This paper proposes an intermediate account of personhood, based on the capacity to participate in intersubjective interactions. We articulate our proposal as a reply to liberal and restrictive accounts, taking Mark Rowlands’ and Stephen Darwall’s proposals as contemporary representatives of each view, respectively. We argue that both accounts fall short of dealing with borderline cases and defend our intermediate view: The criteria of personhood based on the second-person perspective of mental state attribution. According to it, a person should be able (...) to participate in intersubjective interactions. We apply our proposal to the borderline cases of non-human primates and human infants. (shrink)

In Mexico, significant ethical and social issues have been raised by the COVID-19 pandemic. Some of the most pressing issues are the extent of restrictive measures, the reciprocal duties to healthcare workers, the allocation of scarce resources, and the need for research. While policy and ethical frameworks are being developed to face these problems, the gender perspective has been largely overlooked in most of the issues at stake. Domestic violence is the most prevalent form of violence against women, which can (...) be exacerbated during a pandemic: stress and economic uncertainty are triggers for abuse, and confinement limits access to support networks. Confinement also exacerbates the unfair distribution of unpaid labor, which is disproportionately assigned to women and girls, and highlights inequality in the overall labor market. Lack of security measures has resulted in attacks towards health workers, particularly female nurses, due to fear of contamination. Finally, resource results in lack of access to other health necessities, including sexual and reproductive health services. Research across all disciplines to face—and to learn from—this crisis should be done through a gender lens, because understanding the realities of women is essential to understand the pandemic’s true effects in Mexico and the world. (shrink)

This article problematizes the extended diagnosis regarding the relation between truth and politics, or politics and lies, mobilized by the term post-truth. First, it puts into question the presumed historical novelty that the term signals to, reminding us how Western political philosophy has always been marked by the anxiety towards the threathening force of an orphan and erratic discourse with no consciousness and no referent. Second, it indicates the limitations of the reproach against the presumed withdrawal of rationality and veracity (...) from politics, insofar as it fails to take into account the extent to which there is operative nowadays, in a hegemonic tecno-scientific discourse, a production of a certain truth of the social. In order to attend to this other angle of the relation between truth and politics one needs to displace the view from the field of electoral politics, to the field of techniques of government. Third, the article argues that there is a structural coherence between the hyper-truth in which these government techniques operate, and the inescrupulous strategic interest in the realpolitik of electoral politics, a coherence that is anchored in the ontological and epistemological premises of the modern conception of the political. Finally, the article underlines the critical potency that the theoretical legacy of post-structuralism offers to us, facing this landscape. (shrink)

O'Brien & Opie's connectionist vehicle theory of consciousness is heavily dependent on their notion of explicitness as (1) structural and (2) necessary and sufficient for consciousness. These assumptions unnecessarily constrain their position: the authors are forced to find an intrinsic property of patterns that accounts for the distinction between conscious and unconscious states. Their candidate property, stability, does not capture this distinction. Yet, I show that we can drop assumptions (1) and (2) and still develop a vehicle theory of consciousness. (...) This alternative is better served by models that incorporate both connectionist and symbolic representations. (shrink)

In this study we examined whether parents’ perceptions of students’ anxiety as well as perceived support from both teachers and classmates were predictive of changes in students’ academic motivation during the first wave of COVID-19. To this end, we used a retrospective pretest-posttest design together with a latent change score model to analyze our data. From April to May of 2020, 394 Portuguese parents of students in grades 1–9 participated in this study. Our results showed that students’ anxiety and teachers’ (...) social support, as perceived by parents, were highly significant predictors of academic motivation changes. Specifically, we found a negative effect of anxiety and a positive effect of teachers’ social support on students’ academic motivation. Our results did not show, however, a significant predictive role of classmates’ social support. This study provides an important contribution to further understand the intrapersonal and interpersonal factors that are associated with the decline of students’ academic motivation during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pivotal role of teachers in sustaining students’ academic motivation and other relevant educational implications for the ongoing pandemic are discussed. (shrink)

Margaret Archer plays a leading role in the sociological analysis of the relation between structure and agency, and particularly in the study of reflexivity. The main aim of this article is to discuss her approach, focusing on the main contributions and limitations of Archer’s theory of reflexivity. It is argued that even though her research is a pioneering one, proposing an operationalization of the concept of reflexivity in view of its empirical implementation, it also minimizes crucial social factors and the (...) dimensions necessary for a more complex and multi-dimensional study of the concept, such as social origins, family socialization, processes of internalization of exteriority, the role of other structure–agency mediation mechanisms and the persistence of social reproduction. (shrink)

