A number of recent studies have documented rapid changes in behavioural sensory acuity induced by aversive learning in the olfactory and auditory modalities. The effect of aversive learning on the discrimination of low-level features in the visual system of humans remains unclear. Here, we used a psychophysical staircase procedure to estimate discrimination thresholds for oriented grating stimuli, before and after differential aversive learning. We discovered that when a target grating orientation was conditioned with an aversive loud noise, it subsequently led (...) to an improvement of discrimination acuity in nearly all subjects. However, no such change was observed in a control group conditioned to an orientation shifted by ±90° from the target. Our findings cannot be explained by contextual learning or sensitisation factors. The results converge with those reported in the olfactory modality and provide further evidence that early sensory systems can be rapidly modified by recently experienced reinforcement histories. (shrink)

EDUCERE is a government funded research and development project. EDUCERE objectives are to investigate, develop, and evaluate innovative solutions for society to detect changes in psychomotor development through the natural interaction of children with toys and everyday objects, and perform stimulation and early attention activities in real environments such as home and school. In the EDUCERE project, an ethical impact assessment is carried out linked to a minors’ data protection rights. Using a specific methodology, the project has achieved some promising (...) results. These include use of a prototype of smart toys to detect development difficulties in children. In addition, privacy protection measures which take into account the security concerns of health data, have been proposed and applied. This latter security framework could be useful in other Internet of Things related projects. It consists of legal and technical measures. Special attention has been placed in the transformation of bulk data such as acceleration and jitter of toys into health data when patterns of atypical development are found. The article describes the different security profiles in which users are classified. (shrink)

In recent years postcolonial and decolonial feminisms have become increasingly salient in philosophy, yet they are often deployed as conceptual stand-ins for generalized feminist critiques of eurocentrism (without reference to the material contexts anti-colonial feminisms emanate from), or as a platform to re-center internal debates between dominant European theories/ists under the guise of being conceptually ‘decolonized’. By contrast, this article focuses on the specific contexts, issues and lifeworld concerns that ground anti-colonial feminisms and provides a brief survey of the literature. (...) Because the terms implicated in the analysis (Third World, transnational, women of color, postcolonial, decolonial and indigenous feminisms) are highly contested on their own, I only provide provisional and non-foundational histories and definitions for the purposes of resisting philosophical appropriations of anti-colonial feminist theory. (shrink)

Ideal theory in social and political philosophy generally works to hide philosophical theories’ complicity in sustaining the structural violence and maintenance of white supremacy that are foundational to settler colonial societies. While non-ideal theory can provide a corrective to some of ideal theory’s intended omissions, it can also work to conceal the same systems of violence that ideal theory does, especially when framed primarily as a response to ideal theory. This article takes a decolonial approach to exploring the limitations of (...) non-ideal theory in its ability to respond to and redress the continuing harms done to Indigenous peoples by settler colonialism, including by outlining non-ideal theory’s relationship to a colonial politics of recognition. (shrink)

Intersectionality is a term that arose within the black feminist intellectual tradition for the purposes of identifying interlocking systems of oppression. As a descriptive term, it refers to the ways human identity is shaped by multiple social vectors and overlapping identity categories (such as sex, race, class) that may not be readily visible in single-axis formulations of identity, but which are taken to be integral to robustly capture the multifaceted nature of human experience. As a diagnostic term, it captures the (...) confluence of power and domination on the social construction of identity in order to remedy concrete harms that result from this convergence. It is not a prescriptive methodology or closed system of analysis, but rather an open-ended hermeneutic lens through which interconnected systems of oppression can come into focus in the fight for social justice. (shrink)

This paper addresses the phenomenological experience of precarity and vulnerability in racialized gender-based violence from a structural perspective. Informed by Indigenous social theory and anti-colonial approaches to intergenerational trauma that link settler colonial violence to the modalities of stress-inducing social, institutional, and cultural violences in marginalized women’s lives, I argue that philosophical failures to understand trauma as a functional, organizational tool of settler colonial violence amplify the impact of traumatic experience on specific populations. It is trauma by design. I explore (...) this through the history of the concept of trauma and its connection to tragedy. I give a brief overview of prominent theories of trauma and contrast these with the work of Indigenous feminist scholar Dian Million (2013), who highlights functional complicity of settler colonial institutions in shaping accounts of trauma in the west. I begin the piece with an important illustration of the kinds of lives and experiences that call for a politicized understanding of trauma in anti-colonial feminist theory. I end by offering an expansive notion of structural trauma that is a methodological pivot for conducting trauma-based gender-based violence research in a decolonial context, which calls for an end to narratives of trauma that are severed from the settler colonial project of Native land dispossession and genocide. [Volume 23, no.1]. (shrink)

