En este texto partiremos de la conocida tensión cinematográfica entre la imagen y la narración, refiriendo a un caso concreto de cine mexicano tipológico costumbrista. Es un género que se distingue por una trama débil constituida por secuencias con un importante peso mostrativo o “descriptivo”, más que narrativo y el espectador se entretiene en el reconocimiento de los estereotipos, obteniendo un goce mimético de reconocimiento. Para abordar tal reconocimiento mimético distinguiremos entre los imaginarios literarios y los imaginarios fílmicos. Los imaginarios (...) literarios son esquemas faltos de concreción. Por el contrario, los imaginarios fílmicos no son lo absoluto una cuestión de la imaginación más o menos vaga, sino que dada su base fotográfica presentan girones de la realidad tal cual es en su apariencia. Este imaginario fílmico ya no consta de imágenes de la mera imaginación, al gusto del que se las imagina, sino que consta de fragmentos fotográficos de la apariencia real, por lo que esas imágenes de calidad fotográfica tienden a generan de inmediato aprobación o rechazo. Puede ser que se lea algo que no gusta y entonces tiende a dejarse de lado, pero es más difícil dejar de lado algo que, aunque no guste no se leyó sino se vio. Para analizar el género de narrativa débil tipologizante recurrimos a la teoría de D. Bordwell sobre la construcción de la historia combinándola con la teoría de R. Barthes acera de los núcleos, catálisis, informantes e indicios narrativos. (shrink)

Prof. Alberto Urquidez, in an important recent article that appears in different form in his book, Redefining Racism, offers an informed, sustained, careful, multi-pronged, and sometimes original critique of the volitional analysis of racism, which I have proposed in a series of articles over the past two dozen years. Here I expand and improve VAR’s analysis of paternalistic racists and their beliefs, clarify its ‘infection’-model’s explanation of racism’s spread and variety, and lay out what it is for something to (...) be ‘characteristically’ racist, an understanding that I then use to offer a unified account of the way in which both certain physical objects and certain abstract objects can properly be called racist. Identifying and engaging some presuppositions behind Urquidez’s social, political, and moral criticisms of VAR, I respond to complaints from him and others, showing that VAR’s content is neither politically conservative nor dependent on religious doctrine, and point out that race theory would in fact profit from taking more seriously and internalizing the Christian morality of most African-Americans. (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)

Summary Canfield and Lehrer argued in [1] that it is impossible to predict an event deductively from given laws and initial conditions. In [2] I showed (1) that there are counterexamples to C&L's claim, (2) that their argument was based on an assumption which they failed to recognize, let alone support (the assumption that there are ‘rejectible’ facts), (3) that if certain simple conditions on predictability were granted, it could be shown that C&L's tacit assumption is false. In a recent (...) issue of this Journal Dr. Harnatt has criticized (3) (ignoring (1) and (2)), and he has concluded that we should still wonder whether there are any deductive predictions. Dr. Harnatt's arguments are shown to be defective. (shrink)

