The rise of foundational dualism and the eclipse of the body -- "Body am I entirely, and nothing else": non-reductive materialism and the struggle against dualism -- Toward a materialist phenomenology of religion -- The phenomenology of embodiment and the study of religion -- Religious bodies as social artifacts -- Holding social constructionism in check: the recovery of the active, lived body -- A cultural neurophenomenology of religion: enter the embodied mind -- The eclipse of practice: textualism at large -- (...) "Ceci n'est pas un texte": from textualism to practice -- Expanding the conversation on emplaced religion -- Mobility, networks, and ecology. (shrink)

"An impressively reasoned and startlingly unorthodox treatise on religion." - Belles Lettres Florence Nightingale (1820-1920) is famous as the heroine of the Crimean War and later as a campaigner for health care founded on a clean environment and good nursing. Though best known for her pioneering demonstration that disease rather than wounds killed most soldiers, she was also heavily allied to social reform movements and to feminist protest against the enforced idleness of middle-class women. This original edition provides bold (...) new insights into Nightingale's beliefs and a new picture of the relationship between feminism and religion. Suggestions for Thought to the Searchers after Truth Among the Artisans of England (1860), which contains the novel Cassandra , is a central text in 19th-century history of feminist thought and is published here for the first time. Nightingale argues that work was the means by which every individual sought self-fulfillment and served God. She wrote influentially about the group most Victorians declared to be above work: unmarried, middle-class women. (shrink)

This book challenges the traditional idea that religions can be understood primarily as texts to be interpreted, decoded, or translated. In More Than Belief, Manuel A. Vásquez argues for a new way of studying religions, one that sees them as dynamic material and historical expressions of the practices of embodied individuals who are embedded in social fields and ecological networks. He sketches the outlines of this approach through a focus on body, practices, and space. In order to highlight the centrality (...) of these dimensions of religious experience and performance, Vásquez recovers materialist currents within religious studies that have been consistently ignored or denigrated. Drawing on state-of-the-art work in fields as diverse as anthropology, sociology, philosophy, critical theory, environmental studies, cognitive psychology, and the neurosciences, Vásquez offers a groundbreaking new way of looking at religion. (shrink)

This book constructs a new scientific explanation of the causes of war. The author describes systematically those factors common to wars between equal states to see if there is a pattern that suggests why war occurs and delineates the typical path by which relatively equal states have become embroiled in wars with one another in the modern global system. The book differs from others in that it employs the large number of empirical findings generated in the past twenty-five years to (...) solve the puzzle of war and peace. (shrink)

En el Santiago del siglo XVIII, los ajustes urbanísticos y sociales emanados de las autoridades se tradujeron en prácticas y representaciones, institucionales y de las otras, que involucraron a todos los habitantes de la ciudad. La actuación decidida de algunos alcaldes, como los de Aguas y los de Barrio, implicó el acomodo de voluntades e intereses, y también el enfrentamiento violento de cuerpos y de subjetividades, los que han quedado registrados en los pleitos por injuria seguidos en tribunales de primera (...) y de última instancia. El análisis comparado de dos casos puntuales, con el auxilio de preguntas y miradas propias de las ciencias sociales, enriquece el conocimiento de la dinámica vida cotidiana en la capital del reino durante el último siglo colonial. (shrink)

El ensayo parte de la premisa que el método científico funciona como un dispositivo de generación de verdades articuladas con estrategias de ejercicio del poder. Los argumentos desarrollados giran en torno a una crítica de la supremacía de la ciencia formal en el quehacer científico social y el uso ..

Although informed consent models for prescribing hormone replacement therapy are becoming increasingly prevalent, many physicians continue to require an assessment and referral letter from a mental health professional prior to prescription. Drawing on personal and communal experience, the author argues that assessment and referral requirements are dehumanising and unethical, foregrounding the ways in which these requirements evidence a mistrust of trans people, suppress the diversity of their experiences and sustain an unjustified double standard in contrast to other forms of clinical (...) care. Physicians should abandon this unethical requirement in favour of an informed consent approach to transgender care. (shrink)

The evaluation of study habits as determinant factors in academic performance is a concern for educational agents because they determine the academic opportunities of students. However, a problem encountered is the accessibility of valid and reliable instruments to evaluate study habits from the students' point of view. In this sense, this paper analyzes the internal structure, reliability, and rating of the study habits perception questionnaire. The results and the practical contribution to the educational community in guiding intervention to improve students' (...) academic opportunities are discussed. (shrink)

