In 2022, students at North American universities with third-dose COVID-19 vaccine mandates risk disenrolment if unvaccinated. To assess the appropriateness of booster mandates in this age group, we combine empirical risk-benefit assessment and ethical analysis. To prevent one COVID-19 hospitalisation over a 6-month period, we estimate that 31 207–42 836 young adults aged 18–29 years must receive a third mRNA vaccine. Booster mandates in young adults are expected to cause a net harm: per COVID-19 hospitalisation prevented, we anticipate at least (...) 18.5 serious adverse events from mRNA vaccines, including 1.5–4.6 booster-associated myopericarditis cases in males (typically requiring hospitalisation). We also anticipate 1430–4626 cases of grade ≥3 reactogenicity interfering with daily activities (although typically not requiring hospitalisation). University booster mandates are unethical because they: (1) are not based on an updated (Omicron era) stratified risk-benefit assessment for this age group; (2) may result in a net harm to healthy young adults; (3) are not proportionate: expected harms are not outweighed by public health benefits given modest and transient effectiveness of vaccines against transmission; (4) violate the reciprocity principle because serious vaccine-related harms are not reliably compensated due to gaps in vaccine injury schemes; and (5) may result in wider social harms. We consider counterarguments including efforts to increase safety on campus but find these are fraught with limitations and little scientific support. Finally, we discuss the policy relevance of our analysis for primary series COVID-19 vaccine mandates. (shrink)

The contents of linguistic and mental representations may seem to be individuated by what they are about. But a problem arises with regard to representation of the non-existent - words and thoughts that are about things that don't exist. Fourteen new essays get to grips with this much-debated problem.

Gut microbiome plays a significant role in defining the health status of subjects, and recent studies highlight the importance of using time series strategies to analyse microbiome dynamics. In this paper, we develop a Bayesian model for microbiota longitudinal data, based on Dirichlet distribution with time-varying parameters, that take into account the compositional paradigm and consider principal balances. The proposed model can be effective for predicting the future dynamics of a microbial community in the short term and for analysing the (...) microbial interactions using the value of the estimated parameters. The usefulness of the proposed model is illustrated with six different datasets, and a comparison study with four alternative models is provided. (shrink)

Crisis del estado.--Libertad.--Democracia.--Disciplina colectiva.--El pueblo y la opinión.--En torno a la revolución.--Economía y política.--La república española.--Varios.

Social innovations are urgently needed as we confront complex social problems. As these social problems feature substantial interdependencies among multiple systems and actors, developing and implementing innovative solutions involve the re-negotiating of settled institutions or the building of new ones. In this introductory article, we introduce a stylized three-cycle model highlighting the institutional nature of social innovation efforts. The model conceptualizes social innovation processes as the product of agentic, relational, and situated dynamics in three interrelated cycles that operate at the (...) micro, meso, and macro levels of analysis. The five papers included in this special issue address one or more of these cycles. We draw on these papers and the model to stimulate and offer guidance to future conversations on social innovations from an institutional theory perspective. (shrink)

A brilliant and comprehensive history of the creation of the modern Western mind. Soul Machine takes us back to the origins of modernity, a time when a crisis in religious authority and the scientific revolution led to searching questions about the nature of human inner life. This is the story of how a new concept—the mind—emerged as a potential solution, one that was part soul and part machine, but fully neither. In this groundbreaking work, award-winning historian George Makari shows how (...) writers, philosophers, physicians, and anatomists worked to construct notions of the mind as not an ethereal thing, but a natural one. From the ascent of Oliver Cromwell to the fall of Napoleon, seminal thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, Diderot, and Kant worked alongside often-forgotten brain specialists, physiologists, and alienists in the hopes of mapping the inner world. Conducted in a cauldron of political turmoil, these frequently shocking, always embattled efforts would give rise to psychiatry, mind sciences such as phrenology, and radically new visions of the self. Further, they would be crucial to the establishment of secular ethics and political liberalism. Boldly original, wide-ranging, and brilliantly synthetic, Soul Machine gives us a masterful, new account of the making of the modern Western mind. (shrink)

This collection explores the core concepts of Ignacio Ellacuría's liberating philosophy; his critique of ideologies and continuity with critical theory; his philosophical anthropology and humanism; and the implications that praxis has for philosophical thought.

