Major depression etiopathogenesis is related to a wide variety of genetics, demographic and psychosocial factors, as well as to environmental factors. The objective of this study is to analyze sociodemographic and environmental variables that are related to the prevalence of depression through correlation analysis and to develop a regression model that explains the behavior of this disease from an ecological perspective. This is an ecological, retrospective, cross-sectional study. The target population was 1,148,430 individuals over the age of 16 who were (...) registered in Aragon (Spain) during 2010, with electronic medical records in the community’s primary health care centers. The spatial unit was the Basic Health Area (BHA). The dependent variable was the diagnosis of Depression and the ecological independent variables were: Demographic variables (gender and age), population distribution, typology of the entity, population structure by sex and age, by nationality, by education, by work, by salary, by marital status, structure of the household by number of members, and state of the buildings. The results show moderate and positive correlations appear with higher rates of depression in areas having a higher femininity index, higher population density, areas with a higher unemployment rate and higher average salary. The results of the linear regression show that aging +75 and rural entities act as protective factors for depression, while urban areas and deficient buildings act as risk factors. In conclusion, the ecological methodology may be a useful tool which, together with the statistical epidemiological analysis, can help in the political decision making process. (shrink)

Introduction and ObjectiveThe early identification of depressive patients having a poor evolution, with frequent relapses and/or recurrences, is one of the priority challenges in this study of high prevalence mental disorders, and specifically in depression. So, this study aims to analyze the factors that may be associated with an increased risk of recurrence of major depression episodes in patients treated in primary care.MethodsA retrospective, descriptive study of cases-controls was proposed. The cases consisted of patients who had been diagnosed with major (...) depression and who had presented recurrences, in comparison with patients who had experienced a single major depression episode with no recurrence. The variables of the study are age at first episode; number of episodes; perception of severity of the depression episode suffered prior to recurrence; number of residual symptoms; physical and psychiatric comorbidity; history of anxiety disorders; family psychiatric history; high incidence of stressful life events ; and experiences of physical, psychological, or sexual abuse in childhood. The differences of the variables were compared between the case subjects and the control subjects, using the Mann–Whitney, chi-square, and Fisher’s U statistics. A multivariate analysis was performed.ResultsThe average age of those suffering more than one depressive episode is significantly older, and a higher percentage of subjects who have experienced more than one depressive episode have a history of anxiety disorders. In the multivariate analysis, the variables that obtained a significant value in the logistic regression analysis were age and having suffered sexual abuse during childhood.ConclusionThese indicators should be considered by primary care physicians when attending patients suffering from major depression. (shrink)

El objetivo de este artículo es analizar la transformación del concepto de aura a partir de la integración de las nuevas tecnologías y el ser humano. Si Walter Benjamin asoció la pérdida del aura a la era de la reproductividad técnica, la nueva cultura popular ha encontrado en la comunicación fática el modo de recuperarla. En este sentido, ésta ya no se establece sólo en función del objeto a contemplar sino también en virtud del sujeto que la contempla. Para explicar (...) esta evolución, es necesario tener en cuenta la amputación por parte de los medios electrónicos de ciertas formas sentir, pensar y recordar que llegan incluso a modificar nuestra identidad social e individual, pero también nuestra memoria colectiva. De este modo, la transmisión de las experiencias de manera oral ha dejado paso a una forma de comunicabilidad establecida por la integración de aura y comunicación fática, donde lo importante no es ver el acontecimiento mediático sino poder sentirlo en directo. Nuestra identidad medíática parece desvincularse del ser para formar parte de un estar. En este caso, de un estar juntos. (shrink)

Animal models of human diseases are often used in biomedical research in place of human subjects. However, results obtained by animal models may fail to hold true for humans. One way of addressing this problem is to make animal models more similar to humans by placing human tissue into animal models, rendering them chimeric. Since technical and ethical limitations make neurological disorders difficult to study in humans, chimeric models with human neural tissue could help advance our understanding of neuropathophysiology. In (...) this article, we examine whether the introduction of human neural tissue and any consequent cognitive change is relevant to the way we ought to treat chimeras. We argue that changes in cognitive abilities are morally relevant to the extent that they increase the capacities that affect the moral status of any entity, including awareness, autonomy, and sociability. We posit that no being, regardless of species, should be treated in a way that is incommensurate with its moral status. Finally, we propose a framework that can be used to guide ethical assessment of research involving chimeras with advanced cognitive capacities. We advance this framework as a useful tool for bringing relevant considerations to the forefront for those considering the ethical merit of proposed chimeric research. In doing so, we examine concepts relevant to the question of how any entity may be treated, including moral status, dignity, and capacities. (shrink)

