In December 1995, the guns fell silent on Bosnia-Herzegovina and so did much dialogue. Silence is omnipresent in this postwar society: People conceal their suffering; they remain silent about their potential responsibility and guilt and—in interethnic encounters—the violent past is often wholly screened out. Drawing on a literature analysis as well as own interviews and ethnographic observations conducted in Bosnia-Herzegovina since 2007, the article focuses on the interplay between silence and the constitution of ethnic boundaries. In accordance with the literature, (...) it argues that silencing in-group atrocities reinforces the boundaries between former enemies by strengthening ethnically biased collective memories. However, existing research also suggest that not speaking about war in interethnic encounters most likely contributes to the integration of Bosnian society because it enables members of different ethnic communities to interact ‘peacefully’ in everyday life, thereby creating ‘new’ realities within which ethnic boundaries become less important. This conclusion assumes that silencing necessarily leads to forgetting. The following paper challenges this perception and argues that silence about war and the avoidance of conflict in interethnic communication can, in fact, also promote a further consolidation of ethnic boundaries. When conversations about past realities only take place between like-minded people, the likely result is that their pre-existing shared perspective on this reality will become solidified. In other words, silencing war in interethnic encounters impedes any potential revision or restructuring of interethnic relations and therefore stabilises the boundaries between ethnic groups. (shrink)

Flexibility in conceptual projection constitutes one of the most challenging issues in the embodiment and conceptual metaphor literatures. We sketch a theoretical proposal that places the burden of the explanation on attentional dynamics in interaction with mental models in working memory that are constrained to be maximally coherent. A test of this theory is provided in the context of the conceptual projection of time onto the domain of space. Participants categorized words presented at different spatial locations (back–front, left–right) as referring (...) to the past or to the future. Responses were faster when the irrelevant word location was congruent with the back–past, front–future metaphoric mapping. Moreover, when a new highly task-relevant spatial frame of reference was introduced, it changed the projection of past and future onto space in a way that was congruent with the new frame (past was now projected to left space and future to right space), as predicted by the theory. This study shows that there is substantial flexibility in conceptual projection and opens a venue to study metaphoric variation across tasks, individuals, and cultures as the result of attentional dynamics. (shrink)

Authentic leadership has become increasingly important in the literature, attracting the attention of many scholars in the last decade. This study adopted an employee-centered perspective to guide its examination of the relationship between authentic leadership and individual performance and investigation of the sequential mediation of employees’ affective commitment and individual creativity. An analysis was conducted of data collected from 214 employees working in different business sectors. The results reveal a statistically significant positive relationship between authentic leadership and employees’ workplace performance, (...) which are both directly connected and indirectly linked through the two proposed psychosocial mechanisms. The findings thus indicate that authentic leadership reinforces workers’ emotional connection with their organizations, thereby increasing their individual creativity and, subsequently, promoting better on-the-job performance. This study presents new and significant results since, on the one hand, it relied on a sequential mediation analysis of variables and, on the other hand, integrated the four main constructs into a single model. The proposed model displays the chain of effects between authentic leadership, affective commitment, individual creativity, and employee workplace performance. Implications for organizational management are discussed. (shrink)

In her recent book Gillian Brock argues that states’ legitimacy depends on their being part of a just state system that protects human rights. Here I discuss some practical limitations raised by Brock’s legitimacy framework: mainly, (1) the problematic real-world implications of such an account, and (2) the epistemic challenges that judgements inspired by this account would have to face, were we to proceed solely on the basis of it.

The purpose of this paper is to view Kant's approach to education in the broader context of Kant's philosophy of culture and history as a process whose direction should be reflectively assumed by human freedom, in the light of man's moral vocation. In this context, some characteristic tensions of his enlightened approach to education appear. Thus, while Kant takes the educational process to be a radically moral enterprise all the way through—and hence, placed in a relational context—he also aspires to (...) constitute education as a science, to be improved through experiments, thereby paving the way for a systemic approach to education; in spite of its moral inspiration, his systemic approach not only could enter into conflict with the moral demand of taking each individual subject as an end, but is also marked by an intrinsic paradox, already involved in the ambiguity of the term ‘humanity’, which might mean a) humanity as a moral disposition present in each individual human being or b) humanity as a whole, as the ‘human species’. (shrink)

