Las ciencias sociales, desde sus orígenes, consideraron sencillo explicar sucesos relevantes y, en general, todas las manifestaciones de la vida humana, a través de un discurso que tenía como meta la reducción del significado de las acciones sociales a explicaciones nomológicas que se asumieron como verdades absolutas. Sostengo que este paradigma epistemológico fue asumido por las ciencias sociales como si el conocimiento de los hechos del pasado y del presente no fuese más que el resultado de explananda, inferidos de la (...) corroboración o ‘falsación’ de explanans, en conformidad con la aplicación de métodos inductivos e, incluso, deductivos. El objetivo de este trabajo es proponer, siguiendo a Hannah Arendt, que la tarea del teórico social no consiste en intentar someter a prueba, a través del “método científico”, sus hipótesis, sino que debe hurgar y analizar aquellos hechos que se presumen que son relevantes para las experiencias humanas concretas, acudiendo a la hermenéutica; un enfoque que vislumbro como más apropiado si lo que se desea es determinar la verdad relativa de los resultados de las actividades, instituciones y manifestaciones sociales, dentro del contexto histórico-político en el cual se insertan. (shrink)

El presente ensayo intenta explorar, siguiendo un filón abierto por Hannah Arendt, la hipótesis de que, en buena medida, el más eximio representante del liberalismo contemporáneo John Rawls no sólo asume el modelo contractualista hobbesiano, sino que vía Adam Smith, se apoya en su metafísica. Del mismo modo se sugiere que si el punto de partida de la teoría de la justicia de Rawls es la concepción del individuo : "como un sujeto autónomo capaz de orientarse por fines generalizables en (...) la vida pública", tal premisa no sólo muestra la deuda de Rawls con Kant, sino que ella ha sido igualmente determinante para la filosofía de Hobbes y para la teoría económica de Smith. Por último, mi tesis es que tanto la "mano invisible" de Adam Smith como "los dos principios de la justicia" de John Rawls persiguen mutatis mutandi el mismo telos del "Leviathan" de Thomas Hobbes; a saber, instaurar una "Sociedad Bien Ordenada". (shrink)

To date, no definition of life has been unequivocally accepted by the scientific community. In frustration, some authors advocate alternatives to standard definitions. These include using a list of characteristic features, focusing on life’s effects, or categorizing biospheres rather than life itself; treating life as a fuzzy category, a process or a cluster of contingent properties; or advocating a ‘wait-and-see’ approach until other examples of life are created or discovered. But these skeptical, operational, and pluralistic approaches have intensified the debate, (...) rather than settled it. Given the failure of even these approaches, we advocate a new strategy. In this paper, we reverse the usual line of reasoning and argue that the “life problem” arises from thinking incorrectly about the nature of life. Scientists most often conceptualize life as a class or kind, with earthly life as a single instance of it. Instead, we advocate thinking about Earth’s Life as an individual, in the way that species are now thought to be. In this view, Life is a monophyletic clade that originated with a last universal common ancestor, and includes all its descendants. We can continue to use the category ‘life’ pragmatically to refer to similarities between various phenomena and Life. But the relevant similarities are a matter of interest and preference, not a matter of fact. The search for other life in the Universe, then, is merely a search for entities that resemble parts of Life in whatever sense astrobiologists find most appealing. This does not mean that the search for evolved complexity elsewhere in the universe or its creation in the lab are futile endeavors, but that debates over whether they count as ‘life’ are. Ironically, finally abandoning the concept ‘life’ may make our searches for evolved complexity more fruitful. We explain why. (shrink)

In the half century since the formulation of the prokaryote : eukaryote dichotomy, many authors have proposed that the former evolved from something resembling the latter, in defiance of common (and possibly common sense) views. In such ‘eukaryotes first’ (EF) scenarios, the last universal common ancestor is imagined to have possessed significantly many of the complex characteristics of contemporary eukaryotes, as relics of an earlier ‘progenotic’ period or RNAworld. Bacteria and Archaea thus must have lost these complex features secondarily, through (...) ‘streamlining’. If the canonical three-domain tree in which Archaea and Eukarya are sisters is accepted, EF entails that Bacteria and Archaea are convergently prokaryotic.We ask what this means and how it might be tested. (shrink)