La nueva enfermedad del coronavirus de 2019 (Covid-19), producida por el coronavirus del Síndrome Respiratorio Agudo Severo 2 (SARS-CoV-2), es una pandemia que está creando una creciente crisis sanitaria mundial, dada su novedad, su alcance y sus inicialmente limitadas opciones de tratamiento eficaz. En efecto, se sabe poco acerca de las intervenciones no farmacéuticas óptimas para evitar la morbilidad y mortalidad causadas por él, y también se conoce poco sobre la rentabilidad y aspectos éticos de dichas intervenciones. Por lo tanto, (...) éste es el primer análisis ético y de rentabilidad de las medidas de contención del Covid-19 que se conoce (así como de las medidas de cuarentena de la población para cualquier pandemia en particular), con el fin de ayudar a los sistemas de salud y a los gobiernos a garantizar la atención clínica más rentable que pueda proporcionarse equitativamente al mayor número posible de pacientes, durante esta pandemia y en las futuras crisis mundiales que sean similares. Este análisis utilizó la metodología adoptada por los Centros para el Control y la Prevención de Enfermedades (CDC), cifras comúnmente aceptadas como entradas, y los supuestos mínimos tanto extremos como del mundo real para proporcionar los resultados más sólidos y confiables posibles. El análisis de costos indicó que en los escenarios extremos, o en el mejor de los casos para las medidas de contención del Covid-19 durante la cuarentena de la población, hay una relación de costo-efectividad de $154.86 millones de dólares gastados por cada muerte evitada, y un costo neto de $1.92 billones a nivel mundial. En el mundo real, esta intervención tiene una proporción de 2,520 millones de dólares gastados por cada muerte evitada y un costo neto de 1,99 billones de dólares. La ética del contrato social personalista, tal y como se articula en el popular sistema ético de derechos y deberes de las Naciones Unidas, pone de manifiesto la especial preocupación por el hecho de que estos confinamientos pueden derivar en injusticias poco éticas perpetuadas por los Estados, de manera que socavan las vidas y las libertades individuales, al tiempo que afectan de manera des- proporcionada a las comunidades de menores ingresos, especialmente a las minorías raciales. Este estudio sugiere, por tanto, que la práctica prevalente de la cuarentena entre la población, en comparación con las precauciones de tipo estándar y las intervenciones más específicas, puede proporcionar un beneficio neto inadecuado por su costo financiero y ético. En un momento de escasez mundial, que pone a prueba la capacidad de los sistemas sanitarios para detectar y atender adecuadamente a los pacientes con Covid-19, especialmente en los países en desarrollo y en las comunidades desatendidas, este estudio respalda que se dediquen menos recursos a intervenciones con una relación costo- beneficio poco clara, y más recursos a intervenciones más asequibles, éticas y equitativas, con mayores pruebas de sus beneficios netos para salvar vidas. (shrink)

The legal and ethical asymmetry between honoring positive claims of conscience versus negative claims of conscience was recently analyzed by several articles in this journal. The first author of this article (ALB) identified unique but defeasible reasons against honoring positive claims of conscience, such as the greater threat they post to institutional values and institutional resources than negative claims of conscience. However, ALB wrote, when these reasons can be overcome, positive claims of conscience should enjoy the same ethical and legal (...) respect as negative claims of conscience. This article argues that the prescription of birth control by non-Roman Catholic physicians in Roman Catholic institutions is an example of a positive claim of conscience that can overcome concerns of institutional values and resources, and therefore ought to receive the same ethical respect and legal protection as negative claims of conscience. In making this argument, this article also responds to several of the thoughtful comments raised by Alberto Giubilini and Dominic Wilkinson. (shrink)

The traditional verbal/nonverbal dichotomy is inadequate for completely describing cerebral lateralization. Musical functions are not necessarily mediated by the right hemisphere; evidence for a specialist left-hemisphere mechanism dedicated to the encoded speech signal is weakening, and the right hemisphere possesses considerable comprehensional powers. Right-hemisphere processing is often said to be characterized by holistic or gestalt apprehension, and face recognition may be mediated by this hemisphere partly because of these powers, partly because of the right hemisphere's involvement in emotional affect, and (...) possibly through the hypothesized existence of a specialist face processor or processors in the right. The latter hypothesis may, however, suffer the same fate as the one relating to a specialist encodedness processor for speech in the left. Verbal processing is largely the province of the left because of this hemisphere's possession of sequential, analytic, time-dependent mechanisms. Other distinctions are special cases of an analytic/holistic dichotomy. More fundamentally, however, the left hemisphere is characterized by its mediation of discriminations involving duration, temporal order, sequencing, and rhythm, at thesensory level, and especially at themotorlevel. Spatial aspects characterize the right, the mapping of exteroceptive body space, and the positions of fingers, limbs, and perhaps articulators, with respect to actual and target positions. Thus there is a continuum of function between the hemispheres, rather than a rigid dichotomy, the differences being quantitative rather than qualitative, of degree rather than of kind. (shrink)

La construcción de la identidad es un elemento constitutivo en el desarrollo vital de las personas y de los colectivos. En nuestro mundo actual globalizado y diverso, este elemento cobra una relevancia nuclear, más si cabe desde una mirada de los flujos migratorios y la integración social. Es en el día a día donde se juegan muchas de las dinámicas identitarias, en las que se entrelazan procesos de identidad personal y colectiva, tendencias más estáticas y dinámicas. El objetivo de este (...) trabajo es aportar luz a los modelos de integración y de cohesión social desde los procesos de construcción identitaria, en diálogo con el modelo de integración mixto. Para este fin, se ha presentado muy enriquecedor el dialogo entre el modelo de conductas mayoritarias y minoritarias de J. L. Segundo, el enfoque de las capacidades de A. Sen, los modelos clásicos de integración de personas inmigrantes, el modelo de construcción de identidades de M. Castells, junto al estudio empírico realizado por P. Norris. (shrink)

