Traditionally, what we are conscious of in self-consciousness is something non-corporeal. But anti-Cartesian philosophers argue that the self is as much corporeal as it is mental. Because we have the sense of proprioception, a kind of body awareness, we are immediately aware of ourselves as bodies in physical space. In this debate the case histories of patients who have lost their sense of proprioception are clearly relevant. These patients do retain an awareness of themselves as corporeal beings, although they hardly (...) feel their bodies. They can initiate movements, and with the help of visual feedback learn to control them. It is shown that the traditional view of the self as immaterial is not supported by these cases. But the argument against this view has to be amended. It relies too much on bodily sensations, and misses the importance of active self-movement. (shrink)

This paper takes an evolutionary approach to what we are, namely autopoietic systems with a first person perspective on our surroundings and ourselves. This in contrast with Thomas Metzinger.

Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.

The person with dementia: A plea for a (non-metaphysical) relational notion of personhood In this article we explore the notions of personal identity and personhood, using concrete descriptions of the experiences of people living with dementia as a case study. From an analytical point of view we argue against memory or psychological-continuity criteria of personal identity as too cognitive. Instead we focus on embodiment. The person with dementia, as an embodied human being, is numerically the very same person (s)he was (...) before. Moreover, we argue against a metaphysical notion of personhood. Personhood is constituted by the reactive attitudes of other persons: someone becomes a person and remains a person by being received, and almost literally incorporated, in a community of persons. From a phenomenological point of view we show that embodied intersubjectivity is crucial for the recognition of one person by another. We use Merleau-Ponty’s notion of intercorporality to show that there are ways of keeping people with dementia within this community of persons, of keeping in touch with them, even when many of their cognitive capacities are gone, for instance by singing or dancing together. As long as there is still a shared world, it is up to us to keep recognising someone with dementia as a person, and not as ‘an empty shell’. (shrink)

How fat is the I? Neuroscience and the elusive self This article explores the concept of self in relation to neuroscience. Four options are discussed on the basis of a key representative. The first is the dualist position where the non-material self controls its brain, as defended by Eccles. Next comes the option of the self as a relatively or completely powerless entity within the brain, as exemplified by Libet’s experiments on free will. The third option is the identity of (...) self and brain, as argued by Dennett. The last option is the identity of self and body, and here Gallagher is the representative. It is shown that no monist position is completely consistently defended. In the conclusion, four factors are identified that hinder a simple and consistent monist conceptualisation of the self in the context of neuroscience. (shrink)

What are we, most fundamentally? Two topical answers to this question are discussed and rejected and a more evolutionary account is offered. Lynne Baker argues that we are persons: beings with a first-person perspective. Persons form a separate ontological category, with persistence conditions that are different from those of the body. Eric Ol-son, by contrast, claims that we are human organisms. No psychological property is definitive of what we are. Our persistence conditions are those of the human organism. In a (...) more evolutionary approach to the notion of personhood, it is argued that we are indeed, most fundamentally, beings with a first-person perspective. But such a perspective is not definitive of personhood. It is precisely living organisms that have it, and cannot fail to have it. There is no separate ontological category of persons. (shrink)

This paper deals with the perception of depth in two-dimensional pictures. Two indirect theories of perception, the Mainstream Theory and the Projection Theory, are compared with a direct Adverbial Theory. Apart from seeming to be the philosophical counterpart to present-day empirical theories of perception, the first two theories seem to be tailor-made to deal with this phenomenon, where the perceived space is certainly not out there, on or behind the canvas: they claim that pictorial space is constructed by the brain (...) as the direct object of perception. In contrast, the Adverbial Theory seems unsuited to deal with this phenomenon. I argue, however, that both constructivist theories are incoherent. They misconstrue the intentionality of perception, and fail to attend to the perceptual experience itself. The version of the Adverbial Theory that I defend claims that nothing needs to be constructed: the picture is the direct object of perception, but we perceive it in a certain way. The brain creates no pictorial space; there is only a perceptual experience as of a three-dimensional scene. The Adverbial Theory can thus account for the empirical data, without suffering from coherence problems. (shrink)