Virtue ethics has often been regarded as complementary or laissez-faire ethics in solving business problems. This paper seeks conceptual and methodological improvements by developing a virtue character scale that will enable assessment of the link between organizational level virtue and organizational performance, financial or non-financial. Based upon three theoretical assumptions, multiple studies were conducted; the content analysis of 158 Fortune Global 500 firms ethical values and a survey of 2548 customers and employees. Six dimensions of organizational virtue (Integrity, Empathy, Warmth, (...) Courage, Conscientiousness and Zeal) are identified through confirmatory factor analysis, and validated against satisfaction measure. Strategic implications of virtue characters are discussed. (shrink)

Alison Simmons, in Simmons (1999), argues that Descartes in Meditation Six offered a teleological account of sensory representation. According to Simmons, Descartes’ view is that the biological function of sensations explains both why sensations represent what they do (i.e., their referential content) and why they represent their objects the way they do (i.e., their presentational content). Moreover, Simmons claims that her account has several advantages over other currently available interpretations of Cartesian sensations. In this paper, I argue that Simmons’ teleological (...) account cannot be sustained for both theoretical and textual reasons and that it does not have the advantages it is claimed to have. (shrink)

While the concept of adaptive preferences is an important tool for criticizing injustice, it is often claimed that using the concept involves showing disrespect for persons judged to have adaptive preferences. In this paper, I propose an account of adaptive preferences that does the relevant political work while still showing persons two centrally important kinds of respect. My account is based in what I call an indirect substantive account of autonomy, which places substantive requirements on the options available to a (...) person, rather than on the option that she ultimately prefers. This allows us to pinpoint cases in which a person's circumstances have rendered her insufficiently autonomous, without saying that any conception of the good must be non-autonomous tout court. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for the counter-intuitive conclusion that the same adaptive preference can be both prudentially good and prudentially bad for its holder: that is, it can be prudentially objectionable from one temporal perspective, but prudentially unobjectionable from another. Given the possibility of transformative experiences, there is an important sense in which even worrisome adaptive preferences can be prudentially good for us. That is, if transformative experiences lead us to develop adaptive preferences, then their objects can become prudentially (...) better for our actual selves than the objects of their non-adaptive alternatives would now be. I also argue, however, that the same worrisome adaptive preferences might still be prospectively prudentially objectionable: that is, our pre-transformation selves might be prudentially better off undergoing a non-adaptive alternative transformative experience instead. I argue that both claims hold across the range of the most broadly-defended accounts of well-being in the literature. (shrink)

How do engineers respond to ethical dilemmas that occur in practice? How do they view their individual and collective responsibilities? How do they make decisions before all the facts are in? Using the space shuttle programme as the framework, this book examines the role of ethical decision making in the practice of engineering. In particular, the book considers the design and development of the main engines of the space shuttle as a paradigm for how individual engineers perceive, articulate, and resolve (...) ethical dilemmas in a large, complex organisation. A series of in-depth case studies show engineers at work on various stages of the project as they balance budgets, deadlines and risks. By documenting the historical development of a single system, the book provides a unique opportunity to explore the complex interactions between political, organisational and technical pressures and engineering and management decisions. (shrink)

Resumen: El presente artículo propone que la 31ª Bienal de Sao Paulo entraña un afán emancipador para los "sin tierra" - errantes, migrantes y viajeros. Para ello se conforma como un cuerpo sin órganos, que despliega estrategias liberadoras promoviendo: desarticulación, experimentación, vagabundeo y tránsito de sujetos y pueblos. Esta Bienal, en tanto CsO, mueve intensidades como flujos sensibles por los intersticios de los proyectos artísticos dispuestos en organismo. Acá el CsO es un conjunto de prácticas reservadas a desterritorializar los estratos (...) del "organismo social" y hacer estallar los órganos estructurados en dichos sistemas.: This article shows that the 31st Sao Paulo Biennial has an emancipatory affinity for the landless - wanderers, migrants, and travelers. As such it becomes a Body without Organs that displays liberating strategies, promoting disarticulation, experimentation, wandering, and the transit of subjects and peoples. This Biennial, as a BwO, moves intensities as sensible flows through the interstices of the artistic projects inside the organism. Here, the BwO becomes a set of practices that deterritorialize the strata of the "social organism", making the structured organs in these systems explode. (shrink)