I show the relevance of feminist thought to some of the major debates within the field of environmental ethics. The feminist vision of a holistic universe is contrasted with the dualistic notions inherent in both the “individual rights” and traditionally defined “holist” camps. I criticize the attempt in environmental ethics to establish universal, hierarchical rules of conduct for our dealing with nature (an up-down dualism) as weIl as the attempt to derive an ethic from reason alone (the dualism of reason (...) and emotion). I maintain that the division between the “holist” and “individual rights” camps is yet another form of dualist thinking, and propose in its stead a holistic vision that concerns itself both with the individual and with the whole of which the individual is apart. (shrink)

El contenido del libro lo integran trabajos presentados por algunos de los más importantes filósofos anglosajones del derecho penal, todos ellos profesores en aquel momento en el Reino Unido. Dichos trabajos fueron discutidos por penalistas, filósofos y criminólogos de habla hispana provenientes de España, Argentina y Chile. En este sentido, el workshop ejemplificó también el tipo de acercamiento que los distintos mundos académicos, en este caso el mundo anglosajón y el hispano, o de forma más general el mundo jurídico del (...) common law y el de la tradición europea continental, están viviendo en estos días. (shrink)

The Corpus of English Philosophy Texts (CEPhiT) is part of the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing (CC) following CETA (Corpus of English Texts on Astronomy). In accordance with the rest of the Corpus, CEPhiT has been compiled for the description of philosophical texts written in English in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The sampling method employed requires the collection of extracts of 10,000 words. This method has been followed in CETA and CEPhiT, with samples from 40 different authors in (...) the latter, both from Europe and North America. Text selection is based on some extralinguistic criteria, such as year of publication, sex, geographical provenance and text-types/genres. The corpus contains samples belonging to six different genre categories. This taxonomy, as well as some other extralinguistic information, can be used to search the corpus. CEPhiT, like CETA, is released on CD-Rom with Coruña Corpus Tool (CCT), purpose-designed software by IrLab. (shrink)

Modern moral and political philosophy is in debt with natural law theory, both in its ancient and mediaeval elaborations. While the very notion of a natural law has proved highly controversial among 20th Century scholars, the last decades have witnessed a renewed interest in it. Indeed, the threats and challenges as result of multiculturalism, plural societies and global changes have generated a renewed attention to natural law theory. Clearly, it offers solid basis as possible framework to a better understanding of (...) human goods without contradictions and partial bias. The purpose of the present volume is to provide an overview of the history of this concept (Cicero, St. Paul, Aquinas, Melanchthon, Montaigne, Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, Burke, Kant, MacIntyre, etc.) as well as a deep understanding of ongoing research, both in Europe and in America. Furthermore, the specificity of these studies will be of particular value to philosophers, law-philosophers, historians, anthropologists, sociologists and theologians, and those concerned on such issues as the relation between law and moral norm, law and practical reason, and the presence of the idea of natural law in several prominent thinkers. It includes a selected bibliography on natural law. The book also provides an excellent introduction to several of the major topics in natural law theory making it useful both as a reference text and as a sourcebook for academics alike. Natural law is a rich, complex, and highly disputed term. Since its first appearances in the history of Western civilization, it has been used both to point to God as the source of the moral order and to assert that there is an objective order of justice in nature that men and their laws ought to respect. In modern times, natural law theory gave birth to what we usually call "human rights." Unlike the meaning of the term, the importance of an ongoing debate on natural law and on the theories related to it is undisputable. This is why I welcome today this new collection of essays edited by Alejandro Nèstor Garcìa Martìnez, Mario Å ilar and Josè M. Torralba. Natural Law: Historical, Systematic and Juridical Approaches includes a wide variety of studies, covering key authors and issues in natural law theory. Younger students will appreciate the clarity of the chapters, and more trained readers the detailed and accurate bibliographical references that each of them offers. The editors's choice to go from a historical approach to contemporary theories, and then to theoretical and more practical issues is also commendable. Students in philosophy and in legal theory will greatly benefit from this book. Fulvio Di Blasi, author of God and the Natural Law: A Rereading of Thomas Aquinas. (shrink)

Iris Marion Young fue una de las pensadoras feministas más importantes del último cuarto del siglo pasado. Su obra es reconocida internacionalmente como una de las aportaciones más creativas e influyentes de nuestra época. Con el objeto de celebrar su aporte único y su novedad y de mantener vivo su pensamiento, Máriam Martínez-Bascuñán desarrolla un riguroso análisis crítico de su obra desde las cuestiones de justicia social, democracia deliberativa y su relación con la teoría de la opresión, hasta el enfoque (...) metodológico con el que Young aproxima su estudio sobre la experiencia corporal femenina llevando a diálogo las ideas de Simone de Beauvoir y Merleau-Ponty. Se examinan sus herramientas conceptuales articuladas desde la teoría crítica (Habermas y Marcuse), junto con el postestructuralismo psicoanalítico (Kristeva e Irigaray). Asimismo, el libro trata de plasmar las fructíferas controversias teóricas que Iris Young llevó a cabo con autores y autoras de relevancia internacional como lo son Nancy Fraser, Seyla Benhabib, John Rawls o el propio Jürgen Habermas. (shrink)