This article argues that thinking about entrepreneurship as a potential instrument for relief from endemic poverty and disadvantage, especially among the Indigenous, has all too often been captive to a concept of entrepreneurship that is built out of constrained economic and cultural assumptions. The authors develop this argument from a critical discussion of contributions by Karl Polanyi and Robert Heilbroner. The result is that approaches to venture have been encouraged that are sometimes a poor fit for the circumstances of those (...) they are meant to benefit, and other forms that could have considerable promise have gone unexplored. This article outlines some features of Indigenous culture and build on the analysis of David Harper to construct an improved notion of entrepreneurship that allows for these distinctive features. The article concludes that research and policy making concerning entrepreneurship as an instrument of development among the Indigenous need to be undertaken with this reconstructed understanding of entrepreneurship that is a better fit for the realities of Indigenous culture. (shrink)

The International Criminal Court (ICC) is responsible for prosecuting individuals for heinous crimes that take place during civil and/or international armed conflicts, including sexual violence. Prosecuting this crime relies primarily on survivor accounts, but witnesses often fear the psychological effects of giving such testimony, particularly because there is a high risk of retraumatization, a stigma associated with victimhood, and a fear of victim-blaming. Thus, the Court’s Victims and Witness Unit (VWU) puts forth provisions for questioning vulnerable witnesses, requiring, in part, (...) that questioners avoid embarrassing or offending witnesses. Using a discourse analytic approach, this paper examines transcripts from three recent ICC cases dealing with wartime sexual violence—_Bemba, Ongwen_, and _Katanga and Chui—_exploring the discursive strategies employed by prosecutors and defense attorneys in these trials as they navigate arguing their cases before the judges while also tailoring their questions to adhere to the VWU’s provisions. I show that adhering to the provisions often involves relying on euphemistic expressions to discuss rape—which enter the trial discourse through linguistic formulations and reformulations—even though these expressions reflect the language used to discuss consensual sex and not sexual violence. Thus, this method of adhering to the provisions can undermine the prosecution’s case while helping the defense’s. (shrink)

This paper considers the UN efforts to introduce a legally binding Treaty on corporate accountability for human rights impacts in the context of other proposed legislation at country level, on the one hand, and existing voluntary initiatives like the UN Guiding Principles (2011), on the other. What we are interested in is whether the proposed Treaty signals a transition from voluntary initiatives (based on moral commitments) to law (that is, a focus on compliance), and the extent to which it might (...) stimulate or hinder links between judicial and non-judicial initiatives. The scholars who have explicitly addressed these two divides are – Michael Sandel, on theory v. practice; and Amartya Sen, on law v. morality. We engage with their views, in sections II and III respectively, seeking to build an integrated approach to help us overcome these dualisms. We further consider John Ruggie’s “principled pragmatism”, a strategy that he uses to build the Protect, Respect and Remedy (henceforth, PRR) Framework; and we invoke arguments from casuistry as well as a practice-focused deontology (Thomas Donaldson’s) in favour of an ethics ‘beyond cognition’, which we consider better suited than either utilitarian or principle-based theories to guide the debate on human rights. This is because it allows us to take non-rational factors into account (such as emotions and personal affiliations), when judging the kind of common good we consider worth pursuing. In the last section of the paper, we investigate whether and how might the Treaty illustrate the two divides, trying to (a) distinguish between purely legal elements and those of a wider nature, to do with morality; and (b) understand what might help bridge the gap between theoretical commitments to the universality of human rights and various practical challenges. Our aim is not to evaluate the Treaty, from a legal viewpoint, or suggest improvements to it (lawyers are better placed to do that); rather, we seek to investigate the way in which the proposed Treaty – which is the first attempt to address the challenge of transnational business and human rights in international law – combines moral and legal aspects, and what this tells us about the world we live in. (shrink)

Business Ethics: A European Review, EarlyView.