This chapter proceeds in two ways. First, I argue that Fanon’s structural witnessing of racism yields important insights about the nature of violence that challenges the settler colonial concept of violence as the extra-legal use of force. Second, I argue that his analysis of violence is insufficient for combating colonial racism and violence because, using the terms of his own analysis, it leaves intact logics and mechanisms that allow racism to structurally renew itself in perpetuity: violence against women. Without a (...) critical feminism that tracks the alterities of structural violence against women, and women of color in particular, Fanonianism is just another lifeline of colonialism. I thus caution against uncritical uses of Fanon’s structural account of violence for any emancipatory social theory that fails to acknowledge the attendant alterities, asymmetries, and axes of coordinated subordination involved in racialized violence against women. (shrink)

El volumen Aesthetic Reason and Imaginative Freedom: Friederich Schiller and Philosophy continúa un esfuerzo que se viene gestando desde hace más de quince años en el ámbito de la investigación filosófica: restituir la figura de Friedrich Schiller como filósofo.

This essay addresses structural violence against Latinas by looking at the existential toll different forms of cultural violence take on us. In particular, it looks at linguistic violence and the role lesser-known violences play in the intergenerational continuation of colonial violence, such as hermeneutic violence. Defined as violence done to systems of meaning and interpretation, hermeneutic violence is discussed at length in relation to the experience of harm and injury. The essay further explores some resistant epistemic practices Latina feminists have (...) generated to address systemic violence. The work of Gloria Anzaldúa is elaborated as an example of resistant epistemic practices. (shrink)

One way to track the many critical impacts of women of color feminisms is through the powerful structural analyses of gendered and racialized oppression they offer. This article discusses diverse lineages of women of color feminisms in the global South that tackle systemic structures of power and domination from their situated perspectives. It offers an introduction to structuralist theories in the humanities and differentiates them from women of color feminist theorizing, which begins analyses of structures from embodied and phenomenological st¬¬andpoints--with (...) the day-to-day concerns of our lives. The essay is divided into three sections. In section one, I discuss theories of structure in the humanities and sciences, differentiating them from women of color’s analysis of structure as diagnostic of the ways colonial power relations are functionalized through social structures. In section two, I discuss the diverse contexts of interpretation that background women of color feminisms, outlining key themes and ideas related to theories of structure. I argue against a unified theory of women of color structural feminisms that supplants difference, favoring a rehabilitated concept of structure for the purposes of making targeted interventions in contemporary radical anti-colonial politics. I offer the example of systematic marginalization produced by colonial violence and mythology as one reason to take up this approach. In section three, I outline four provisional characteristics of women of color structural feminisms. I conclude that, when divested from colonial myths that guide mainstream notions of structure, it can be a useful hermeneutic tactic in the fight for liberation from ongoing colonial violence. (shrink)

Gender-based forms of administrative violence, such as reproductive violence, are the result of systems designed to enact population-level harms through the production and forcible imposition of colonial systems of gender. Settler statecraft has long relied on the strategic promotion of sexual and reproductive violence. Patterns of reproductive violence adapt and change to align with the enduring goals and evolving needs of settler colonial occupation, dispossession, and containment. The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision to end the constitutional right to abortion in (...) Dobbs v Jackson is but one instance of this larger pattern. We analyze reproductive and obstetric violence and the structural trauma they produce through the lenses of i) historical continuity and ii) the global architectures of neoliberal settler capitalism in order to connect reproductive rights rollbacks in the U.S. with the expansion of reproductive violence across a world connected by colonial globalization. (shrink)

This paper builds on theoretical developments that view entrepreneurship as emancipation, i.e., entrepreneurial activities as generators of change and pursuit of freedom from perceived constraints. Using a representative data set of 1095 SMEs owned by Indigenous entrepreneurs in Canada, the authors investigate how pursuit of this freedom affects the way entrepreneurs enact several aspects of their ventures and the performance outcomes achieved. Findings reveal how the initial motivations of entrepreneurs lead to distinct business practices, which in turn impact differentially entrepreneurial (...) outcomes. (shrink)

Este ensaio desenvolve um estudo, a partir da obra de G. Agamben, sobre a arqueologia do ofício e as implicações ético-políticas do modo de subjetivação do funcionário. O funcionário age a partir do dever de oficio, separando, nessa ação, a responsabilidade pessoal da eficiência da ação. Ao agir como funcionário não atua em nome próprio, mas age em nome de outro, para o qual se transfere toda responsabilidade ética da ação funcional. Eichmann apresenta-se como o modelo de funcionário que cumpriu (...) o dever de sua função, independentemente de suas convicções pessoais a respeito da catástrofe humana que provocou. (shrink)