By attending to how people speak about their gender, we can find diverse answers to the question of what it is like to have a gender identity. To some, it is little more than having a body whereas others may report it as more attitudinal or dispositional—seemingly contradictory views. In this paper, I seek to reconcile these disparate answers by developing a theory of how individual gender identity comes about. In the simplest possible terms, I propose that gender identity is (...) how we make sense of our gender subjectivity, the totality of our gendered experiences of ourselves. Gender identity is constituted by gender subjectivity, but this constitutive relationship is underdetermined. While gender subjectivity may narrow the range of inhabitable gender identities, it is always compatible with more than one. To arrive at a gender identity, we arrange gender subjectivity like building materials. My theory helps us understand how different people offer seemingly incompatible accounts of their gender identity without questioning their authenticity or validity. They simply arrange similar building materials differently. (shrink)

En la siguiente exposición se propone un comentario de la obra del filósofo cubano Pablo Guadarrama González, denominada Pensamiento filosófico latinoamericano. Humanismo, método e historia. La perspectiva humanista que es postulada contiene una serie de precisiones que son analizadas en sus implicaciones teóricas y prácticas. Asimismo, se extiende su estudio de las ideas filosóficas a distintos momentos del desarrollo particular seguido en América Latina, al igual que está acompañada esta tarea historiográfica de consideraciones metodológicas que resultan significativas. Desde el conjunto (...) de temas planteados por el autor se retoman sus aportes en relación a debates que se inscriben en el cruce disciplinario de la filosofía y la historia de las ideas, que se ubican inicialmente en el contexto latinoamericano pero aspiran a una proyección con alcances universales. We comment the Cuban philosopher Pablo Guadarrama González’s Latin American philosophical thinking. Humanism, method and history. The humanistic perspective posited therein contains some assumptions that we analyze in their theoretical and practical implications. Furthermore, we extend his study of philosophical ideas to different moments of Latin America’s particular development, being this historiographic task accompanied by significant methodological considerations. Of all the themes posed by this author, we take his contributions to the debates raised in the interdisciplinary intersection of philosophy and the history of ideas, initially located in a Latin American context but with universal projection. (shrink)

La participación - entendida como la influencia e intervención de la ciudadanía en asuntos públicos y en el sistema político- requiere de mayores capacidades de acción y posicionamiento. Por lo tanto, el estudio del poder al interior de la sociedad civil es un tema central, más aun entendiendo el contexto actual de movimientos sociales y fenómenos que establecen una nueva relación entre sociedad civil y Estado. De esta forma, el siguiente artículo indaga en distintas perspectivas teóricas estableciendo la “paradoja del (...) poder”, a través de la cual la organización y coordinación de la comunidad en asociaciones, provee mayores capacidades de acción y empoderamiento de la colectividad (mayor participación); a la vez que puede generar la elitización y concentración del poder en un grupo dirigencial que no represente la totalidad de los intereses de la comunidad (menor participación). (shrink)

A “Critical Perspectives” article in the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry on scientific integrity in Brazil summarizes several misconduct cases documented therein . To further reinforce the responsible conduct of research in developing countries and to fight against the unaccountability of many editors , we describe here a Mexican instance of alleged in-house plagiarism .In June 2011, we submitted a “Correspondence” note to a Nature group journal to expose what we claimed to be a breach of collegiality and inappropriate authorship in (...) a three-page mutation report just published in that journal. Our main complaints were two: the surreptitious way in which we believed that both displayed metaphases in that report had been obtained from our files by a local colleague and then published without our consent and the massive easy-on co-authorship: 14 out of 21 co-authors declared just to have “provided clinical material.” In c .. (shrink)

Drawing on the principle of subsidiarity, this article develops a framework for allocating medical decision-making authority in the absence of capacity to consent and argues that decisional authority in paediatric transgender healthcare should generally lie in the patient. Regardless of patients’ capacity, there is usually nobody better positioned to make medical decisions that go to the heart of a patient’s identity than the patients themselves. Under the principle of subsidiarity, decisional authority should only be held by a higher level decision-maker, (...) such as parents or judges, if lower level decision-makers are incapable of satisfactorily addressing the issue even with support and the higher level decision-maker is better positioned to satisfactorily address the issue than all lower level decision-makers. Because gender uniquely pertains to personal identity and self-realisation, parents and judges are rarely better positioned to make complex medical decisions. Instead of taking away trans youth’s authority over their healthcare decisions, we should focus on supporting their ability to take the best possible decision for themselves. (shrink)

Appels au meurtre et à la haine, apologie de la pédophilie, propos racistes ou sexistes, quelles sont les limites de la liberté d'expression en littérature ? Le style et la fiction autorisent-ils toutes les transgressions ?