Based on our empirical research on global meaning in people with spinal cord injury and people with stroke, we formulated ‘inner posture’ as a concept in rehabilitation. Inner posture, as we concluded from our empirical data, refers to the way in which people bear what cannot be changed. It helps them to live with their injury. Considering that much has already been written about meaning from a variety of disciplines, the question arises whether the concept of inner posture adds something (...) new to the existing literature, or is just another name for a phenomenon that has already been described before in different terms. In this paper, we aim to investigate this and to clarify our conceptualization, by comparing the concept of inner posture with influential concepts in healthcare literature which seem to be more or less related. In the work of Puchalski regarding spirituality, Pargament regarding religion, Eliott regarding hope and Frankl regarding attitude, we found definitions and descriptions that seemed to come close to the phenomenon we refer to as inner posture. Because these concepts have various theoretical backgrounds, the comparison can help to better understand our concept of inner posture, through a process of dialogue between traditions, following Gadamer’s notion of dialogue as fusion of horizons of understanding. We conclude that inner posture differs from the other concepts in several ways. Some of these differences are more fundamental, other are partial. This suggests that we identified a new perspective on a phenomenon partially described earlier. The comparison also inspired us to slightly adjust our definition and to formulate new research questions. (shrink)

Este artículo plantea que el concepto de solidaridad, usualmente exaltado en tiempos de crisis, contiene en sí mismo el conjunto de límites que lo debilitan y lo convierten, paradójicamente, en una sutil manifestación del egoísmo. Para analizar esta contradicción, se abordan las posiciones emblemáticas de cinco autores contemporáneos: John Rawls, Richard Rorty, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor y Hannah Arendt. A través de este análisis puede mostrarse que los grandes desafíos de nuestra civilización permiten advertir los dilemas y las contingencias que (...) afectan el nexo entre el liberalismo y la solidaridad. (shrink)

RESUMENEl trabajo critica la fundamentación liberal del a democracia. Por dos razones: la primera, por la imposible defensa de un modelo neutral del estado; y la segunda, por el componente individualista tanto de su epistemología como de su filosofía moral y política, que reduce de modo significativo las posibilidades emancipadoras del proyecto democrático. por último, señala que estos rasgos básicos del a fundamentación liberal se mantienen incluso en una de las versiones del liberalismo social más acordes con la democracia constitucional; (...) el liberalismo político de John Rawls. PALABRAS CLAVELIBERALISMO-DEMOCRACIA LIBERAL- HOBBES-RAWLS- ARENDTABSTRACTThe paper critiques the liberal foundation of democracy. For two reasons: the first, because of the imposible defense of a neutral model of the state; and the second, because of the individualist element both of its epistemology and of its moral and political phiosophy, that reduces significantly the emancipatory chances of the democratic project. Lastly, it points out that these basic features of the liberal foundation even remain in one the versions of liberalism more akin to constitutional democracy: John Rawls' political liberalism.KEYWORDSLIBERALISM-LIBERAL DEMOCRACY-HOBBES-RAWLS-ARENDT. (shrink)

This article reports the findings of a survey examining if there are gender and career stage differences between male and female practitioners regarding ethical judgment. The results show that, on average, females adopted a more strict ethical stance than their male counterparts on 7 out of 19 vignettes. Males on the other hand, demonstrated a more ethical stance than their female counterparts on 2 out of 19 vignettes. The results furthermore indicate there is a significant difference in ethical judgment across (...) career stages. Overall, it appears that practitioners in later career stages display higher ethical judgment than practitoners in lower career stages. Implications are provided for both practitioners and academicians. (shrink)

This personal account traces a series of studies that led from DNA physical chemistry to anticancer drug mechanisms. Chemical crosslinking as a basis for anticancer drug actions had been suspected since the time of the first clinical reports of the effectiveness of nitrogen mustard in 1946. After the elucidation of the DNA helix‐coil transition, several nearly concurrent findings in the early 1960s established the paradigm of DNA interstrand crosslinking. The DNA filter elution phenomenon was discovered in the early 1970s, and (...) lent itself to the development of practical assays for DNA crosslinks and other DNA lesions in mammalian cells. The assays allowed studies of the effects of DNA damaging agents at pharmacologically or toxicologically relevant doses, and have been widely applied in studies of mutagenic and chemotherapeutic agents. During the period 1979–1986, DNA filter elution studies led to the paradigm of DNA topoisomerases as targets of anticancer drug action, and this has become one of the most active areas of anticancer drug development. (shrink)