Jesse Prinz has argued that a proxytype theory of concepts provides what he calls the 'intentionality' and 'cognitive content' desiderata better than any current competitor, and that the hybrid nature of proxytypes allows his theory to combine the informational component of informational atomism with the view that concepts are semantically structured entities. In response, I argue that the hybrid character of proxytypes, far from delivering the advantages Prinz claims, generates a threatening dilemma: either his theory is novel but fails to (...) deliver the intentionality and cognitive content desiderata, or it delivers these desiderata but is not novel. (shrink)

The significance of critical phenomenology for psychiatric praxis has yet to be expounded. In this paper, I argue that the adoption of a critical phenomenological stance can remedy localised instances of hermeneutical injustice, which may arise in the encounter between clinicians and patients with psychosis. In this context, what is communicated is often deemed to lack meaning or to be difficult to understand. While a degree of un-shareability is inherent to subjective life, I argue that issues of unintelligibility can be (...) addressed by shifting from individualistic conceptions of understanding to an interactionist view. This takes into account the contextual, historical and relational background within which meaning is co-constituted. I conclude by providing a corrective for hermeneutical injustice, which entails a specific attentiveness towards the person’s subjectivity, a careful sensitivity to contingent meaning-generating structures, and a degree of hermeneutical flexibility as an attitude of openness towards alternative horizons of possibility. (shrink)

This study compares the different emphases on virtuous characters presented in their values, across global firms considering country and industry of origin. It presents a content analysis of the 122 codes of conduct statements from Fortune Global 500 firms, drawn from four sectors and using correspondence analysis. American firms tend to emphasize courage, while European firms emphasize integrity and empathy, surprisingly with Asian firms being closer to European ones. Retailers and pharmaceutical firms emphasize empathy, while banks and petroleum emphasize courage. (...) This study extends the newly emerging strategic paradigm of organizational virtue, by introducing an empirical study of ethical values. Implications for multinational companies are then discussed. (shrink)

The brain is often taken to be a paradigmatic example of a signaling system with semantic and representational properties, in which neurons are senders and receivers of information carried in action potentials. A closer look at this picture shows that it is not as appealing as it might initially seem in explaining the function of the brain. Working from several sender-receiver models within the teleosemantic framework, I will first argue that two requirements must be met for a system to support (...) genuine semantic information: 1. The receiver must be competent —that is, it must be able to extract rewards from its environment on the basis of the signals that it receives. 2. The receiver must have some flexibility of response relative to the signal received. In the second part of the paper, this initial framework will be applied to neural processes, pointing to the surprising conclusion that signaling at the single-neuron level is only weakly semantic at best. Contrary to received views, neurons will have little or no access to semantic information (though their patterns of activity may carry plenty of quantitative, correlational information) about the world outside the organism. Genuine representation of the world requires an organism - level receiver of semantic information, to which any particular set of neurons makes only a small contribution. (shrink)

Alison Simmons, in Simmons (1999), argues that Descartes in Meditation Six offered a teleological account of sensory representation. According to Simmons, Descartes’ view is that the biological function of sensations explains both why sensations represent what they do (i.e., their referential content) and why they represent their objects the way they do (i.e., their presentational content). Moreover, Simmons claims that her account has several advantages over other currently available interpretations of Cartesian sensations. In this paper, I argue that Simmons’ teleological (...) account cannot be sustained for both theoretical and textual reasons and that it does not have the advantages it is claimed to have. (shrink)

In this article, I first propose four guidelines that follow from understanding the project of assigning victims duties to resist oppression as an ameliorative project. That is, if we understand the project to be motivated by the urgent aim of ending or mitigating the harm that oppression imposes on the oppressed, I argue that we should focus on developing and assigning duties that satisfy what I call the ability, weighting, fairness, and overdemandingness guidelines. Second, I develop the duty to be (...) a non-normative individual, which satisfies all four guidelines. (shrink)

Are there representations in the brain? It depends on what you mean by representations, and it depends on what you want them to do for you—both in terms of the causal role they play in the system, and in terms of their explanatory value. But ideally, we would like an account of representation that allows us to assign a representational role and content to the appropriate mechanistic precursors of behavior that in fact play that role and conversely, search for the (...) mechanistic realizers of representational roles that are posited by our models of behavior and cognition. Such an account would be methodologically valuable in neuroscience. Lately, people have started asking similar questions about deep neural networks. What representations do they learn and use, and what is the relation between those representations and the sometimes impressive capacities these networks exhibit? More philosophically puzzling, perhaps, is the question of why the internal activities or dispositions labeled as such in neuroscience and AI research should count as representations at all. I think we can give a unified answer to both sets of questions, in the form of a kind of representational pragmatism. What makes something a representation just is that we can identify and re-identify it as such, and moreover, that we can manipulate it effectively to do whatever it is that we think representations ought to do for us in that particular context. For the first condition, the idea is that so long as we have some probe that allows us to pick out the relevant causally effective candidate, we should consider that to be a candidate representation-relative-to-that-probe. The second condition can be understood as a kind of anti-gerrymandering constraint: one ought to be able to intervene on the candidate, and see effects of that intervention consistent with the functional role the representation is supposed to play. Naturally the details need to be spelled out for different contexts—and I will articulate them for a few illustrative cases—which effectively allows for a kind of pluralism about representation depending on the setting and the kinds of questions being asked. With the extra components filled in, representational pragmatism can make sense of existing practices in neuroscience and AI, as well as their relationship to naturalistic theories of representation in philosophy. (shrink)