The contemporary confluence of globalization and ethical pluralism is at the origin of many ethical challenges that confront business nowadays, both in practice and in theory. One of the challenges arising from the development of globalization has to do with respect for cultural diversity. It is often said that the success of economic globalization tends towards social and cultural homogeneity. To the extent that cultural diversity is usually seen as a valuable reality, that global trend seems to contradict our efforts (...) to respect ethical pluralism, both personal and cultural, within society. In this paper I argue that (a) ethical minimalism, despite its emphasis on tolerance and justice, does not take pluralism seriously into account in present-day society, and (b) ethical minimalism is not suited to balancing the homogenizing trend of globalization. Certainly ethical norms are necessary, but by no means are they sufficient in themselves to encourage either justice or tolerance; nor are they sufficient to inspire and encourage good practices and sound regulations. Instead, virtue-based ethics has the capacity of inspiring and encouraging good practices. Particularly, virtue-based ethics is able to inspire a serious dialogue about ethical and legal issues both in the public arena and within organizations. (shrink)

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)

U ovom članku raspravljamo o hipotezi proširenog jastva Andyja Clarka i Davida Chalmersa, a osobito o prigovoru prema kojemu proširenom jastvu nedostaje stabilnost i kontinuitet koji su potrebni da bismo ga smatrali identičnim kroz vrijeme. Pokušavamo pokazati da je taj prigovor neodrživ. Raspravljamo i o gledištu prema kojemu se drugi tip jastva, to jest narativno jastvo, također može shvatiti kao prošireno, i tvrdimo da stabilnost i kontinuitet toga tipa jastva također nisu ugroženi ako ga proširimo izvan granica čovjekova tijela. Stoga, (...) barem što se tiče tih tipova jastva, kada razmišljamo o problemima osobnog identiteta, nije potrebno ograničiti se na internalizirano jastvo. (shrink)

This book joins the contemporary recovery of Kant’s empirical works to highlight the relevance of his concept of culture for understanding the sources of various characteristic modern dilemmas, such as the tension between culture and happiness, the morally ambivalent nature of cultural progress, or the existing conflicts between a factual plurality of cultures and the historical forces pressing toward a universal civilization. The book will be of special interest for Kantian scholars, moral and political philosophers, as well as philosophers of (...) culture. (shrink)

We report two new phenomena of deontic reasoning: (1) For conditionals with deontic content such as, "If the nurse cleaned up the blood then she must have worn rubber gloves", reasoners make more modus tollens inferences (from "she did not wear rubber gloves" to "she did not clean up the blood") compared to conditionals with epistemic content. (2) For conditionals in the subjunctive mood with deontic content, such as, "If the nurse had cleaned up the blood then she must have (...) had to wear rubber gloves", reasoners make the same frequency of all inferences as they do for conditionals in the indicative mood with deontic content. In this regard, subjunctive deontics are different from subjunctive epistemic conditionals: reasoners interpret subjunctive epistemic conditionals as counterfactual and they make more negative inferences such as modus tollens from them. The experiments show these two phenomena occur for deontic conditionals that contain the modal auxiliary "must" and ones that do not. We discuss the results in terms of the mental representations of deontic conditionals and of counterfactual conditionals. (shrink)

Este trabalho tem como principal foco de análise o currículo oficial português relacionado com a componente de História, para o Ensino Básico, em particular as ausências que aí mais sobressaem. Estas podem relacionar-se com os conhecimentos substantivos que se apartam da abordagem preconizada por variadas razões (passados incómodos? temas difíceis? grupos não poderosos? …) ou com as competências de pensamento histórico (multiperspetiva, significância, causalidade, empatia, …) que parecem ter sido esquecidas quando se estruturou certo percurso de aprendizagem para estudantes com (...) idades entre os 6 e os 15 anos. Como considerações maiores, constata-se, naqueles textos curriculares (denominado Aprendizagens Essenciais), uma aparente simplificação genérica da narrativa histórica que se conta aos mais jovens cidadãos do mundo atual. A inevitável seleção de determinados saberes em detrimento de outros, na verdade, contribui, acima de tudo, para o escamotear de uma literacia histórica que podia, e devia, alcançar outros níveis. O processo de ensino (e de aprendizagem) da História, desde o começo da escolaridade obrigatória, tem de orientar-se no sentido de uma formação cidadã, esclarecida, democrática, intertemporal. As inexistências no que concerne aos conteúdos considerados ou ao raciocínio potenciado, por sua vez, somente comprometem aquele desígnio. (shrink)

