Patients with psychotic disorders experience a range of reality distortions. These often include auditory-verbal hallucinations, and thought insertion to a lesser degree; however, their mechanisms and relationships between each other remain largely elusive. Here we attempt to establish a integrative model drawing from the phenomenology of both AVHs and TI and argue that they in fact can be seen as ‘spectra’ of experiences with varying degrees of agency and ownership, with ‘silent and internal own thoughts’ on one extreme and ‘fully (...) external and clearly audible voices’ in the absence of a speaker on the other. We believe a spectral model will add emphasis to the continuity of experience and help to better understand how one type of psychotic symptom may interact with another, and put forward the argument that the experience of TI itself is not sufficient to classify as a delusion. In addition we aim to discuss some of the conceptual issues surrounding AVHs and TI with first-person accounts and current philosophical and neuropsychological theories in mind. We propose that the mechanisms behind AVHs and TI are more complex than source-monitoring deficits; indeed, to understand such phenomena one must appreciate that their very ‘existence’ and ‘reality’ as experienced by the individual have much deeper implications and meaning, both philosophically and clinically. (shrink)

Schizophrenia as a pathology of self-awareness has attracted much attention from philosophical theorists and empirical scientists alike. I view schizophrenia as a basic self-disturbance leading to a lifeworld of solipsism adopted by the sufferer and explain how this adoption takes place, which then manifests in ways such as first-rank psychotic symptoms. I then discuss the relationships between these symptoms, not as isolated mental events, but as end-products of a loss of agency and ownership, and argue that symptoms like thought insertion (...) and other ego-boundary disorders are by nature a multitude of paradoxes created by a fragmented awareness. I argue that such fragmentation does not always require or lead to a delusional elaboration as the definitive feature of its phenomenology, and present reasons for the role of the first-person pronoun as a mere metaphor used to represent the patient’s bizarre experiences where sensory perception and thinking processes converge. Further, I discuss the initi... (shrink)

El principio de proporcionalidad constituye hoy en día quizá el más conocido y el más recurrente "límite de los límites" a los derechos fundamentales, y en esa medida supone una barrera frente a intromisiones indebidas en el ámbito de los propios derechos. La idea de este libro es la de difundir entre los interesados una serie de herramientas hermenéuticas que son necesarias para lograr la adecuada protección de los derechos fundamentales. Las constituciones de América Latina, siguiendo la tendencia que ya (...) se apuntaba sobre el carácter fuertemente "materializado" de las cartas supremas de nuestros días, contienen todas ellas un amplio catálogo de derechos fundamentales. Pero su aplicación práctica ha dejado y sigue dejando mucho que desear. Esperamos que con la publicación de este libro se inicie un debate provechoso sobre las mejores formas de proteger los derechos fundamentales, a partir de una correcta interpretación de los mismos. Desde luego, Colombia lleva en este punto mucha ventaja respecto de otros países latinoamericanos, pues cuenta con la mejor jurisdicción constitucional de todos ellos. La Corte Constitucional de Colombia es reconocida y respetada en toda América Latina por su liderazgo intelectual y por su fuerte activismo progresista en materia de derechos fundamentales. (shrink)

St Joachim and St Anne Meeting at the Golden Gate, painted by Eugenio Cajés between 1604 and 1605, is the sole remnant of a major commission for the Cercito chapel in the church of San Felipe el Real in Madrid. The painting has been praised by modern critics, who have drawn attention to the painter’s emulation of Italian artistic precedents. Illuminating as this appraisal may be, such an approach does not explain why the patrons chose an iconographic subject that had (...) become increasingly rare, especially since the traditional association of the Meeting with the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin had been questioned in the late sixteenth century. Above all, focussing on the painting’s style fails to take into account the specific context for which this painting was conceived. As it happens, the Cercito family chapel was dedicated to a very particular cult, that of the Holy Child of La Guardia, the purported victim of one of the most notorious blood libels in late medieval Spain. The purpose of the present study is to redress the previous art-historical oversight with regard to this painting, through an in-depth study of the artistic, devotional and socio-cultural significance of the Meeting at the Golden Gate in seventeenth-century Madrid. An analysis of the extensive and to date unpublished archival documentation for the commission makes it possible to reconstruct key elements of the lost chapel. These sources, when read together with devotional texts that circulated at the time, reveal the personal motives that underpinned the foundation and decoration of the Cercito chapel. The reconstruction of the Cercito chapel proposed in this article offers a new perspective on the way in which religious art engaged with the tensions prompted by the issue of the purity of blood, as well as with anxieties related to family and procreation. (shrink)