A recent paper by Teresa Baron and Geoffrey Dierckxsens argues that puberty blockers and hormone therapy should be disallowed before adulthood on prudential and consent-related grounds. This response contends that their argument fails because it is predicated on unsupported premises and misinterpretations of the available evidence. There is no evidence that a large proportion of pubertal and postpubertal youths later discontinue medical transition. Meaningful assent is a viable and commonly accepted alternative to meaningful consent in paediatric bioethics. And finally, the (...) primary purpose of transition-related interventions is to actualise youths’ gendered self-image, not treat an underlying mental illness. (shrink)

Florence Chiew interviews Maurizio Meloni on his new book, Impressionable Biologies: From the Archaeology of Plasticity to the Sociology of Epigenetics. The conversation reflects on a number of key themes and arguments in Meloni’s work, such as the use of the term ‘impressionability’ to explore longstanding ideas of the permeable body in constant flux in response to cosmological changes. This notion of the body-porous is one whose history Meloni traces back to ancient traditions and systems of medicine, such as (...) humoralism. In this important book, Meloni makes a compelling argument for questioning the current emphasis on the novelty of biological plasticity as an exclusively contemporary phenomenon, and urges us to take a longer genealogical perspective to appreciate how histories of corporeal plasticity have always been part of deeply gendered, racialized and classed discourses in which social hierarchies have been made through physiological distinctions. (shrink)

En este texto se desarrollará una temática problemática y dilemática en tanto que se hará una reflexión sobre los efectos de la pandemia para las personas. Se afirmará que esta pandemia ha dejado enfermedades por tratar y curar; estas enfermedades no son solo del cuerpo; nos ha dejado entender la necesidad de cuidado de sí como un cuidado también del otro. Por esto, planear y proponer algunas virtudes que orienten dicha búsqueda de sabiduría. El texto consta de seis partes donde (...) se enmarcará la pandemia como el problema a abordar, luego se tratará el asunto de la acción humana y sus implicaciones para sí mismo y para el otro; estas acciones provienen de la autonomía y del cuidado de sí que requiere unas virtudes con las cuales se transforma a la persona y a la comunidad. (shrink)

" Les romans devraient être interdits par l'État " selon le professeur Kien, savant solitaire dans " Auto-da fé " d'Elias Canetti. En quoi la littérature est-elle dangereuse? Elle ne connaît de vérité que de passage. Elle se plaît à décliner les formes changeantes que l'imagination fait percevoir ou disparaître. Le charme qu'elle exerce menace ainsi l'identité. S'il est une séduction littéraire, elle réside dans l'invention d'une subjectivité impersonnelle: on ne parle pas de soi en littérature. Écrire procède d'un effort (...) exceptionnel pour sortir du carcan de la personne, briser le miroir, s'évader de la psyché en faisant résonner, dans et par le style, une parole défigurée. L'autofiction se situe aux antipodes de l'enjeu littéraire majeur, lorsqu'elle prend la forme d'un déballage des émois dérisoires qui composent une vie. Dès lors, notre réflexion relève d'un double défi : extraire la littérature de la gangue du savoir critique qui risque de l'asphyxier sans que le refus de l'objectivité ne coïncide avec un retour au mirage de l'expression de soi. Cette défense et illustration du pouvoir des fables implique un regard déniaisé sur le plaisir de l'imagination. La fiction ne demande pas un " oui " servile, adhésion à un monde cohérent qui comblerait les fissures de la réalité ; elle fait éprouver jusqu'au vertige de l'idée inattendue, dans l'exploration de mondes logiquement autonomes. Déployant une pensée déconcertante, la fiction met la raison à la question, égarée au-delà des terres familières de l'argumentation. Détournons la voix du poète : " Vous qui entrez ici, abandonnez toute espérance " ; la littérature est enfer pour l'esprit de sérieux qui s'y effraie, s'accrochant à son identité, faute de tenter la quête de soi. La passion littéraire commence par l'abandon de réponses dépassées en vue d'une imagination en liberté, déculpabilisée. À l'heure où tout le monde prétend raconter sa vie et la publier, comptons que ce livre, réveillant le questionnement, servira la force littéraire, invitation à lire et écrire des livres dignes d'être brûlés. (shrink)