In this article an analysis of perception is given that accommodates both the fact that perception is a kind of interaction with the world, and the existence of illusions and hallucinations. This analysis, the Adverbial Approach, is contrasted with Representationalism and Enactivism. I will confront all three theories of perception with three test cases: a ginger cat, a ginger cat hidden behind a picket fence, and a ginger cat as in the Bonnet syndrome. I will argue that Representationalism can account (...) for illusions and hallucinations by postulating the existence of internal representations as the direct object of perception, but by doing so fails to account for the interaction with the world. Moreover, I will show that by combining the Cartesian notion of mental representations with physicalism, it is incoherent. Enactivism, on the other hand, discards the need for internal representations and analyses perception as direct interaction with the world, but completely fails to account for hallucinations. The Adverbial Approach can do justice to both aspects of perception: it stresses the fact that perception is indeed interaction with the world and not with any internal representation of it, but leaves room for perceptual experience as distinct from that interaction. Finally I will diagnose the problems of both Representationalism and Enactivism as a faulty conception of the intentionality of perception. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that embodiment is crucial for any self-aware agent. What is less obvious is whether the body has to be real, or whether a virtual body will do. In that case the notion of embodiment would be so attenuated as to be almost indistinguishable from disembodiment. In this article I concentrate on the notion of embodiment in human agents. Could we be disembodied, having no real body, as brains-in-a-vat with only a virtual body? Thought experiments alone will (...) not suffice to answer this Cartesian question. I will draw on both philosophical arguments and empirical data on phantom phenomena. My argument will proceed in three steps. Firstly I will show that phantom phenomena provide a prima facie argument that real embodiment is not necessary for a human being. Secondly I will give a philosophical argument that real movement must precede the intention to move and to act. Agents must at least have had real bodies once. Empirical data seems to bear this out. Finally, however, I will show that a small number of aplasic phantom phenomena undermines this last argument. Most people must have had a real body. But for some people a partly virtual, unreal, phantom body seems to suffice. Yet though there is thus no knockdown argument that we could not be brains-in-a-vat, we still have good reasons to suppose that embodiment must be real, and not virtual. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on the golden era and proposes an exercise of creativity whereby we imagine Diana, the Amazon, becoming Wonder Woman in order to overthrow Man's World. Through Wonder Woman's story, we can build a feminist epic that depicts women who fight patriarchy. In the novel Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary, Wittig and Zeig describe the Amazons as the warriors thanks to whom we have been able to enter the Golden Age, an age without patriarchy or sex differences. (...) Diana, by becoming Wonder Woman and by fighting against heteropatriarchal injustice, leads the war toward the destruction of this dualistic division. The connection between Amazons and Guerrilleres, between two generations of fighters against patriarchy, aims to inspire our sorority and union in this fight against heteronormative, oppressive structures that affect us all, especially women and other subjects with alternative sexual and gender identities. (shrink)

By Focusing on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s magnum opus Truth and Method, this paper aims to show how understanding itself — including the understanding of artworks, texts, tradition, and living speech — can be understood as a kind of game or dialogical play-process which requires crucial ethical conditions to be met if it is going to succeed. Success, in terms of the communication of meaning, requires that the players (or interlocutors) commit to a genuine participation with each other in which they “open” (...) themselves to each other’s “claims to truth,” take each other seriously, listen, respond and question, and stand prepared to risk their old prejudices, learn from each other, and be transformed in the process. (shrink)

El objetivo de este artículo es describir la percepción de riesgo y los factores de protección y de riesgo frente al consumo de sustancias psicoactivas legales e ilegales en estudiantes de la Universidad de Boyacá. Es un estudio cuantitativo y descriptivo de corte transversal, para el cual se tomó una muestra de 573 estudiantes que fueron seleccionados mediante muestreo estratificado probabilístico. El instrumento utilizado fue la encuesta sobre consumo de drogas, factores y percepción de riesgo en estudiantes universitarios (CODEU) diseñado (...) por Beverido, Salas, De San Jorge, Pavón, Blázquez, Gogeascoechea y Cruz (2012), que consta de 73 preguntas. Este instrumento fue validado y obtuvo un alpha de Cronbach de 0.787. Los hallazgos muestran que entre los factores protectores se encuentran: adecuadas relaciones familiares y practicar un deporte, como factores de riesgo se identifican principalmente: la permisividad social y las construcciones de reconocimiento social presentes ante el consumo de sustancias legales. De las sustancias ilegales, la marihuana es la que se percibe como de menor riesgo frente a la cocaína, el bazuco, los inhalantes y la heroína. (shrink)