Este artículo describe y analiza la doctrina del Tribunal Europeo de Derechos Humanos (TEDH) sobre la identidad de género de las personas transexuales. En el Convenio Europeo sobre Derechos Humanos (CEDH), como en otros tratados internacionales sobre derechos humanos, no existe un derecho que reconozca y proteja la situación del colectivo trans. Sin embargo, el Tribunal ha elaborado una doctrina propia a partir del artículo 8 del CEDH, el derecho al respeto a la vida privada y familiar, en la que (...) cobra especial importancia su análisis de las obligaciones negativas y positivas de los Estados y su aplicación a la protección de la autonomía personal, de la libertad y de la dignidad humana de las personas transexuales. (shrink)

Abstract It would be puzzling if the morally best agents were not so good after all. Yet one prominent account of the morally best agents ascribes to them the exact motivational defect that has famously been called a “fetish.” The supposed defect is a desire to do the right thing, where this is read de dicto . If the morally best agents really are driven by this de dicto desire, and if this de dicto desire is really a fetish, then (...) the morally best agents are moral fetishists. This is puzzling. I resolve the puzzle by showing that on a proper understanding of the interaction between de dicto and de re moral motivation, it is not only not fetishistic, but quite possibly desirable, to be motivated by a de dicto desire to do the right thing. My argument relies partly on an appeal to a non-buck-passing account of moral rightness, according to which rightness is itself an additional reason-giving property over and above the right-making properties of an action. If this account of moral rightness is correct, then we would expect the morally best agents to exhibit de dicto moral motivation. However, since their de dicto desire acts in concert with de re desires, there is no reason to consider it a fetish. Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-19 DOI 10.1007/s11098-011-9825-z Authors Vanessa Carbonell, Philosophy Department, University of Cincinnati, P.O. Box 210374, Cincinnati, OH 45221-0374, USA Journal Philosophical Studies Online ISSN 1573-0883 Print ISSN 0031-8116. (shrink)

The moral community is a social community, and as such it is vulnerable to social problems and pathologies. In this essay I identify a particular way in which participation in the moral community can be constrained by social factors. I argue that features of the social world—including power imbalances, oppression, intergroup conflict, communication barriers, and stereotyping—can make it nearly impossible for some members of the moral community to hold others responsible for wrongdoing. Specifically, social circumstances prevent some marginalized people from (...) engaging in what Stephen Darwall calls “felicitous moral address” (Darwall 2006). We should think of some members of the moral community as having “second-class moral citizenship” in ways that parallel second-class political citizenship. The injustice of second-class moral citizenship can be understood by drawing an analogy with Miranda Fricker’s notion of “epistemic injustice” (Fricker 2007). Fricker’s account of how people can be undermined in their capacity as knowers can be extended to show how people can be undermined in their capacity as makers of moral claims, which can be called “claimant injustice”. (shrink)

It is well-known that racism is encoded into the social practices and institutions of medicine. Less well-known is that racism is encoded into the material artifacts of medicine. We argue that many medical devices are not merely biased, but materialize oppression. An oppressive device exhibits a harmful bias that reflects and perpetuates unjust power relations. Using pulse oximeters and spirometers as case studies, we show how medical devices can materialize oppression along various axes of social difference, including race, gender, class, (...) and ability. Our account uses political philosophy and cognitive science to give a theoretical basis for understanding materialized oppression, explaining how artifacts encode and carry oppressive ideas from the past to the present and future. Oppressive medical devices present a moral aggregation problem. To remedy this problem, we suggest redundantly layered solutions that are coordinated to disrupt reciprocal causal connections between the attitudes, practices, and artifacts of oppressive systems. (shrink)

In this article, I give a counterexample to a claim made in that empirically equivalent theories can often be regarded as theoretically equivalent by treating one as having surplus structure, thereby overcoming the problem of underdetermination of theory choice. The case I present is that of Lorentz's ether theory and Einstein's theory of special relativity. I argue that Norton's suggestion that surplus structure is present in Lorentz's theory in the form of the ether state of rest is based on a (...) misunderstanding of the role that the ether plays in Lorentz's theory, and that in general, consideration of the conceptual framework in which a theory is embedded is vital to understanding the relationship between different theories. (shrink)

We address a recent proposal concerning ‘surplus structure’ due to Nguyen et al.. We argue that the sense of ‘surplus structure’ captured by their formal criterion is importantly different from—and in a sense, opposite to—another sense of ‘surplus structure’ used by philosophers. We argue that minimizing structure in one sense is generally incompatible with minimizing structure in the other sense. We then show how these distinctions bear on Nguyen et al.’s arguments about Yang-Mills theory and on the hole argument.