The transition semantics presented in Rumberg (J Log Lang Inf 25(1):77–108, 2016a) constitutes a fine-grained framework for modeling the interrelation of modality and time in branching time structures. In that framework, sentences of the transition language L_t are evaluated on transition structures at pairs consisting of a moment and a set of transitions. In this paper, we provide a class of first-order definable Kripke structures that preserves L_t-validity w.r.t. transition structures. As a consequence, for a certain fragment of L_t, validity (...) w.r.t. transition structures turns out to be axiomatizable. The result is then extended to the entire language L_t by means of a quite natural ‘Henkin move’, i.e. by relaxing the notion of validity to bundled structures. (shrink)

In 1976 Raymond Williams commented, ‘Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.’ Such implied difficulty has not prevented Bloomsbury Academic, since the 2000s, from publishing around forty series of their well-produced and generously illustrated Cultural Histories, with, according to their website, a further fifty in progress. Each series contains six volumes, each book covering, in theory, the same chronological period (antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the age of empire and (...) the modern age), though there is some variation depending on precise topic. The idea is that one can use these books not only to read ‘horizontally’ about a subject across time, but also ‘vertically’ through different subjects in the same period – a idea made easier by the e-texts of the series on Bloomsbury's website. (shrink)

Business Ethics, the Environment &Responsibility, EarlyView.

This essay rebuts Gary Seay's efforts to show that committing euthanasia need not conflict with a physician's professional duties. First, I try to show how his misunderstanding of the correlativity of rights and duties and his discussion of the foundation of moral rights undermine his case. Second, I show aspects of physicians' professional duties that clash with euthanasia, and that attempts to avoid this clash lead to absurdities. For professional duties are best understood as deriving from professional virtues and the (...) commitments and purposes with which the professional as such ought to act, and there is no plausible way in which her death can be seen as advancing the patient's medical welfare. Third, I argue against Prof. Seay's assumption that apparent conflicts among professional duties must be resolved through "balancing" and argue that, while the physician's duty to extend life is continuous with her duty to protect health, any duty to relieve pain is subordinate to these. Finally, I show that what is morally determinative here, as throughout the moral life, is the agent's intention and that Prof. Seay's implicitly preferred consequentialism threatens not only to distort moral thinking but would altogether undermine the medical (and any other) profession and its internal ethics. (shrink)

In this paper the authors provide an epistemological view on the old controversial random-necessity. It has been considered that either one or the other form part of the structure of reality. Chance and indeterminism are nothing but a disorderly efficiency of contingency in the production of events, phenomena, processes, i.e., in its causality, in the broadest sense of the word. Such production may be observed in natural and artificial processes or in human social processes (in history, economics, society, politics, etc.). (...) Here we touch the object par excellence of all scientific research whether natural or human. In this work, is presented a hypothesis whose practical result satisfies the Hegelian dialectic, with the consequent implication of their mutual reciprocal integration_._ Producing abstractions, without which, there is no thought or knowledge of any kind, from the concrete, that is, the real problem, which in this case is a given Ontological System or Reality. (shrink)

. New insights about a variety of epistemological topics including skepticism, peer disagreement, and the nature of knowledge emerge when we give the right sort of attention to our epistemic immaturity at the species level. This large-scale developmentalist concern illustrates a new way of doing epistemology, here called big epistemology.

This paper criticizes the thesis that intending to do something is reducible to some combination of beliefs and desires. Against Audi's recent formulation of such a view I offer as counterexample a case wherein an agent who wants and expects to V has not yet decided whether to V and hence does not yet intend to. I try to show that whereas belief that one will V is not necessary for intending to V, as illustrated in cases of desperate attempts (...) to V, one cannot intend to V without preferring to V (rather than not V) and thus one cannot intend to V without, in some sense, wanting to V (at least wanting it in preference to not V-ing). The connection of one's intentions with one's objectives, attempts, plans, and hopes is briefly treated, and some influential work by Davidson is criticized. (shrink)

(No abstract is available for this citation).