For the last 50 years the dominant stance in experimental biology has been reductionism in general, and genetic reductionism in particular. Philosophers were the first to realize that the belief that the Mendelian genes were reduced to DNA molecules was questionable. Soon, experimental data confirmed these misgivings. The optimism of molecular biologists, fueled by early success in tackling relatively simple problems has now been tempered by the difficulties encountered when applying the same simple ideas to complex problems. We analyze three (...) examples taken from experimental data that illustrate the shortcomings of this sort of reductionism. In the first, alterations in the expression of a large number of genes coexist with normal phenotypes at supra-cellular levels of organization; in the second, the supposed intrinsic specificity of hormonal signals is negated; in the third, the notion that cancer is a cellular problem caused by mutated genes is challenged by data gathered both from the reductionist viewpoint and the alternative view proposing that carcinogenesis is development gone awry. As an alternative to reductionism, we propose that the organicist view is a good starting point from which to explore these phenomena. However, new theoretical concepts are needed to grapple with the apparent circular causality of complex biological phenomena. (shrink)

This book advances a 'naturalized' normative theory of deliberative democracy; one that is informed by an empirically-grounded analysis of public deliberation in naturalistic settings and in unadulterated form, and goes on to provide institutional design proposals for how to improve it.

In this article, I explore the way in which Korsgaard’s approach to obligation as springing from the reflective rejection of that which threatens one’s own identity can account for obligations towards others, without making the latter relative to obligations to oneself. To this end, I begin by stressing the role of reflexivity in ethical relationships, and show how this reflexivity is mediated by reference to law, which applies both to the self and to the other. On this basis, I then (...) argue that Korsgaard’s account of the interplay between practical and moral identity reflects the very structure of practical reason, which requires both a particular and a universal premise in order to issue practical reasons for action– and the corresponding obligations. Within this framework, I argue that Korsgaard’s solution to the problem outlined above lies in having stressed the shareable character of reasons such that it is neither your reason nor my reason that obligates me, but rather reason as such. This solution, however, requires a further argument aimed at clarifying what makes your reasons different from my own. (shrink)

Socio-cultural shifts during the 1960s and 1970s included widespread secularization, challenges to authority and tradition, and an emphasis on individual choice. Healthcare and biomedical research advances accompanied these social changes, giving rise to numerous ethical and policy questions. The contemporary bioethics project emerged in this context with (at least) three aims: (1) to offer practical answers to these questions (often) in ways that (2) facilitate or support particular practices or goals (e.g., organ donation or human research) and that (3) appear (...) broadly applicable and legitimately enforceable. Philosophical thinking, which involves investigating and disambiguating concepts and categories, articulating conceptually clear definitions, and mapping arguments to identify premises, detect fallacies, and describe their logical implications, can undermine the practical goals of the bioethics project. This tension between the goals of bioethics and philosophical thinking might help to explain what some scholars see as a disinterest in philosophical thinking in bioethics today. (shrink)

The expression “a culture of freedom” is unmistakably modern. Yet its meaning is not immediately clear. My purpose in this paper is to clarify the possible meaning of this expression by taking Kant’s practical philosophy as a point of reference. In order to do so, I will depart from Kant’s explicit conception of culture, and try to relate it to his own distinction between external and internal freedom, especially as it appears in the Metaphysics of Morals.

Following the 15th anniversary of the European Society for the History of Science (ESHS), one can definitely say that this relatively young society has come of age. Through regular meetings, a journal, a prize, fellowships and various other activities, the ESHS has been striving to create a space fostering diversity, plurality and internationalization among historians of science, located in Europe and elsewhere. This paper revisits my own research on the past of the sciences in Portugal, examining in particular the role (...) of the 18th century naturalist and diplomat Abbé Correia da Serra. As a member of an extended network of estrangeirados (Europeanized intellectuals), Correia da Serra played a decisive role in the circulation of knowledge in Europe and also in the world, a role forgotten by his peers within the time interval of a generation. This case study acts as a springboard to discuss the importance of geographical and methodological diversity in the past of the sciences in Europe. In the present historiographical predicament in which the international community finds itself, I advocate that one of the main challenges faced by the ESHS is to turn its historical gaze to Europe again, while fiercely repudiating Eurocentrism. This enables to show how much the building of the European spaces of scientific practice were never a prerogative of a few regions or a small set of countries, but, on the very contrary, took shape as the result of complex interactions between diverse spaces and cultures, not only intra-European but also non-European. (shrink)