Organisations have implemented intensive home-based teleworking in response to global COVID-19 lockdowns and other pandemic-related restrictions. Financial pressures are driving organisations to continue intensive teleworking after the pandemic. Understanding employees’ teleworking inclinations post COVID-19, and how these inclinations are influenced by different factors, is important to ensure any future, more permanent changes to teleworking policies are sustainable for both employees and organisations. This study, therefore, investigated the relationships between the context of home-based teleworking during the pandemic, productivity perceptions during home-based (...) teleworking, and employees’ future teleworking inclinations beyond the pandemic. Specifically, the study examined whether pandemic-teleworking conditions related to the job, and the physical and social environments at home, influenced employees’ FTI, and if perceptions of improved or reduced productivity mediated these relationships. Data were collected during April and May 2020 with a cross-sectional online survey of teleworkers in Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and other countries during the first COVID-19 lockdowns. Reported FTI were mixed. Most participants reported wanting to telework more post-pandemic compared to before the pandemic; however, 18% wanted to telework less. Hierarchical multiple regression analysis revealed that some teleworking conditions were positively associated with FTI. Other teleworking conditions were not associated with FTI. Perceived changes in productivity mediated the relationship between work privacy fit and FTI. Findings highlight the role of work privacy fit and job demands in influencing pandemic productivity perceptions and teleworking inclinations post-pandemic. Results raise questions about the suitability and sustainability of home-based teleworking for all staff. As organisations plan to increase the proportion of teleworking post-pandemic, this study suggests there is a need to support employees who perceived their productivity to be poor while home-working during the pandemic. (shrink)

¿Trae la posibilidad de mecanismos de mejoramiento cognitivo, como por ejemplo la posibilidad de implantar creencias en la mente de personas, preguntas nuevas a la epistemología? En este corto volumen, J. Adam Carter propone que sí. En particular, Carter argumenta que obliga a que consideremos la necesidad de una condición adicional en nuestras caracterizaciones del concepto de conocimiento: además de ser una forma de creencia verdadera justificada, que satisface una condición anti-Gettier, como aceptan la mayoría de los enfoques contemporáneos (en (...) particular desde la perspectiva de la epistemología de las virtudes), el conocimiento debe satisfacer una condición de autonomía. En la práctica, esto significa que sujetos a quienes se haya implantado creencias que de otro modo satisfarían los estándares del conocimiento no tengan, por lo tanto, conocimiento, en contra de las predicciones de ciertos futuristas. (shrink)

I argue for the existence of a ‘ratcheting-up effect’: the behavior of moral saints serves to increase the level of moral obligation the rest of us face. What we are morally obligated to do is constrained by what it would be reasonable for us to believe we are morally obligated to do. Moral saints provide us with a special kind of evidence that bears on what we can reasonably believe about our obligations. They do this by modeling the level of (...) sacrifice a person can realistically bear. Exposure to moral saints thus ‘ratchets-up’ our obligations by combating a type of ignorance that would otherwise defeat those obligations. (shrink)

Susan Wolf famously claimed that the life of the moral saint is unattractive from the “point of view of individual perfection.” I argue, however, that the unattractive moral saints in Wolf’s account are self-defeating on two levels, are motivated in the wrong way, and are called into question by real-life counter-examples. By appealing to a real-life case study, I argue that the best life from the moral point of view is not necessarily unattractive from the individual point of view.