In this review, we describe some of the central philosophical issues facing origins-of-life research and provide a targeted history of the developments that have led to the multidisciplinary field of origins-of-life studies. We outline these issues and developments to guide researchers and students from all fields. With respect to philosophy, we provide brief summaries of debates with respect to (1) definitions (or theories) of life, what life is and how research should be conducted in the absence of an accepted theory (...) of life, (2) the distinctions between synthetic, historical, and universal projects in origins-of-life studies, issues with strategies for inferring the origins of life, such as (3) the nature of the first living entities (the “bottom up” approach) and (4) how to infer the nature of the last universal common ancestor (the “top down” approach), and (5) the status of origins of life as a science. Each of these debates influences the others. Although there are clusters of researchers that agree on some answers to these issues, each of these debates is still open. With respect to history, we outline several independent paths that have led to some of the approaches now prevalent in origins-of-life studies. These include one path from early views of life through the scientific revolutions brought about by Linnaeus (von Linn.), Wöhler, Miller, and others. In this approach, new theories, tools, and evidence guide new thoughts about the nature of life and its origin.We also describe another family of paths motivated by a” circularity” approach to life, which is guided by such thinkers as Maturana & Varela, Gánti, Rosen, and others. These views echo ideas developed by Kant and Aristotle, though they do so using modern science in ways that produce exciting avenues of investigation. By exploring the history of these ideas, we can see how many of the issues that currently interest us have been guided by the contexts in which the ideas were developed. The disciplinary backgrounds of each of these scholars has influenced the questions they sought to answer, the experiments they envisioned, and the kinds of data they collected. We conclude by encouraging scientists and scholars in the humanities and social sciences to explore ways in which they can interact to provide a deeper understanding of the conceptual assumptions, structure, and history of origins-of-life research. This may be useful to help frame future research agendas and bring awareness to the multifaceted issues facing this challenging scientific question. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: God and the primordial causes God and the world: theophany “Man: how great a thing and great a name, the image of divine nature” (V, 821C) Last things Eriugena in his time and beyond.

Critics are calling for the decolonization of AI (artificial intelligence). The problem is that this technology is marginalizing other modes of knowledge with dehumanizing applications. What is needed to remedy this situation is the development of human-centric AI. However, there is a serious blind spot in this strategy that is addressed in this paper. The corrective that is usually proposed—participatory design—lacks the philosophical rigor to undercut the autonomy of AI, and thus the colonization spawned by this technology. A more radical (...) or substantial proposal is advanced in this discussion that is known as community-based design. This alternative makes a theoretical maneuver that allows AI design to be directed by human agency, thereby introducing a safeguard that may help to prevent colonization by this technology. (shrink)

This study explores linkages between what Chinese managers generally know about environmental issues, how strongly they value environmental protection, and different types of behaviours/actions they may take within their organizations on behalf of the environment. From a sample of 305 managers in Guangzhou and Beijing, it was found that both environmental knowledge and values are more predictive of more personal managerial behaviours, such as keeping informed of relevant company issues and working within the system to minimize environmental impacts, than more (...) overt behaviours. Moreover, for these more personal actions, environmental knowledge and values were found to have both main and interactive effects. By comparison, it was found that both environmental values and knowledge had additive effects on managerial tendencies to initiate new programs within their domain of responsibility. Only environmental values was found to have a modest influence environmental advocacy. (shrink)

This paper looks broadly at the theme of corporate governance in Mexico. It begins with a brief analysis of the historical corporate governance model in Mexico, including the governance structures, the banking and financial systems, ownership and control patterns, industrial policy, and industrial relations. The paper then examines how and why these various aspects of corporate governance have been changing with processes of economic liberalization currently under way. Finally, it analyzes the consequences of changes in the model of corporate governance (...) for the country's development (e.g. increased consumer goods for middle class consumers, increased disclosure by domestic corporations, less support for corporate social programs, etc.). (shrink)

AI is considered to be very abstract to a range of critics. In this regard, algorithms are referred to regularly as black boxes and divorced from human intervention. A particular philosophical maneuver supports this outcome. The aim of this article is to (1) bring the philosophy to the surface that has contributed to this distance between AI and people and (2) offer an alternative philosophical position that can bring this technology closer to individuals and communities. The overall goal of the (...) analysis in this paper is the humanising of AI by addressing the shortcomings of conceptualising algorithms as black boxes. (shrink)

AI-developers face a challenge when seeking to use models that aim to be culturally sensitive. While we agree that culture is an emergent reality, there is always the risk of creating algorithms that treat culture as objective to account for various facets of the social realm. As a result, culture becomes prepackaged and autonomous. Nonetheless, culture is not only emergent but dialogically and socially invented. In this article, the point is to advance the discussion about culture by addressing a crucial (...) philosophical issue and proposing some practical themes on how to avoid culturalism in AI development. (shrink)

Most workers report that they are alienated from their jobs and find their workplaces to be stifling and uninviting. Given this condition, the introduction of computer technology, including AI, will only make matters worse, unless a more humane organizational culture is created. The key point in this article is the need to produce a responsible technology, so that employees are not further overworked and manipulated. To achieve this end, phenomenology is invoked, particularly the life world, to provide technology with a (...) human foundation. In practice, this shift in philosophy means that when AI is introduced into an organization, workers have a central role in the design, implementation, and evaluation of this technology. Computer technology can thus promote human flourishing instead of control and alienation in workplaces. (shrink)