El presente artículo expone una redescripción de la primera persona gramatical en términos de su funcionamiento lógico-pragmático: qué ─acción─ cuenta como práctica lingüística de enunciación de “yo” como operación anafórica. Para conseguir este propósito, se utiliza la noción de anáfora como vínculo inferencial con estructuras suboracionales substituibles, y estas a su vez con estructuras proposicionales articuladas inferencialmente. Además, se cuenta con la noción de juegos de lenguaje y formas de vida ─Lebensformen─ en tanto adiestramiento para la práctica de dicho jugador. (...) En este sentido, se sigue plenamente la estructura que Robert Brandom desarrolla en hacerlo explícito. En definitiva, el enunciante de “yo” debe articular los contenidos conceptuales que se adscribe de manera anafórica para que se establezca un entramado coherente de compromisos deónticos. (shrink)

A credible fear test is an in-depth interview process given to undocumented people of any age arriving at a U.S. port of entry to determine qualification for asylum-seeking. Credible fear tests as a typical immigration procedure demonstrate not only what structural epistemic violence looks like but also how this violence lives in and through the design of asylum policy. Key terms of credible fear tests such as “significant possibility,” “evidence,” “consistency,” and “credibility” can never be neutral in the context of (...) colonial administrative violence. We argue that these terms function as mechanisms of exclusion and demonstrate that the capacity to be violent (i.e. to be an instrument of violence) is built into these tests, ready to be deployed when an administration wants to stop certain people from certain places from entering without regard to their own ongoing occupation of Indigenous lands. Not only are such practices instruments of violence, but the concept of ‘violence’ continues to be organized, defined, and conceived within settler colonial epistemologies so as to exclude these administrative forms of violence deployed against Indigenous peoples and people of color from recognition and nameability. We argue that this is an intentional strategy of colonial power preservation that is functionalized through social processes that remain structurally stable and self-regenerating across historical and political changes. (shrink)

The hermeneutic resources necessary for understanding Indigenous women’s lives in Latin America have been obscured by the tools of Western feminist philosophical practices and their travel in North-South contexts. Not only have ongoing practices of European colonization disrupted pre-colonial ways of knowing, but colonial lineages create contemporary public policies, institutions, and political structures that reify and solidify colonial epistemologies as the only legitimate forms of knowledge. I argue that understanding this foreclosure of Amerindian linguistic communities’ ability to collectively engage in (...) interpretive processes of culture and be heard and understood as coherent is an essential background condition to conceiving and theorizing the multiplicity of social oppressions and their intersections in contemporary Latin American contexts. Further, the work of disrupting and disobeying colonial interpretive frameworks has long been practiced by Indigenous women in Latin America, whose testimonies and expressions have been made sub-audible by design in colonial systems of meaning-making. This is part of the extensive legacy of the long quillwork of communal alphabets of survival. (shrink)

This paper explores the antecedents of intra-organizational social capital from a comprehensive perspective that integrates leadership as the main antecedent. To be precise, we propose that intra-organizational social capital is a direct consequence of an organizational ethical and community context to which leadership in the servant dimension plays a transcendental role. Indeed, since the seminal work of Greenleaf the servant leadership concept has been widespread among business academics and professionals for the value it brings to the organization not only in (...) ethical but also in excellence terms. Among the recent styles and theories on leadership up to date, servant leadership fits perfectly an organizational ethical context both at the organizational or group level, acting in addition as a main promoter of that context. Furthermore, servant leadership is linked to the cultivation of helpful, altruistic and servant attitudes among the employees which are useful elements in the generation of social capital inside the organization. A model then for understanding the causes of intra-organizational social capital with a focus on servant leadership is here elaborated from which conclusions and implications for Management will be delineated. (shrink)

Este artículo aporta una clarificación sobre lo que sí podemos decir de la relación entre este mundo y el futuro anunciado por la esperanza cristiana (escatología). La iluminación según la sagrada Escritura de la recíproca interdependencia y complementariedad entre el futuro intrahistórico y el metahistórico, permite encontrar pautas teórico-prácticas de actuación. Una humanidad nueva conduce a forjar un mundo según el plan de Dios, un mundo donde ha de reinar la paz y la justicia. El futuro es la ciudad de (...) la Paz; construirla es tarea de todos. En esta hora de la historia, la mujer está dando una aportación digna de consideración. El sueño de futuro que alimenta el Apocalipsis no es una ilusión, pues se está gestando ya en lo escondido de la historia. (shrink)