This book explores the integral vision of human development contained in the original works of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. It delves into multiple layers of the human personality as envisaged by Sri Aurobindo and The Mother and explores a new developmental science of consciousness based on the practice of Integral Yoga. The book examines the major metatheoretical conceptions that shape the contemporary discipline of developmental psychology and discusses the ways in which Sri Aurobindo's philosophical and psychological perspective can help (...) break fresh ground for developmental theorisation and research by extending the current understanding of the human evolutionary potential. The author proposes a new agenda for human development which brings together the key ideas of integral individual and collective development and informs practices in the areas of counselling, education, parenting, and self-development. This book will be of special interest for researchers of developmental psychology, human development, counselling psychology, philosophy, social work, and education. (shrink)

Ethical leadership matters in the context of organizational change due to the need for followers to trust the integrity of their leaders. Yet, there have been no studies investigating ethical leadership and organizational change. To fill this gap, we introduce a model of the moderating role of involvement in change. Organizational change and involvement in change are proposed as context-level moderators in the relationships of ethical leadership and work-related attitudes and performance. We employ a sample of 199 supervisor–subordinate pairs from (...) a wide variety of organizations. Results support a three-way interaction (ethical leadership, organizational change, and involvement in change) for performance and OCBs. Our results have important implications for organizational change since ethical leadership appears to complement follower involvement when change is happening. (shrink)

Through cultural transmission, repeated learning by new individuals transforms cultural information, which tends to become increasingly compressible . Existing diffusion chain studies include in their design two processes that could be responsible for this tendency: learning and reproducing . This paper manipulates the presence of learning in a simple iterated drawing design experiment. We find that learning seems to be the causal factor behind the increase in compressibility observed in the transmitted information, while reproducing is a source of random heritable (...) innovations. Only a theory invoking these two aspects of cultural learning will be able to explain human culture's fundamental balance between stability and innovation. (shrink)

Why, when and where are some moral systems supported and followed whilst others are condemned? Are moral values relative or universal? Can immoral actions be tolerated in times of crisis? Is the dream of becoming better sufficient for prompting virtuous behavior, or should we dream about what is best? Do moral values last? The divergence in practices and codes of moral belief and action present significant challenges but also offer opportunities to anthropologists for understanding social life. In this book, (...) class='Hi'>Monica Heintz explores these questions, drawing on case studies from Eastern Europe that encompass migration, religion, economic and social policies and paying particular attention to the way morality works in communities undergoing rapid social change. She uses these examples to reflect on the wider question of societal conflict and change, showing how they are driven by moral values. By highlighting the centrality of such values as engines for action and questioning the limits of universal moral values, she argues that anthropology has the capacity to shed light on the study of morality and moral values generally. The Anthropology of Morality: A Dynamic and Interactionist Approach will be of interest to students and researchers in anthropology, as well as those in politics and sociology with an interest in European politics. (shrink)

What is a telenovela? Its literal meaning is “a novel transmitted by televison.” This implies a means of transmission—the television—and a form of discourse—the novel. The telenovela.

Blockchain is an open digital ledger technology that has the capability of significantly altering the way that people operations operate in organizations. This research takes a first step in proposing several ways in which the blockchain technology can be used to improve current organizational practices, while also considering the ethical implications. Specifically, the paper examines the role that blockchain technology plays in three primary areas of people operations: entry to the organization, intraorganizational processes, and exit. In each section, the paper (...) reviews the ethical implications from the lenses of virtue ethics, utilitarianism, deontology and contractarianism. The paper concludes that in whole the implementation of blockchain technology in people operations processes can create a more ethical work environment. However, careful implementation is necessary and requires extensive examination of ethical implications in advance. (shrink)

As a neonatal neurologist, I serve families facing tragic decisions in which they must balance trade-offs between death and life with profound disability. I often find myself in complex discussions about future outcome, in which families sort through in real-time what information they value most in making such a choice. Will he laugh? Will he be in pain? Will he know how much he’s loved? In this month’s feature article, Brick et al share the results of an online survey aimed (...) at assessing public views on when a life is not worth living, in an effort to inform ongoing legal and clinical debates about withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment for children. These findings raise important questions about how we define and measure outcomes that matter to parents as they make these tragic decisions. It is challenging to interpret these findings in the absence of context of how decision-making for infants occurs in real-time. The nature of this study and its objective required that cases be substantially simplified. As the authors acknowledge, the prognoses and function of the children involved in these cases were often deeply contested. Prognostic uncertainty is common for children with significant …. (shrink)