POLITICS is a system of computer programs which simulates humans in comprehending and responding to world events from a given political or ideological perspective. The primary theoretical motivations were: (1) the implemention of a functional system which applies the knowledge structures of Schank and Abelson (1977) to the domain of simulating political belief systems; (2) the development of a tentative theory of intentional goal conflicts and counterplanning. Secondary goals of the POLITICS project include developing a representation for belief systems, investigating (...) cognitive processes such as goal‐directed inferencing, and the integration of several types of knowledge representations into a functional system. (shrink)

Counterpossibles, counterfactuals conditional with impossible antecedents, are notoriously contested; while the standard view makes them trivially true, some authors argue that they can be non-trivially true. In this paper, I examine the use of counterfactuals in the context of games, and argue that there is a case to be made for their non-triviality in a restricted sense. In particular, I examine the case of retro problems in chess, where it can happen that one is tasked with evaluating counterfactuals about illegal (...) positions. If we understand illegality as a type of restricted impossibility, those counterfactuals are non-trivial counterpossibles. I suggest that their non-triviality stems from their role in practices of rule coordination and revision, and suggest that this model could be generalized to counterpossibles in different domains. I then compare the approach to the accounts of Vetter 2016 and Locke 2019. (shrink)

In this paper, I sketch a new model for the format of the content of understanding states, Compressible Graph Maximalism (CGM). In this model, the format of the content of understanding is graphical, and compressible. It thus combines ideas from approaches that stress the link between understanding and holistic structure (like as reported by Grimm (in: Ammon SGCBS (ed) Explaining Understanding: New Essays in Epistemollogy and the Philosophy of Science, Routledge, New York, 2016)), and approaches that emphasize the connection between (...) understanding and compression (like Wilkenfeld (Synthese 190(6):997–1016, 2018)). I argue that the combination of these ideas has several attractive features, and I defend the idea against some challenges. (shrink)

The purpose of cultural competence education for medical professionals is to ensure respectful care and reduce health disparities. Yet as Berger and Miller (2021) show, the cultural competence framework is dated, confused, and self-defeating. They argue that the framework ignores the primary driver of health disparities—systemic racism—and is apt to exacerbate rather than mitigate bias and ethnocentrism. They propose replacing cultural competence with a framework that attends to two social aspects of structural inequality: health and social policy, and institutional-system activity; (...) and two psychological aspects of structural inequality: the clinical encounter, and the epistemic. -/- We agree with the structural approach. To that end, we think it would be fruitful to include attention to physical contributors to structural inequality, namely the material artifacts used in medicine. Devices, tools, and technologies can materialize biases, perpetuate oppression, and contribute to health disparities. Granted, not everything that interests philosophers can be squeezed into medical education. Nevertheless, there are compelling reasons for including the study of material artifacts in education designed to reduce health disparities. First, devices and tools often carry forward biases from the past, and keep biases hidden from plain sight. Second, by studying these artifacts, future clinicians can begin to see themselves as part of a larger sociotechnical system. Finally, as medicine becomes increasingly tech-laden, it’s important for clinicians to see how material artifacts (including algorithms) connect individuals to structures. This will help to undermine oversimplified narratives according to which objective tools and technologies can correct for the bias and subjectivity of flawed human beings. (shrink)

We argue that several apparently distinct responses to the hole argument, all invoking formal or mathematical considerations, should be viewed as a unified “mathematical response.” We then consider and rebut two prominent critiques of the mathematical response before reflecting on what is ultimately at issue in this literature.

We emerge from certain activities with an altered sense of self. Whether returning from a warzone or from an experience as common as caring for an aging parent, one might remark, “I’m not the same person I was.” I argue that such transformations are relevant to debates about what morality requires of us. To undergo an alteration in one’s self is to make a special kind of sacrifice, a sacrifice of self. Since projects can be more or less morally obligatory (...) to the extent that they require more or less sacrifice, we must incorporate these unique sacrifices into any accounting of the contours and limits of moral obligation. But sacrifices of self pose a special difficulty for any such accounting, precisely because of their transformative nature. Unlike most other sacrifices, they cannot be analyzed entirely in terms of wellbeing. Using real-world case studies and examples, I argue for the existence of two types of sacrifice of self, involving changes in identity and moral agency. I argue that sacrifices of self require particular attention because they may be extra difficult to compare with other costs and with moral gains. (shrink)

In this paper, I raise the problem of dealing with counterpossible conditionals for theories of subject matter. I argue that existing accounts of subject matter need to be revised and extended to be able to a) provide reasonable (potentially non-degenerate) verdicts about what counterpossibles are about, b) explain the intuition that counterpossibles are in some sense about what would happen if the antecedent were true, and c) explain in what sense counterpossibles can be about individuals. I sketch how one could (...) extend atom-based and way-based theories of subject matters to handle the problem. Then, I raise the problem that it might be desirable for a theory of subject matter to prevent the inference that certain counterpossibles are about the kinds of things that they seem to mention. (shrink)