Philosophical proponents of predictive processing cast the novelty of predictive models of perception in terms of differences in the functional role and information content of neural signals. However, they fail to provide constraints on how the crucial semantic mapping from signals to their informational contents is determined. Beyond a novel interpretative gloss on neural signals, they have little new to say about the causal structure of the system, or even what statistical information is carried by the signals. That means that (...) the predictive framework for perception can be relabeled in traditional, non-predictive terms, with no empirical consequences relevant to existing or future data. To the extent that neuroscientific research based on predictive processing is both innovative and productive, it will be due to the framework’s suggestive heuristic effects, or perhaps auxiliary empirical claims about implementation, rather than a difference in the information-processing structure that it describes. (shrink)

Industrial pollution is of both national and international concern in the context where one country's emissions contribute to the problem of global warming. Existing studies have focused on government and regulations rather than on employees. The context of this study is in respect of 472 workers in seven Chinese energy companies in Shanxi province in China, one of the biggest coal mining regions and a region most responsible for environmental pollution. The key findings are two-fold: first, employees' values were positively (...) correlated with attitudes toward the environment, which also correlates with perceived corporate citizenship; second, the ownership type of the firm had a significant influence on corporate citizenship, employee values and their attitudes toward environment. Contrary to existing beliefs, Stateowned enterprises in China have much poorer ratings on all the three constructs compared to privately owned companies. The results highlight the role of the government and policy makers in shaping employees' attitudes toward the environment, and in turn the corporate citizenship of the Chinese energy industry. (shrink)

I propose that we can explain the contribution of mental time travel to agency through understanding it as a specific instance of our more general capacity for narrative understanding. Narrative understanding involves the experience of a pre-reflective and embodied sense of self, which co-emerges with our emotional involvement with a sequence of events. Narrative understanding of a sequence of events also requires a ‘recombinable system’, that is, the ability to combine parts to make myriad sequences. Mental time travel shares these (...) two characteristics: it involves an embodied sense of self and the ability to create novel scenarios. What is unique about mental time travel is that it is a story explicitly about our selves, and it involves metarepresentation. Agency is enabled by narrative understanding when we are able to put our current situation into a larger narrative context, whereby some possible actions, but not others, make sense. However, new features of agency are enabled when we understand stories that are explicitly about our selves: we gain the ability to plan and act on plans. (shrink)

Multiple realizability says that the same kind of mental states may be manifested by systems with very different physical constitutions. Putnam ( 1967 ) supposed it to be “overwhelmingly probable” that there exist psychological properties with different physical realizations in different creatures. But because function constrains possible physical realizers, this empirical bet is far less favorable than it might initially have seemed, especially when we take on board the richer picture of neural and brain function that neuroscience has been uncovering (...) over the past forty years, in which all sorts of brain activities play crucial roles beyond all-or-nothing electrical signaling. Because of its evolutionary history, the brain’s metabolic and informational processes are inextricably intertwined. The resulting complex integrated functions impose more constraints on possible realizers than the clean, single-purpose functions usually cited as examples in discussions of multiple realizability—with ramifications for the functionalist and computationalist foundations of cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Although the problem of adaptiveness plays an important motivating role in her work on human capabilities, Martha Nussbaum never gives a clear account of the controversial concept of adaptive preferences on which she relies. In this paper, I aim both to reconstruct the most plausible account of the concept that may be attributed to Nussbaum and to provide a critical appraisal of that account. Although her broader work on the capabilities approach moves progressively towards political liberalism as time passes, I (...) aim to show that her account of adaptive preferences continues to maintain her earlier commitment to perfectionism about the good. I then distinguish between two obligatory kinds of respect for persons, which I call, respectively, primary and secondary recognition respect. This distinction allows us to see that her perfectionist account of adaptive preferences allows her to show persons primary but not secondary recognition respect. Ultimately, I claim that an acceptable account of adaptive prefer.. (shrink)