This article analyzes the attitudes of United States business professionals toward the issue of international bribery, and in particular, whether or not having a written code of ethics has an effect on these attitudes. A vignette relating to international bribery from a widely used survey instrument was employed in a nationwide survey of business professionals to gather information on ethical attitudes of respondents. Data were also collected on gender of respondents, whether or not respondents were self-employed, whether or not the (...) respondents' firms had a written code of ethics, and to what extent the respondents' firms generated revenues from international operations. Attitudes concerning whether or not international bribery is ever acceptable exhibited wide dispersion. Respondents from firms that have a written code of ethics were significantly less likely to find international bribery acceptable. Firms that generate revenues from international operations were significantly more likely to have a written code of ethics than were firms which did not generate revenues from international operations. Implications of the findings for business policy are discussed. (shrink)

Most workers report that they are alienated from their jobs and find their workplaces to be stifling and uninviting. Given this condition, the introduction of computer technology, including AI, will only make matters worse, unless a more humane organizational culture is created. The key point in this article is the need to produce a responsible technology, so that employees are not further overworked and manipulated. To achieve this end, phenomenology is invoked, particularly the life world, to provide technology with a (...) human foundation. In practice, this shift in philosophy means that when AI is introduced into an organization, workers have a central role in the design, implementation, and evaluation of this technology. Computer technology can thus promote human flourishing instead of control and alienation in workplaces. (shrink)

Antonio Gramsci is one of the major social and political theorists of the 20th century whose work has had an enormous influence on several fields, including educational theory and practice. Gramsci and Education demonstrates the relevance of Antonio Gramsci's thought for contemporary educational debates. The essays are written by scholars located in different parts of the world, a number of whom are well known internationally for their contributions to Gramscian scholarship and/or educational research. The collection deals with a broad range (...) of topics, including schooling, adult education in general, popular education, workers' education, cultural studies, critical pedagogy, multicultural education, and the role of intellectuals in contemporary society. (shrink)

Research on the relationship between religious commitment and business ethics has produced widely varying results and made the impact of such commitment unclear. This study presents an empirical investigation based on a questionnaire survey of business managers and professionals in the United States yielding a database of 1234 respondents. Respondents evaluated the ethical acceptability of 16 business decisions. Findings varied with the way in which the religion variable was measured. Little relationship between religious commitment and ethical judgment was found when (...) responses were compared on the basis of broad faith categories – Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, other religions, and no religion. However, respondents who indicated that religious interests were of high or moderate importance to them demonstrated a higher level of ethical judgment (less accepting of unethical decisions) than others in their evaluations. Evangelical Christians also showed a higher level of ethical judgment. (shrink)

This paper reports on the results from two studies that were conducted eight years apart with different respondents. The studies examined the role of the Mere Exposure Effect on ethical tolerance or acceptability of particular business decisions. The results from Study 1 show there is a significant difference in ethical judgment for 12 out of 16 vignettes between those who have been exposed to such situations compared to those who have not been exposed to them. In those 12 situations, those (...) who have been exposed to such situations adopted a more tolerant stance toward the ethically questionable behavior. The results from Study 2 show there is a significant difference in ethical judgment for 9 out of 16 vignettes between those who have been exposed to such situations compared to those who have not been exposed to them. Again, in those nine situations, those who have been exposed to such situations adopted a more tolerant stance toward the ethically questionable behavior. Interestingly, the 9 situations in Study 2 were 9 of the 12 situations found to be significant in Study 1, and in the same direction, suggesting that we have found consistency in our findings and support for the Mere Exposure Effect. Implications are provided for both higher education and practitioners. (shrink)

Given its non-invasive nature, there is increasing interest in the use of transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation across basic, translational and clinical research. Contemporaneously, tVNS can be achieved by stimulating either the auricular branch or the cervical bundle of the vagus nerve, referred to as transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation and transcutaneous cervical VNS, respectively. In order to advance the field in a systematic manner, studies using these technologies need to adequately report sufficient methodological detail to enable comparison of results between (...) studies, replication of studies, as well as enhancing study participant safety. We systematically reviewed the existing tVNS literature to evaluate current reporting practices. Based on this review, and consensus among participating authors, we propose a set of minimal reporting items to guide future tVNS studies. The suggested items address specific technical aspects of the device and stimulation parameters. We also cover general recommendations including inclusion and exclusion criteria for participants, outcome parameters and the detailed reporting of side effects. Furthermore, we review strategies used to identify the optimal stimulation parameters for a given research setting and summarize ongoing developments in animal research with potential implications for the application of tVNS in humans. Finally, we discuss the potential of tVNS in future research as well as the associated challenges across several disciplines in research and clinical practice. (shrink)