Feminist-Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition, which draws upon the insights of both feminist and pragmatist theory and practice. It is fundamentally concerned with enlarging philosophical thought through activism and lived experience, and assumes feminist and pragmatist ideas to be mutually beneficial for liberatory causes. Feminist-pragmatism emphasises the need to redress false distinctions, or dualisms, as these usually result in a denigration of one oppositional by another. Thus, feminist-pragmatists critique such bifurcations as thought/action, mind/body, universal/particular, and they show how the skewed (...) favouring of one over the other results in philosophical theories which are incapable of explaining our gendered existences, positions in society, understandings of knowledge, or learning experiences. Feminist-pragmatists contribute to current debates in epistemology, social and political philosophy, philosophy of education, ethics, and metaphysics. Their work reflects the theoretical advances made by feminist theorists especially over the course of the latter part of the twentieth century, while being rooted in the principles and criticisms of the classical pragmatists. (shrink)

This is the first book to bring a philosophical lens to issues of socio-political and cultural importance in twenty-first century Ireland. While the social, political, and economic landscape of contemporary Ireland has inspired extensive scholarly debate both within and well beyond the field of Irish Studies, there is a distinct lack of philosophical voices in these discussions. The aim of this volume is to enrich the fields of Philosophy and Irish Studies by encouraging a manifestly philosophical exploration of contemporary issues (...) and concerns. -/- The essays in this volume collectively address diverse philosophical questions on contemporary Ireland by exploring a variety of themes, including: diaspora, exile, return; women’s bodies and autonomy; historic injustices and national healing; remembering and commemoration; institutionalisation and containment; colonialism and Ireland as "home"; conflict and violence; Northern Ireland and the peace process; nationalism, patriotism, and masculinities; ethnicity, immigration, and identity; and translation, art and culture. -/- Philosophical Perspectives on Contemporary Ireland marks a significant contribution to contemporary theorizations of Ireland by incorporating both Irish and transatlantic perspectives. It will appeal to a broad audience of scholars and advanced students working in philosophy, Irish Studies, feminist theory, history, legal studies, and literary theory. Beyond academia, it will also engage those interested in contemporary Ireland from policy and civil society perspectives. (shrink)

Educar implica, en gran medida, transgredir la flecha del tiempo y actuar a modo de contratiempo. Los profesores saben bien que, en numerosas ocasiones, para asegurar el éxito de su acción, deben a menudo "perder tiempo" dejándose paradójicamente llevar por él. El conocimiento del tiempo educativo nos introduce en el estudio de este peculiar contratiempo que, a diferencia del tiempo objetivo, predecible y cronométrico que sirve para racionalizar las actividades pedagógicas, permite a los educadores impedir que en educación el tiempo (...) pase, se consuma sin más, fluya o simplemente suceda. De ahí que la autora plantee las relaciones tiempo y educación desde una perspectiva más integradora, incorporando para ello los múltiples tiempos que confluyen en la realidad educativa junto aquéllos que confieren legitimidad al proyecto educativo. La escuela ha venido recreando un modelo no normativo tiempo -básicamente predictivo y probabilístico- y ha aplicado una racionalidad ahistórica que dificulta la emergencia del sujeto al que se dirige y el modelo de sociedad hacia la que se proyecta. En la actualidad se plantea la necesidad de educar desde una nueva perspectiva ética que integre el tiempo como categoría normativa de acción. Educar hoy para mañana exigirá, en este sentido, atender a dos lógicas temporales: impregnar de historicidad la dimensión de sentido de todo proyecto educativo y planificar las acciones pedagógicas de acuerdo con una nueva tecnología temporal que incorpore la incertidumbre, la complejidad, la interdependencia y la sostenibilidad temporal. (shrink)

In the field of clinical practice, there does not seem to be too much contention about what schizophrenia is, at least from a high level. After all, there are various diagnostic systems and guidelines, all of which point toward schizophrenia as a psychotic syndrome which likely forms a continuum with other psychotic disorders. It may sound obvious that, according to the current definitions, the major commonality between schizophrenia and all other psychoses is psychotic symptoms; more precisely, delusions and hallucinations. Any (...) description, or ‘phenomenology’ as most clinicians view it, can be found in these diagnostic manuals. However, is there anything at all that sets schizophrenia apart from the other... (shrink)