The proposed reflection intends to present the problem of judicial adjudication as a substantially-axiologically founded autonomous moment on the practical realization of law, and to explore this understanding in confrontation with external exigencies, mostly teleologically determined—hence, beyond strict deductive application, as a syllogistic reference of facts to norms, and finalistically determined decision, as an option among possible alternatives to achieve specific aims. The main objective is to enter into a discussion on the methodological meaning of “integrity”, “hard cases” and “right (...) answer”, as presented by Ronald Dworkin, and a critical reflection on the criticism of that approach levelled by Neil MacCormick, so as to confront the relevance of principle and policy arguments, in order to bring about a different methodological approach, an alternative jurisprudentialist conception of adjudication, incorporating a practical-normative constitutive dialectics between legal controversy and legal system, such as that presented by Castanheira Neves. The focus will, then, be the legitimacy of the connection of arguments of principle and consequentialist arguments in adjudication, its selection and its justification, stating, therefore, a specifically assumed judicium, a judicative decision, having the legal system as its horizon of normative reference and of substantial and institutional autonomy. (shrink)

Rigorous attention has been paid to moral distress among healthcare professionals, largely in high-income settings. More obscure is the presence and impact of moral distress in contexts of chronic poverty and structural violence. Intercultural ethics research and dialogue can help reveal how the long-term presence of morally distressing conditions might influence the moral experience and agency of healthcare providers. This article discusses mixed-methods research at one nongovernmental social support agency and clinic in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Chronic levels of moral (...) distress and perceptions of moral harm among clinicians in this setting were both violent, following Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ use of that term, and a source of exceptional and innovative care. Rather than glossing over the moral variables of work in such desperate extremes, ethnography in these settings reveals novel skills and strategies for managing moral distress. (shrink)

The term ‘culture wars’ has been used to describe deep, apparently intractable, disagreements between groups for many years. In contemporary discourse, it refers to disputes regarding significant moral matters carried out in the public square and for which there appears to be no way to achieve consensus or compromise. One set of battle lines is drawn between those who hold traditional Christian commitments and those who do not. Christian bioethics is nested in a set of moral and metaphysical understandings that (...) collide with those of the dominant secular culture. The result is a gulf between a moral life and an approach to bioethics framed in the face of a transcendent God and a final judgment versus a moral life and an approach to bioethics framed as if the world were without ultimate meaning and as if death were the end of personal existence. These approaches are separated by a moral and metaphysical gulf that sustains incompatible life worlds and incompatible understandings of bioethics. Attempts to bridge the gulf with secular reason are ineffective because there is no shared conception of reason or standard of evidence. Efforts to use the state to enforce a particular set of metaphysical and moral commitments, whether secular or religious, lead to public disputes with a war-like character. (shrink)

Dans cet article l?auteur situe le sujet de sa recherche et donne un aper?u des th?ories dominantes qui examinent le processus de la transformation du champ acad?mique dans les pays ayant adh?r?? la D?claration de Bologne, aussi bien que des th?ories qui peuvent contribuer? expliquer l??tat actuel du champ de l?enseignement sup?rieur. L??laboration de ce sujet a pour son but principal la construction d?un instrument analytique ad?quat pour la conceptualisation et la recherche sur la r?forme du syst?me de l?enseignement sup?rieur. (...) Une attention particuli?re sera consacr?e? l?analyse du champ acad?mique en Serbie. U ovom clanku autorka daje obrazlozenje svoje istrazivacke teme i pregled dominantnih teorija koje se bave transformacijom akademskog polja u zemljama koje su se obavezale na primenu Bolonjske deklaracije, ali i teorija koje mogu doprineti objasnjenju aktuelnog stanja polja visokog obrazovanja. Glavni cilj realizacije ove teme jeste konstruisanje adekvatnog analitickog instrumenta za promisljanje i istrazivanje reforme sistema visokog obrazovanja. Posebna paznja bice posvecena analizi akademskog polja u Srbiji. (shrink)

The author examines the possibility for a rapprochement between Luc Boltanski?s sociology of critique and Bourdieu?s critical sociology of domination by analyzing three subjects within the theoretical opus of Luc Boltanski: the place given to tests in the critical agency of actors, the relation between critique and institutions, and the role the collective plays in the appropriation and distribution of critique. In Boltanski?s works the question of the sense of justice and the critical capacities of actors, that is injustice and (...) its critique, is approached with full respect for the perspectives of the social actors. In his book On Critique the French sociologist writes about domination, or more precisely, the process of domination, but he doesn?t fully answer the question wether and how the capacities of social actors for critique can be realized and elevated to the level of a full-fledged critique of domination. This is considered to be the main condition of the possibility for connecting critical sociology and sociology of critique, so the analysis of the three mentioned topics should 76 determine whether the social actors within the theoretical world of Luc Boltanski are relatively close to the stage of a critique of domination. (shrink)