La manifestación de Jesús tiene su punto culminante en el último día de la fiesta de las Tiendas, en el templo de Jerusalén (Jn 7,38-39). Jesús se proclama poseedor y dador del Espíritu. De la comunión con Cristo emerge la potencia del amor divino, el Espíritu, en el creyente. Cristo resucitado, el Espíritu, la libertad, están en relación de mutua implicación, y constituyen un contexto existencial unitario en la persona que los acoge, según san Pablo. Es preciso tomar conciencia del (...) Espíritu presente en nuestra interioridad. Religiosas/os han encarnado la fertilidad del Espíritu y la ilustran para nuestro tiempo. Para entender la vitalidad, la acción del Espíritu que reciben los creyentes debemos mirar a María. (shrink)

Este trabajo parte de la premisa de que, en El arco y la lira, Octavio Paz hace una reflexión acerca del lenguaje poético que se aproxima en diversos aspectos a la hermenéutica de Hans-George Gadamer. En ambos autores encontramos la idea de que la poesía es un lenguaje originario que, por su carácter creador, nos separa de las relaciones habituales del mundo, al mismo tiempo que nos conecta con la tradición. La poesía deviene, así, como una experiencia de origen y (...) de pertenencia: nos lleva a lo que nunca antes habíamos contemplado (experiencia de la otredad y de lo indeterminado), pero también nos conecta con la historia y con la tradición que está presente en toda lengua. Así, el propósito de este trabajo es mostrar los puntos de encuentro entre ambos autores, que, desde puntos de partida muy diferentes, han llegado a planteamientos bastante compatibles entre sí, lo cual se explica, en buena medida, por el hecho de que ambos han superado la visión del lenguaje como medio y han afirmado la esencia lingüística de la poesía. (shrink)

La tesis que se propone en este artículo es que, si existe el perdón, este siempre implica el trabajo de la memoria. Para llevar a cabo este propósito y reflexionar sobre las posibilidades del perdón en la realidad colombiana, tomaremos como base los planteamientos del filósofo francés Paul Ricoeur de la memoria, el perdón, la identidad, el sí mismo y la narración. Con Ricoeur, podemos afirmar que en el testimonio de las víctimas se abre el horizonte de la relación entre (...) memoria y perdón, porque la reconstrucción de los hechos a través del relato abre una dialéctica entre lo que ha marcado la identidad y las variaciones y proyecciones de dicha identidad. Narrar, además, es una manera de recuperar el _ser capaz _que ha sido vulnerado a través de la falta. Para esto, sin embargo, el testimonio tiene unas condiciones mínimas: que la víctima pueda contar su historia, que haya alguien dispuesto a escuchar y que se pueda recuperar la verdad de los hechos a través de procesos de justicia y reparación. Estas condiciones mínimas nos permitirán analizar, según algunos testimonios de diferentes víctimas, hasta qué punto es factible hablar de perdón en el conflicto armado colombiano. Al final, concluimos que el perdón implica procesos de reparación y justicia, y que solo surge al margen de estos cuando la víctima decide resignificar su pasado doloroso por un ideal ético de felicidad que le permite privilegiar su realización ante la afrenta recibida. (shrink)

Corned stucco represents one of the most characteristic elements of Spanish medieval architecture. The image that we have of the Alhambra, of Samuel Halevi's synagoge —el Tránsito— and of countless other palaces and monasteries is due to this cheap construction material which could imitate the luxurious quality of silk textiles and ivories. In our previous article {Al-Qantara, XX, 275-97), we showed that Ruy López Dávalos de Toledo's palace conserves an important group of carved stuccos. In this paper, we discuss its (...) technique of fabrication. (shrink)

En reseña de:Veronique Champeil-Deplats, Méthodologies du droit et des sciences du droit, col. Méthodes du Droit, Dalloz, Paris, 2014.

Entrevista con el profesor John Zeleznikow, Catedrático de Gestión y Sistemas de Informaciónen la Universidad de Victoria (Australia) y profesor de la Facultad de Derecho de la Universidad de La Trobe (Australia).

Más allá de la legitimidad o ilegitimidad que para el gobierno de un Estado democrático puede comportar la cuestión de la democracia interna de sus partidos, en este artículo se demanda un control y una valoración autónoma del asunto porque, sencillamente, la organización y funcionamiento democráticos de los partidos es una herramienta pedagógica fundamental para que el ciudadano aprenda a vivir en democracia. Esta circunstancia exige la reactivación de sus derechos políticos en el seno de cualquiera de las comunidades de (...) las que forme parte, incluido un partido, lo cual lleva a un ejercicio de especificación o personalización de los mismos en la figura del afiliado. Dicha tarea, que acomete este artículo en relación con los partidos políticos españoles, permite ofrecer un criterio para valorar la cantidad de democracia interna de nuestros partidos, así como para revitalizarla. (shrink)