En este artículo buscamos mostrar que, tanto en la filosofía de Schopenhauer como también en la de Bergson, la experiencia estética se constituye como el paradigma del conocimiento intuitivo. A diferencia de lo que establece la teoría kantiana, para Schopenhauer y Bergson la intuición no sólo es la única forma de conocimiento inmediato, sino que no necesita de conceptos para aprehender aquello dado en la sensibilidad. Asimismo, puesto que actualmente no encontramos demasiada literatura sobre la influencia de Schopenhauer en la (...) filosofía de Bergson, dicho análisis pretende contribuir al establecimiento de los posibles vínculos entre ambas teorías. (shrink)

Do we have control over the content of our imaginings? More precisely: do we have control over what our imaginings are about? Intentionalists say yes. Until recently, intentionalism could be taken as the received view. Recently, authors like Munro & Strohminger (2021) have developed some arguments against it. Here, I tentatively join their ranks and develop a new way to think about the way in which imaginings develop their contents that also goes against intentionalism. My proposal makes use of what (...) we may call a ballistic framework for mental dynamics, which I sketch to some length. In this model, imaginings are articulated by ballistic events sensitive to constraints that modify the trajectories that imaginings trace in a special working space. This framework leaves room for alternatives to pre-assigned-content models, such as Kung’s (2016). In the ballistic-based models sketched here, and against intentionalism, imaginings can fail to be about what we intend them to be about. The framework also has applications beyond the intentionalism debate, some of which I will sketch. (shrink)

While the list of 17 Sustainable Development Goals proposed by the United Nations’ Open Working Group comprises a catalog of highly important post-2015 development priorities, one of the key issue that has not received the attention it deserves is the need to safeguard the Earth's life-support system. Over the course of the past decades, we have concentrated much more on socioeconomic development rather than on environmental sustainability while putting a number of the Earth's systems at risk, and with it poverty (...) eradication and sustainable development. There is thus a need to put the spotlight on global environmental change and to take account of the insights from the latest Earth system science and its implications for the future of global development and global ethics. The ongoing debate on the post-2015 SDGs offers an important occasion for this endeavor. Going beyond the current proposal of the Open Working Group and building on the planetary boundaries or guard rails framework, the SDGs.. (shrink)

This article draws attention to the silent relationship ─ both in written and archeological sources ─ between monasteries and the production of parchment in Late Antiquity, particularly in Visigothic Spain, where there is little archaeological data concerning early monastic communities. Once contextualized, the little, indirect evidence for the production of parchment may provide a valuable argument for the identification of Christian monastic buildings in certain archaeological sites that have been classified according to other typologies, at a time of major changes, (...) during which the parchment codex has replaced the papyrus roll. (shrink)

Este artículo busca el reconocimiento del trabajo de los educadores de adultos y sus luchas desde el fin de la dictadura hasta la actualidad para asentar las bases de la educación de adultos.Con una metodología cualitativa de corte exploratorio, basada en entrevistas en profundidad a los profesionales que estuvieron involucrados, este artículo describe los orígenes, las dificultades encontradas y los procesos llevados a cabo en la creación y reconocimiento oficial del centro de educación de adultos Joan Carles I, situado en (...) el barrio de La Mariola de Lleida, que tiene una idiosincrasia propia. (shrink)

In this paper, I give an overview of different models of understanding attribution and advance a contextualist account of understanding attribution. Whereas other contextualist accounts make the degree in which the epistemic states of the relevant agents satisfy certain invariant conditions context-sensitive, the proposed account makes the conditions themselves context-sensitive.