As global warming continues to attract growing levels of attention, various stakeholders have put climate change on corporate agendas and expect firms to disclose relevant greenhouse gas information. In this paper, we investigate the consistency of the GHG information voluntarily disclosed by French listed firms through two different communication channels: corporate reports and the Carbon Disclosure Project. More precisely, we contrast the amounts of GHG emissions reported and the methodological explanations provided in each channel. Consistent with a stakeholder theory perspective, (...) we find that GHG amounts are significantly lower in the CR than in the CDP. We also find that firms increase the CR figures’ traceability when there is a discrepancy between disclosures in the two channels. We suggest that the aim of this greater traceability is to enhance information credibility across the different channels used. (shrink)

Judith Balso desarrolla en este artículo una visión orgánica de la heteronimia de Fernando Pessoa. En ella aspira a mostrar cómo la poesía afronta con sus propios recursos los desafíos y preguntas propios de la ontología. De ese modo Pessoa se coloca más allá de la tradicional separación entre filosofía y poesía propia de la metafísica occidental. Leer a Pessoa significa encarnar en la escritura las preguntas esenciales de lo humano: la cuestión de la existencia, la pregunta por el ser (...) y la nada, la relación del hombre con la Naturaleza, la interrogación del y por el lenguaje, la relación del hombre con los otros hombres. De ese modo se integran en su campo diversidad de inquietudes que van desde la gnoseología a la estética, de la ética a la literatura, del pensamiento de Dios y los dioses. La idea de Balso es que la crisis propia de la metafísica encuentra en Pessoa no sólo una resonancia sino posibles alternativas de renovación. Su ensayo invita a establecer una relación propositiva y carente de prevenciones entre poesía y filosofía. (shrink)

Podríamos decir que el pluralismo es la cara afirmativa de la tolerancia y su última justificación. Por ello volvemos a la descripción fenomenológica del modo como se nos da el mundouno. En el retorno al origen de la filosofía y la ciencia en Grecia descubre la fenomenología que el sentido originario del mundo de la vida es por esencia multicultural. En efecto, en actitud precientífica se da el mundo en cada cultura desde sus propias tradiciones, mitos y costumbres. Cada cultura (...) tiende a identificar su visión del mundo con el mundouno: se vuelve intolerante y pretende dominar otras culturas. [Fragmento]. (shrink)

Although it has been recognized that employees regularly engage in non-green behaviors, little research has been conducted to explain how these behaviors may be avoided. Using data from a three-wave study, this study tested a moderated-mediation model in which trust in the immediate manager was expected to increase the indirect effect of supervisory support for the environment on non-green behaviors through employee environmental commitment. While the findings showed, as predicted, that exchange relationships with the immediate manager reduce the tendency of (...) employees to engage in non-green behaviors, the indirect effect of supervisory support on non-green behaviors through employee environmental commitment was moderated at a low level of trust in the manager, contrary to predictions. Though unexpected, this result seems less surprising when discussed in the light of negotiated exchange, suggesting that employee efforts to avoid non-green behaviors need to be seen as the result of a deal between managers and subordinates. The findings of this study contribute to the emerging literature on social exchange in an environmental context and have implications for organizations seeking to achieve environmental sustainability. (shrink)

In conversation with Hortense Gallois’ recent essay on the importance of bioethicists participating in public discourse, I suggest that speaking up is as fraught as it is important. Focusing on the anti-trans movement’s misuse of expertise, I highlight the fine line between correcting misinformation and inadvertently causing harm through ill-timed speech. Drawing on the work of Eva Feder Kittay, I suggest that knowing when to speak up and when to stay silent starts with understanding the communities we speak about and (...) the consequences that our words can have on them. (shrink)

During the last two decades there has been an enormous development in treatment possibilities in the field of neonatology, particularly for (extremely) premature infants. Although there are cross-cultural differences in treatment strategy, an overview of the literature suggests that every country is confronted with moral dilemmas in this area. These concern decisions to initiate or withhold treatment directly at birth and, later on, decisions to withdraw treatment with the possible consequence that the child will die. Given that the neonate cannot (...) express his or her own will, who will decide? And on the basis of what information, values and norms? We explored some of these issues in daily practice by interviewing a small sample of health care practitioners in a Dutch university Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). It turned out that experiencing moral dilemmas is part of their daily functioning. Nurses underline the suffering of the newborn, whereas physicians stress uncertainty in treatment outcome. To make the best of it, nurses focus on their caring task, whereas physicians hope that future follow-up research will lead to more predictable outcomes. As for their own offspring, part of these professionals would hesitate to bring their own extremely premature newborn to a NICU. For the most oppressing dilemma reported – terminating an already initiated treatment – we propose the concept of ‘evidence shift’ to clarify the ambiguous position of uncertainty in decision making. (shrink)