En el presente artículo se pretende hacer un recorrido por aquellas herramientas metodológicas utilizadas por Foucault para el estudio de la institución educativa disciplinaria y su posible aplicación al nuevo panorama educativo en las sociedades de control. Foucault analiza los discursos y prácticas como formas de poder en la sociedad disciplinaria, los cuales configuran una individualidad determinada: el cuerpo dócil. Tras la Segunda Guerra Mundial, nuevas modalidades de poder dan lugar a la sociedad de control, conformando una individualidad autogobernada. En (...) la educación secundaria actual aparecen tanto formas del régimen disciplinario como del régimen de control. (shrink)

“Outsiders” addressing ethical issues in medicine—Strangers at the Bedside —became “bioethicists.” Bioethicists providing research ethics consultation have been described as “stranger...

Issues of institutional identity and integrity in Roman Catholic health care institutions have been addressed at the level of individual institutions as well as by organizations of Catholic health care providers and at various levels in the Church hierarchy. The papers by Carol Taylor, C.S.F.N, Thomas Shannon, Kevin O’Rourke, O.P., Gerard Magill in this volume provide a significant contribution to concerns of Roman Catholic health care institutions as they face the challenges of providing health care in a secular, pluralistic, market-driven (...) economy. One way to understand institutional integrity is as a measure of the coherence between what an institution identifies as its commitments (its stated moral character), what an institution does (its manifest moral character) and an institution’s fundamental moral commitments (its deep moral character). The essays in this volume support this model of integrity. Although it is not their explicit focus, the four essays together provide a vision of institutional integrity for Catholic health care institutions. Each author focuses on one of the three central aspects of integrity: what one identifies as one’s commitments (Taylor), how one's actions reflect one’s values (Shannon and Magill), and what one is or what one values at a deep level (O’Rourke). I will offer a brief overview of the ways in which the integrity of Catholic health care institutions has been addressed. Then I will consider the four essays and show how each offers an analysis of one of the three critical elements of integrity. (shrink)

Deliberative democracy started out as an ideal for mass democracy. Lately, however, its large-scale ambitions have mostly been shelved. This article revivifies the ideal of mass deliberative democracy by offering a clear mechanism by which everyone in the community can be included in the same conversation. The trick is to make use of people’s overlapping social communicative networks through which informal deliberative exchanges already occur on an everyday basis. Far from being derailed by threats of polarization, echo chambers, and motivated (...) reasoning, informal networked deliberation can indeed put everyone in touch, directly or indirectly, with everyone else. (shrink)

Pocos fenómenos han suscitado tanto debate en América Latina como es la cuestión de su integración, que, a pesar de sus luces y sus sombras, sus avances y retrocesos, sigue ahí, presente, a pesar de las incertidumbres que los diferentes acontecimientos políticos generan sobre su futuro próximo.

The climatic emergency that threats the Arctic constitutes a challenge for the International Community. The inhabitants of this space, mainly indigenous peoples, face a dramatic situation, because their way of life is disappearing. In this context, Arctic peoples formulate the right to be cold. This paper analyzes the implications of this proposal from the point of view of International Human Rights Law, examining the progress made in the link between the environment, climate change and human rights, the initiatives that the (...) Arctic peoples have proposed in the Inter-American System of Human Rights and the theoretical analysis that this proposal generates. (shrink)

In this article the author attempts to establish whether we can find a “theory of appearance” in the philosophy of Jan Patočka. The “appearance” for Patočka is basically composed of two elements. First there is a “primeval movement” which accounts for an infinite possibility of phenomena. The second element is the relation of this movement with an “addressee”, the subjectivity. If we begin to analyse the unity of these two elements we fundamentally come across three problems: what is it that (...) appears, when appearance presupposes a certain totality of appearance; how does this total appearance come forth; and, finally, is this whole “structure of appearance” taken as a free movement, kept once and for all within the boundaries of phenomenology, which is founded on a precise and positive term of “appearance” — or do we have to stipulate a special “experience” as the starting point of a phenomenology, which accepts the abyssal impossibility to control its frame? (shrink)

O presente artigo busca oferecer elementos suficientes para localizar a filósofa e poetisa Christine de Pizan no contexto intelectual do humanismo francês no início do XV. Esse objetivo responde a uma dificuldade que acompanha o estudo da atividade filosófica do período medieval em meio laico. Enquanto mulher, Pizan é necessariamente laica, e sua produção literária se deu fora dos limites normalmente delineados como objeto de estudo dos historiadores da filosofia medieval, qual seja, a produção tipicamente escolástica.