In recent decades, psychological research on the effects of mindfulness-based interventions has greatly developed and demonstrated a range of beneficial outcomes in a variety of populations and contexts. Yet, the question of how to foster subjective well-being and happiness remains open. Here, we assessed the effectiveness of an integrated mental training program The Art of Happiness on psychological well-being in a general population. The mental training program was designed to help practitioners develop new ways to nurture their own happiness. This (...) was achieved by seven modules aimed at cultivating positive cognition strategies and behaviors using both formal and informal practices. The program was conducted over a period of 9 months, also comprising two retreats, one in the middle and one at the end of the course. By using a set of established psychometric tools, we assessed the effects of such a mental training program on several psychological well-being dimensions, taking into account both the longitudinal effects of the course and the short-term effects arising from the intensive retreat experiences. The results showed that several psychological well-being measures gradually increased within participants from the beginning to the end of the course. This was especially true for life satisfaction, self-awareness, and emotional regulation, highlighting both short-term and longitudinal effects of the program. In conclusion, these findings suggest the potential of the mental training program, such as The Art of Happiness, for psychological well-being. (shrink)

I argue that modal epistemology should pay more attention to questions about the structure and function of modal thought. We can treat these questions from synchronic and diachronic angles. From a synchronic perspective, I consider whether a general argument for the epistemic support of modal though can be made on the basis of modal thoughs’s indispensability for what Enoch and Schechter (2008) call rationally required epistemic projects. After formulating the argument, I defend it from various objections. I also examine the (...) possibility of considering the indispensability of modal thought in terms of its components. Finally, I argue that we also need to approach these issues from a diachronic perspective, and I sketch how to approach this task. (shrink)

COVID-19 is compromising all aspects of society, with devastating impacts on health, political, social, economic and educational spheres. A premium is being placed on scientific research as the source of possible solutions, with a situational imperative to carry out investigations at an accelerated rate. There is a major challenge not to neglect ethical standards, in a context where doing so may mean the difference between life and death. In this paper we offer a rubric for considering the ethical challenges in (...) COVID-19 related research, in the form of an ethics toolkit for global research developed at the University of Edinburgh in collaboration with more than 200 global researchers from around the world. This toolkit provides a framework to support confrontation of ethical conflicts through the integrated and iterative analysis of Place, People, Principles and Precedents, throughout the research journey. Two case analyses are offered to exemplify the utility of the toolkit as a flexible and dynamic tool to promote ethical research in the context of COVID-19. (shrink)

Entre los objetivos primordiales de la enseñanza de segundas lenguas está el desarrollo de habilidades comunicativas como base para la correcta comprensión. En el diagnóstico realizado al estudiantado de la Filial Preparatoria de las Ciencias de la Salud de Morón se evidenciaron limitaciones en dicho componente, porque no es capaz de comprender literalmente el texto, resumirlo, comentar la información ni emitir juicios y criterios. Por tal motivo este trabajo tiene como objetivo analizar aspectos esenciales del desarrollo de la comprensión de (...) textos con fines específicos en el estudiantado de los cursos preparatorios de las ciencias de la salud. Between the principals objectives of teaching second languages, it´s the development of communication activities to base for the correct understanding. Diagnose done to the students of the ¨Preparatory Filial in Health Science of Morón¨ we could watched limitations of this resource, because isn´t capable to understand the text textually, to summarize it, comment the information neither make judgments and opinions. By the way this project has like primary objective make a bibliographic revision of the fundamental aspects about the importance has de development of texts compression with specifics purposes in the students in preparatory courses of health ´s science. (shrink)

La solución de los problemas de salud requiere de la interrelación entre diferentes ramas científicas y tecnológicas, tales como la Biomecánica, las tecnologías de la información, la ingeniería y las ciencias médicas. La importancia de la comunicación interdisciplinaria en las universidades fundamenta la creación de un grupo de investigación que fusiona el conocimiento de la mecánica clásica con las disciplinas de la salud y la participación de pacientes, técnicos, ingenieros, médicos y estudiantes. En el trabajo se realiza una reflexión sobre (...) el carácter interdisciplinario de las investigaciones, cómo se inserta la Ingeniería Mecánica desde la modelación en la solución de problemas de salud y se brindan algunos resultados obtenidos por los miembros del Grupo de Biomecánica y Bioingeniería de la Universidad "Ignacio Agramonte y Loynaz" de Camagüey. The solution of health problems require an interrelation between different scientific and technological branches, such as biomechanics, information technologies, engineering and medical sciences. The importance of the interdisciplinary communication in universities lays the base on the creation of an investigative group that fuses the knowledge of classic mechanic with the disciplines of medicine and the participation of patients, technicians, engineers, doctors and students. A reflection about the interdisciplinary character of investigations and how mechanic engineering is inserted in the model to solve health problems is carried out in this work. Some results obtained by the members of the Biomechanics and Bioengineering Group of "Ignacio Agramonte y Loynaz" University are offered. (shrink)