Colonialidad del poder”. El artículo observa como el cine comunitario sigue los dos estadios propuestos por la pedagogía decolonial como pasos ineludibles (...) hacia la emancipación de los sujetos subalternos. 1- la puesta en crisis de los saberes y las identidades hegemónicas, lo que se logra desde la identificación critica de su situación histórica y el aprendizaje de los artificios del lenguaje audiovisual en tanto aparato de reproducción ideológica colonial-capitalista. 2- Una propuesta teleológica por una vida decolonializada que emerge tanto de la apropiación tecnológica del lenguaje audiovisual desde el cual realizan su narración, su film, como también de las relaciones sociales “Otras” de producción de su mensaje. (shrink)

Theorists of learning, regulation, and evolution explain behavior using remarkably different concepts because of pressures toward specialization, a focus on testing simple causal theories that underconceptualize the contributions of the organism and its environment, and the absence of a working model capable of surviving in a complex environment. We add suggestions for the development and testing of such a model.

This volume provides a much needed, historically accurate narrative of the development of theories of space up to the beginning of the eighteenth century. It studies conceptions of space that were implicitly or explicitly entailed by ancient, medieval and early modern representations of the cosmos. The authors reassess Alexandre Koyré’s groundbreaking work From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe and they trace the permanence of arguments to be found throughout the Middle Ages and beyond. By adopting a long timescale, (...) this book sheds new light on the continuity between various cosmological representations and their impact on the ontology and epistemology of space. Readers may explore the work of a variety of authors including Aristotle, Epicurus, Henry of Ghent, John Duns Scotus, John Wyclif, Peter Auriol, Nicholas Bonet, Francisco Suárez, Francesco Patrizi, Giordano Bruno, Libert Froidmont, Marin Mersenne, Pierre Gassendi, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Samuel Clarke. We see how reflections on space, imagination and the cosmos were the product of a plurality of philosophical traditions that found themselves confronted with, and enriched by, various scientific and theological challenges which induced multiple conceptual adaptations and innovations. This volume is a useful resource for historians of philosophy, those with an interest in the history of science, and particularly those seeking to understand the historical background of the philosophy of space. (shrink)

Este artigo é dedicado ao exame filosófico das dinâmicas do poder (político, jurídico, médico- -científico) sobre a vida e os corpos na Idade da Biotécnica, no nosso mundo, no horizonte da cultura contemporânea. O nosso texto se articulará em torno de três eixos, a saber, a reconstrução genealógica dos elementos principais do “conceito” de biopolítica; as “relações” entrebíos e vontade de potência; a “técnica dos corpos” e a “política dos corpos”. Essencial, para o desdobramento e a fundamentação teorética do nosso (...) discurso, será o diálogo e confronto com uma série de autores contemporâneos, in primis Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Jean-Luc Nancy, Roberto Esposito. (shrink)

Ce travail a pour objectif d'analyser les reflexions ä propos du droit et de la justice faites par Jacques Derrida et Gianni Vattimo. L'objectif principal est de mettre l'accent sur les traits dominants qui distinguent ces reflexions quand elles touchent aux exigences de la praxis (juridique, ethique, politique), ä laquelle les deux philosophes s'adressent de fagon differente. D'un cöte, il y a la deconstruction deridienne, qui denonce le manque de fondement du droit, sa violence originelle, et au moyen d'une double (...) seance et un double mouvement se deplace en un exercice intellectuel lucide, radical et incessant; de l'autre, l'ontologie faible [debole) et nihiliste du philosophe italien dont la proposition est une hermeneutique qui n'en reste pas ä la phase de la denonciation mais veut "faire justice", de fagon pratique et concrete, en essayant d'affaiblir et de reduire peu ä peu la violence originelle du droit. (shrink)

Ce travail a pour objectif d'analyser les reflexions ä propos du droit et de la justice faites par Jacques Derrida et Gianni Vattimo. L'objectif principal est de mettre l'accent sur les traits dominants qui distinguent ces reflexions quand elles touchent aux exigences de la praxis (juridique, ethique, politique), ä laquelle les deux philosophes s'adressent de fagon differente. D'un cöte, il y a la deconstruction deridienne, qui denonce le manque de fondement du droit, sa violence originelle, et au moyen d'une double (...) seance et un double mouvement se deplace en un exercice intellectuel lucide, radical et incessant; de l'autre, l'ontologie faible [debole) et nihiliste du philosophe italien dont la proposition est une hermeneutique qui n'en reste pas ä la phase de la denonciation mais veut "faire justice", de fagon pratique et concrete, en essayant d'affaiblir et de reduire peu ä peu la violence originelle du droit. (shrink)

This essay examines phrenological tools as instruments of matchmaking and focuses on the personal ad as a site for producing and exchanging knowledge about individuals. It shows how cranial measurement produced character profiles for the purpose of judging suitable marriage partners and how users integrated those profiles into personal advertisements published in the Water-Cure Journal. A popular but contested science of the mind, phrenology maintained that one could truly know others and oneself through measuring “organs” of the mind via protrusions (...) on the skull. While much has been written about phrenology, less attention has been paid to its focus on marriage and mating and to how users enrolled phrenology to find and judge the viability of a mate. Focused on the American context in the 1850s, this essay will show that notions of race and gender, heredity, and marital “relations” were embedded in the shorthand of phrenological measurements and personal ads. (shrink)

Metaethical constructivism is the view that insofar as there are normative truths, they are not fixed by normative facts that are independent of what rational agents would agree to under some specified conditions of choice. The appeal of this view lies in the promise to explain how normative truths are objective and independent of our actual judgments, while also binding and authoritative for us. -/- Constructivism comes in several varieties, some of which claim a place within metaethics while others claim (...) no place within it at all. In fact, constructivism is sometimes defended as a normative theory about the justification of moral principles. Normative constructivism is the view that the moral principles we ought to accept are the ones that agents would agree to or endorse were they to engage in a hypothetical or idealized process of rational deliberation. -/- Metaethical constructivist theories aim to account for the nature of normative truths and practical reasons. They bear a problematic relation to traditional classifications of metaethical theories. In particular, there are disagreements about how to situate constructivism in the realism/antirealism debate. These disagreements are rooted in further differences about the definition of metaethics, the relation between normative and metaethical claims, and the purported methods pertinent and specific to metaethical inquiry. The question of how to classify metaethical constructivism will be addressed in what follows by focusing on the distinctive questions that constructivist theories have been designed to answer. Section 1 explains the origin and motivation of constructivism. Sections 2–4 examine the main varieties of metaethical constructivism. Section 5 illustrates related constructivist views, some of which are not proposed as metaethical accounts of all normative truths, but only of moral truths. Sections 6 and 7 review several debates about the problems, promise and prospects of metaethical constructivism. (shrink)

Antonin Artaud, words, drawings, and the extreme and traumatic condition of an individual who pushed back the boundaries of history, of his own time, in Europe’s darkest days. Such is my scope in the pages that follow. This essay examines the drawings produced by Artaud between 1944 and 1946. They offer a particularly helpful starting point for a series of reflections on, on the one hand, a concept of identity that had emerged and re-emerged with a new critical awareness following (...) the close of the Second World War, and on the other, how – leaving behind a modernism in which the cracks were clearly showing – it is from madness and suffering that the contemporary notion of the individual is reborn. (shrink)