Jesse Prinz has argued that a proxytype theory of concepts provides what he calls the 'intentionality' and 'cognitive content' desiderata better than any current competitor, and that the hybrid nature of proxytypes allows his theory to combine the informational component of informational atomism with the view that concepts are semantically structured entities. In response, I argue that the hybrid character of proxytypes, far from delivering the advantages Prinz claims, generates a threatening dilemma: either his theory is novel but fails to (...) deliver the intentionality and cognitive content desiderata, or it delivers these desiderata but is not novel. (shrink)

Accounts of adaptive preferences are of two kinds: well-being accounts fully theorized for their own sake and political accounts theorized to facilitate the political project of reducing oppression and marginalization. Given their practical role, the latter are often less fully theorized, and are therefore less robust to theoretical criticism. In this paper, I first draw on well-being accounts to identify the well-theorized elements that political accounts should want to adopt in order to strengthen their project and avoid common criticisms. Second, (...) I appeal to the political project to show the shortcomings of the well-being accounts on which I draw. (shrink)

Sándor Márai: Consciousness of Reality, Creator of History shows the way Márai builds a series of characters based on Divorce in Buddha, instead of the concept of historical novel. Thanks to their connection between consciousness and reality, these characters are able to recognize themselves in the confessional space and they are regarded as representatives of unofficial history.

As the “Sacred Place”—meant as the new space for religions offered by the Internet—demands for continuous investigations on the encounter between traditional narratives and social practices, the rapid growth of Question and Answering websites asks for improving social research about the Authenticity of the religious feeling as well as their responsibility in the construction of a shared knowledge. In this background, the aim of this study is to investigate the role of Q&A websites as additional interpretative resources in accordance with (...) different religious forms of life. About 800 extracts—composed by questions and answers—from the religious pages of Stack Exchange were analyzed, in accordance with social discursive psychology, through bottom-up and top-down pathways. In relation to the different emerging questioners’ profiles, the rhetoric of “closeness” and “openness” reveal a dialectic trend of these websites in offering both supplementary and extending religious experiences. (shrink)

In this paper I argue against the received view that the anti‐nativist arguments of Book I of Locke's Essay conclusively challenge nativism. I begin by reconstructing the chief argument of Book I and its corollary arguments. I call attention to their dependence on (what I label) “the Awareness Principle”, viz., the view that there are no ideas in the mind of which the mind either isn't currently aware or hasn't been aware in the past. I then argue that the arguments' (...) dependence on this principle is question begging on two counts. Unless this principle is defended, Locke's arguments beg the question against Descartes and Leibniz because their nativism implies the denial of the Awareness Principle. And even when Locke defended the principle, his arguments remain question begging because they presuppose the empiricism they aim to prove. The disclosure of the question‐begging status of these arguments debunks a seemingly powerful way of attacking nativism. (shrink)

This paper comments on ‘Critique and Negativity: Towards the Pluralisation of Critique in Educational Practice, Theory and Research’ by Dietrich Benner and Andrea English. Negativity is a disquieting ghost for teachers, educational researchers, administrators and other professionals of this field, including those involved in the design of policy. First, I make some remarks in response to the essay by Benner and English in order to draw attention to the importance of dealing with negativity. Second, I introduce a further problematisation of (...) negativity: I deal with the practical issues that emerge from the conceptual reactivation of negativity and the possible consequences that result from this in the context of teaching graduate seminars. I am especially concerned with the ways in which negativity is inscribed in the process of knowledge production (that is, research), and in the possible consequences of subscribing to one or the other concept of negativity (teleological negativity, parasitic negativity, and relational negativity as the sine qua non condition for any ontology). Lastly, I raise some points for discussion with regard to certain possible consequences of the use of one or another notion of negativity in teaching and research. (shrink)

In this paper I argue against the received view that the anti-nativist arguments of Book I of Locke’s Essay conclusively challenge nativism. I begin by reconstructing the chief argument of Book I and its corollary arguments. I call attention to their dependence on (what I label) “the Awareness Principle”, viz., the view that there are no ideas in the mind of which the mind either isn’t currently aware or hasn’t been aware in the past. I then argue that the arguments’ (...) dependence on this principle is question begging on two counts. Unless this principle is defended, Locke’s arguments beg the question against Descartes and Leibniz because their nativism implies the denial of the Awareness Principle. And even when Locke defended the principle, his arguments remain question begging because they presuppose the empiricism they aim to prove. The disclosure of the question-begging status of these arguments debunks a seemingly powerful way of attacking nativism. (shrink)