Este artigo analisa os conceitos de sexualidade e gênero na contemporaneidade. Procura-se identificar as produções bibliográficas recentes em vários campos de conhecimento e seus limites e avanços epistemológicos para entender outras relações sociais e os novos contextos diaspóricos na produção de sexualidades, raça, gênero, afetividade e corpo na pós-colonialidade.

Este trabajo se propone explorar los vínculos posibles entre poesía y pensamiento no antrópico tomando como base las filosofías de Jacques Derrida y Maurice Blanchot. Su análisis partirá de El animal que luego estoy si(gui)endo (que dice que el pensamiento animal, si existe, depende de la poesía) y proseguirá con una serie de textos blanchotianos, en particular con «La literatura y el derecho a la muerte». De allí nos será de particular utilidad la distinción entre lenguaje corriente y lenguaje literario, (...) en especial en aquello que atañe a los poetas. Esto implicará rever la nominación qua operación conceptualizante, y conducirá a reflexionar sobre el estatuto de la muerte que acontece en el lenguaje (de lo existente que captura, pero también del autor) y de la materialidad de las palabras. Según espera mostrar, se puede ver en estos análisis sobre el lenguaje una contaminación entre lo lógico y lo poético, y ello permite reconfigurar la relación entre lo humano y el resto de los vivientes. Por último, el trabajo se pregunta qué porvenir pueden tener el pensamiento y la filosofía luego de semejantes elaboraciones, y propone una vía posible nuevamente desde Blanchot y Derrida. (shrink)

Este artículo tiene como propósito principal investigar la famosa sentencia derridiana “il n’y a pas de hors-texte”, que como sabemos entró a significar una especie de slogan de época. En función de este propósito, realizamos un examen del contexto de aparición más inmediato de la mentada frase, estudiamos sus condiciones de recepción y problematizamos el sentido de “texto” y “escritura” en el pensamiento derridiano. Como mostramos, estas nociones no se vinculan con ninguna “hiperbolización” del lenguaje, sino más bien su ruina.

Este trabajo se propone una interpretación de Introducción a “Origen de la geometría” de Husserl de Derrida a la luz de la cuestión de lo literario. Con esto no nos referimos a la literatura como institución, sino a determinada comprensión de la naturaleza del lenguaje en términos no idealistas. Por un lado, se señalará la pregnancia de este tópico en los desarrollos específicos del texto derridiano, mostrando que es fundamental para abordar su crítica a “la exigencia de visibilidad” en Husserl. (...) Por otro, se otorgará una contextualización crítica al interior de su camino intelectual que secundará la relevancia otorgada a nuestro desarrollo. (shrink)

David Waldron Smithers was, among other things, a physician and a pioneer of cancer radiotherapy and a well-respected figure in British medicine and public health. From the 1940s until his retirement from medical practice in 1973, he was the director of the Radiotherapy Department at the Royal Marsden Hospital and London University Chair of Radiotherapy at the Institute of Cancer Research. Using massive amounts of clinical observations, which he interpreted from an organicist viewpoint, and his impressive synthetic thinking, he proposed (...) a coherent alternative perspective to the somatic mutation theory (SMT) which was then, and still is, the dominant theory of cancer. The purpose of this essay is to acquaint the modern audience with his seminal paper, published in 1962, because it deserves to be recognized as a true classic. In it, he examined the lack of fit between clinical observations and the SMT and proposed the rejection of this reductionist perspective. In addition, he built an organicist alternative in which carcinogenesis is seen as a problem of biological organization. His conceptual contribution to the cancer problem has inspired us and other authors over the last two decades. His essay “Cancer: An Attack on Cytologism,” originally published in The Lancet in 1962, is available as supplementary material in the online version of this article. (shrink)

Apresenta-se os resultados de projeto de pesquisa desenvolvido entre os anos de 2014-2020 relacionado as narrativas didáticas de história no Brasil, Paraguai e Uruguai e, pertinentes ao conteúdo Guerra Guasu. Embora tenha ocorrido um significativo avanço historiográfico acerca do tema tais narrativas apresentam um perfil tradicional, descritivo e com enfoque nos feitos daqueles tidos como “grandes homens”. No caso, sobretudo, das narrativas brasileiras foram incorporadas distintas categorias de fontes históricas, entretanto os sujeitos subalternizados elencados para esta análise: mulheres, crianças, indígenas (...) e os negros libertos e escravizados continuam invisibilizados pela escrita de uma narrativa didática oficial e que reverbera os cânones do vencedor. (shrink)