__Cultural Studies and Education_ is a timely introduction to cultural studies and the ways in which it can enrich both education scholarship and practice._ An extensive field that in the last few decades has transformed many academic disciplines, cultural studies has yet to be fully considered by educators and education scholars. Cultural Studies and Education redresses this great shortcoming, bringing cultural studies and its implications for education to the fore. The book aims to serve three main purposes. First, it is (...) an introduction for educators and education researchers to some of the most important theoretical debates and analytic frameworks that have shaped the field of cultural studies. Second, it offers an introduction to and examples of three important areas of inquiry in which education and cultural studies overlap: gender and queer studies; postcolonial and ethnic studies; and popular culture and youth studies. Third, it illustrates how education scholars have dealt with the conceptual challenges of cultural studies and how education offers unique perspectives and contributions to the broader debates in the field.". (shrink)

This research details a pilot study of Finnish college students and their views on the academic ethics. Finland is an unexamined population on this issue. In the current project, we surveyed students in the spring of 2014. We found unethical behavior is common on projects but less common on exams. We also found students are unwilling to report wrongdoing by other students. We examined differences between students’ attitudes on cheating based on several demographic factors, including gender, age and major. We (...) conclude by discussing the implications for further research in this area. (shrink)

A broad evolutionary perspective is essential to fully reverse figure and ground in the rationality debate. Humans' evolved psychological architecture was designed to produce inferences that were adaptive, not normatively logical. This perspective points to several predictable sources of errors in modern laboratory reasoning tasks, including inherent, systematic biases in information-processing systems explained by Error Management Theory.

A philosophical analysis of the works and theory of the noted 20th century French philosopher Emmanuel Mounier.

We thank Leo Lam and Taylor Nichols for their response1 to our paper ‘COVID-19 vaccine boosters for young adults: a risk–benefit assessment and ethical analysis of mandate policies at universities’.2 In our paper, we demonstrate that the risk–benefit calculus to mandate boosters for young adults aged 18–29 is a net risk intervention. The authors assert that we have made three inappropriate comparisons of benefits versus risks of the mRNA vaccine booster dose in this age group. We provide our response to (...) each below. We erred on the side of overestimating benefits of the booster dose against severe COVID-19 in this age group and still found net harms to outweigh net benefits. The conclusion of our paper holds, and university booster mandates for young people were—and remain—unethical. For the first comparison, we weighed predicted hospitalisations prevented by one booster dose of BNT162b2 with vaccine-associated SAEs from the manufacturer’s randomised trial (3/5055).3 We found that the rate of expected SAEs would outweigh the benefits of the booster against hospitalisation by at least 18-fold. Lam and Nichols suggest that this was an inappropriate comparison, as not all SAEs result in hospitalisation. However, the definition of SAE as used in the trial included death, hospitalisation, disability, permanent damage, life-threatening event or condition, which required medical or surgical intervention to prevent a serious outcome.4 While all comparisons include some degree of incommensurability, comparing these SAEs with hospitalisations prevented by the booster is more reasonable than Lam and Nichols’ suggestion of comparing SAEs to infections prevented. The COVID-19 infection hospitalisation risk in this age group was <0.5% (or <1/200)5 even prior to widespread immunity, thus comparing SAEs to infection risk is entirely inappropriate. Furthermore, a booster dose will only offer transient (if any) protection against infection6 and cumulative infection rates …. (shrink)

"The contributions to this book offer a broad vision of the relationships that were established between Greek Philosophy and the Mystery Cults. The authors centre their attention on such thinkers as Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoic and the Neoplatonist philosophers, who used - and in some cases criticised - doctrinal elements from Mystery Cults, adapting them to their own thinking. Thus, the volume provides a new approach to some of the most renowned Greek philosophers, highlighting the influence that Mystery Cults, (...) such as Orphism, Dionysianism, or the Eleusinian rites, had on the formation of fundamental aspects of their thinking. Given its interdisciplinary character, this book will appeal to a broad academic readership interested in the origin of Hellenic thinking and culture. It will be especially useful for those eager for a deeper approach to two fundamental domains that attract the attention of many Antiquity scholars: Greek philosophy and religion. (shrink)