This paper examines folk theories of algorithmic recommendations on Spotify in order to make visible the cultural specificities of data assemblages in the global South. The study was conducted in Costa Rica and draws on triangulated data from 30 interviews, 4 focus groups with 22 users, and the study of “rich pictures” made by individuals to graphically represent their understanding of algorithmic recommendations. We found two main folk theories: one that personifies Spotify and another one that envisions it as a (...) system full of resources. Whereas the first theory emphasizes local conceptions of social relations to make sense of algorithms, the second one stresses the role of algorithms in providing a global experience of music and technology. We analyze why people espouse either one of these theories and how these theories provide users with resources to enact different modalities of power and resistance in relation to recommendation algorithms. We argue that folk theories thus offer a productive way to broaden understanding of what agency means in relation to algorithms. (shrink)

We investigate the emergence of iconicity, specifically a bouba-kiki effect in miniature artificial languages under different functional constraints: when the languages are reproduced and when they are used communicatively. We ran transmission chains of participant dyads who played an interactive communicative game and individual participants who played a matched learning game. An analysis of the languages over six generations in an iterated learning experiment revealed that in the Communication condition, but not in the Reproduction condition, words for spiky shapes tend (...) to be rated by naive judges as more spiky than the words for round shapes. This suggests that iconicity may not only be the outcome of innovations introduced by individuals, but, crucially, the result of interlocutor negotiation of new communicative conventions. We interpret our results as an illustration of cultural evolution by random mutation and selection. (shrink)

This text, commissioned by the OSUN Global Observatory of Academic Freedom, discusses how the concept of academic freedom is codified in Colombian Law and regulations of public and private higher education institutions. It also explores common conceptions of academic freedom among Colombian scholars, as well as commonly observed threats to it.

There is growing interest in the role of new urban agriculture models to increase local food production capacity in cities of the Global North. Urban rooftop greenhouses and hydroponics are examples of such models receiving increasing attention as a technological approach to year-round local food production in cities. Yet, little research has addressed the unintended consequences of new modes of urban farming and food distribution, such as increased competition with existing peri-urban and rural farmers. We examine how small-scale farmers perceive (...) and have responded to a recently established rooftop greenhouse and online marketplace enterprise in Montréal, Canada. Drawing on interviews with key informants and small-scale farmers, we find that peri-urban and rural producers have been affected in three key ways that represent tensions, adaptations, and synergies arising from this new urban agriculture and food distribution enterprise. First, many farmers are concerned about increased competition and value conflation with the ideals of community supported agriculture and organic farming. Second, some farmers have adapted by developing novel marketing strategies and working with local bridge organizations to collectively market their produce to urban consumers. Third, a few farmers have decided to wholesale their produce to this new enterprise, allowing them to specialize production and avoid marketing their produce directly to urban consumers. Our study suggests that the emergence of a new form of alternative food network in Montréal has created both positive and negative disruptions for existing small-scale producers. Advocates for the expansion of new urban food production and distribution models should therefore give greater consideration to the effects on other actors in the local food system. (shrink)

Significant scientific and technological advances in intensive care have been made. However, patients in the intensive care unit may experience discomfort, loss of control, and surreal experiences. This has generated relevant debates about how to humanize the intensive care units and whether humanization is necessary at all. This paper aimed to explore how humanizing intensive care is described in the literature. A scoping review was performed. Studies published between 01.01.1999 and 02.03.2020 were identified in the CINAHL, Embase, PubMed, and Scopus (...) databases. After removing 185 duplicates, 363 papers were screened by title and abstract. Full-text screening of 116 papers led to the inclusion of 68 papers in the review based on the inclusion criteria; these papers mentioned humanizing or dehumanizing intensive care in the title or abstract. Humanizing care was defined as holistic care, as a general attitude of professionals toward patients and relatives and an organizational ideal encompassing all subjects of the healthcare system. Technology was considered an integral component of intensive care that must be balanced with caring for the patient as a whole and autonomous person. This holistic view of patients and relatives could ameliorate the negative effects of technology. There were geographical differences and the large number of studies from Spain and Brazil reflect the growing interest in humanizing intensive care in these particular countries. In conclusion, a more holistic approach with a greater emphasis on the individual patient, relatives, and social context is the foundation for humanizing intensive care, as reflected in the attitudes of nurses and other healthcare professionals. Demands for mastering technology may dominate nurses’ attention toward patients and relatives; therefore, humanized intensive care requires a holistic attitude from health professionals and organizations toward patients and relatives. Healthcare organizations, society, and regulatory frameworks demanding humanized intensive care may enforce humanized intensive care. (shrink)

Orphan drug policy often gives ‘special treatment’ to rare diseases, by giving additional priority or making exceptions to specific drugs, based on the rarity of the conditions they aim to treat. This essay argues that the goal of orphan drug policy should be to make prevalence irrelevant to funding decisions. It aims to demonstrate that it is severity, not prevalence, which drives our judgments that important claims are being overlooked when treatments for severe rare diseases are not funded. It shows (...) that prioritising severity avoids problems caused by prioritising rarity, and that it is compatible with a range of normative frameworks. The implications of a severity-based view for drug development are then derived. The severity-based view also accounts for what is wrong with how the current system of drug development unfairly neglects common diseases that burden the developing world. Lastly, the implications of a severity-based view for current orphan drug policies are discussed. There are no data in this work. (shrink)

The results in this paper are in a context of abstract elementary classes identified by Shelah and Villaveces in which the amalgamation property is not assumed. The long-term goal is to solve Shelah’s Categoricity Conjecture in this context. Here we tackle a problem of Shelah and Villaveces by proving that in their context, the uniqueness of limit models follows from categoricity under the assumption that the subclass of amalgamation bases is closed under unions of bounded, -increasing chains.

Representation is integral to the functioning and legitimacy of modern government. Yet political theorists have often been reluctant to engage directly with questions of representation, and empirical political scientists have closed down such questions by making representation synonymous with congruence. Conceptually unproblematic and normatively inert for some, representation has been deemed impossible to pin down analytically and to defend normatively by others. But this is changing. Political theorists are now turning to political representation as a subject worthy of theoretical investigation (...) in its own right. In their effort to rework the theory of political representation, they are also hoping to impact how representation is assessed and studied empirically. This volume gathers together chapters by key contributors to what amounts to a "representative turn" in political theory. Their approaches and emphases are diverse, but taken together they represent a compelling and original attempt at re-conceptualizing political representation and critically assessing the main theoretical and political implications following from this, namely for how we conceive and assess representative democracy. Each contributor is invited to look back and ahead on the transformations to democratic self-government introduced by the theory and practice of political representation. Representation and democracy: outright conflict, uneasy cohabitation, or reciprocal constitutiveness? For those who think democracy would be better without representation, this volume is a must-read: it will question their assumptions, while also exploring some of the reasons for their discomfort. Reclaiming Representation is essential reading for scholars and graduate researchers committed to staying on top of new developments in the field. (shrink)

Mass-marketing frauds are on the increase. Given the amount of monies lost and the psychological impact of MMFs there is an urgent need to develop new and effective methods to prevent more of these crimes. This paper reports the early planning of automated methods our interdisciplinary team are developing to prevent and detect MMF. Importantly, the paper presents the ethical and social constraints involved in such a model and suggests concerns others might also consider when developing automated systems.

Georg Simmel’s final work, The View of Life, concludes his lifelong engagement with Immanuel Kant by ‘inverting’ Kant’s Categorical Imperative to produce an ethics of authentic individuality. While Kant’s moral imperative is universal to all individuals but particular to their discrete acts, Simmel’s Law of the Individual is particular to each individual but universal to all the individual’s acts. We assess the significance of Simmel’s formulation of the Law of the Individual in three steps: First, as an articulation of an (...) ethical moment consonant with his relational approach to formal sociology, hinted at earlier in Sociology but not developed as such. Second, as a completion of the framework for Simmel’s formal sociology: the Law of the Individual conceptualizes a decisive but under-theorized relationship in Simmel’s vision of ‘society’ that is a woven fabric of social relationships, namely one’s relationship with oneself. We follow with a third proposal about how Simmel might have continued the line of thought he opens in The View of Life, suggesting that we can take the Law of the Individual as an invitation to fold the self-relation back into analysis of social relations, and to theorize how forms of association are shaped by forms of self-relation. We thus narrow the theoretical gulf between Simmel’s vitalism and his sociology, which commentators usually hold apart. And in so doing, we sketch a distinctively Simmelian approach to an ethics of individuality in sociological inquiry. (shrink)