The Fourth Industrial Revolution based on digitalization, the development of AI, robotics, big data, and increasing automation is dredging up older debates on the end of human work. This article contributes to this debate arguing that these changing circumstances represent an opportunity to advance a renewed consideration of human work. By emphasizing its most distinctively human dimensions, including gratuitousness, relationality, and meaningfulness, we propose the articulation of a social model that recognizes relational goods as a specific contribution of human work (...) in an attempt to overcome the state and the market's monopoly of public life built around the dichotomy between the private and the public. Such a social model is based on the concept of circular subsidiarity, which represents a departure from traditional notions of subsidiarity by promoting a dynamic and reciprocal interplay between three essential societal spheres: the state, the market, and organized civil society, all of which have their role to fulfill by providing security, efficiency, and relational goods. Ultimately, this article suggests that circular subsidiarity can lead to a more inclusive and equitable social model by acknowledging how relational goods not only humanize civil society but also sustain the functioning of both the market and the state. (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)

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)

This paper will address the collaborative networks and the gendered organization of the scientific work at the first Unit on Human Genetics of the Mexican Institute for Social Security. There, women and men had different tasks, duties and authority according to their gender and individual and professional skills. I will focus on physician Susana Kofman, who specialized in cytogenetics with Jérôme Lejeune and Jean de Grouchy in France, and physician Leonor Buentello, who graduated in virus genetics in Germany. This narrative (...) intends to return them to the forefront of the history of cytogenetics and to illustrate the contribution of women to scientific developments when research on human genetics was becoming a medical domain for diagnosis at an international level. (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.

Although Kant is not usually counted among the forerunners of social sciences, any look at the work of the most prominent social theorists of the past century shows the pervasive influence of Kant's philosophy. This influence is obvious and crucial at the epistemological level, if only because Kant himself set the frame for subsequent discussion of the difference between human and natural sciences. Yet, Kant's work is also rich in substantive contributions to social theory, which may be articulated around his (...) conception of culture and cultural progress. (shrink)

In Understanding Moral Obligation (2012), Robert Stern sets out to provide a fresh interpretation of the role of autonomy in Kant’s moral philosophy and attempts to rectify J. B. Schneewind’s standard account in The Invention of Autonomy (1998). While Stern agrees that Kant’s resort to autonomy is at the basis of a constructivist account of moral obligation, he claims that autonomy plays no role in Kant’s theory of value, such that, in this respect, Kant remains a realist. Accordingly, Stern characterizes (...) Kant’s moral philosophy as a “hybrid” view because he sees it as involving a compromise between realism with regard to value and constructivism with regard to obligation. Stern’s interpretation relies on a sharp distinction between value and obligation. The purpose of the present article is to question his reliance on that rigid distinction, which involves intermixing theoretical and practical reason and assumes a distorted view of human agency. (shrink)

El presente artículo tiene como objetivo analizar y reconstruir la postura de John Stuart Mill respecto del problema de la inducción. Mostraremos que Mill si bien conoció las objeciones de Hume, no se refiere a ellas en gran medida porque para él la justificación de la inducción es posible. La hipótesis principal será probada por medio de dos tesis: la primera, alude a la evasión de la argumentación circular respecto de la justificación de la inferencia inductiva; y la segunda, refiere (...) al tipo de inducciones que fundamentan el principio de regularidad: inducciones por enumeración simple. (shrink)

The Interconnected model of teacher professional growth elaborated by Clarke and Hollingsworth (2002) is based on four intertwined domains of teacher action: the external domain, the domain of consequence, the personal domain and the domain of practice. The aim of the research is to examine how the model works in the Croatian education system using the example of a biology teacher’s case study. In the theoretical part, an overview of the theoretical foundations of the model is described with reference to (...) its application in studies on the professional growth of teachers. The empirical part of the paper presents the results of the research in accordance with the domains of the Interconnected model of the teacher’s professional growth. The results showed the complexity of teacher growth network processes that sometimes take place simultaneously in different domains and in different directions. The paper contributes to the deepening of scientific knowledge in the field of teacher professional growth, which is an important strategy in achieving the general well-being of students and schools, and thus the education system as a whole. (shrink)

This article aims to show that the practice of attention can create an openness to the truth, from where ethics arises. It does so by exploring the role attention plays, according to Ricoeur, in Freud’s thought. Ricoeur shows how in the first stage of Freud’s thinking – that of the Project of a Scientific Psychology – attention is one of the instances in which a purely mechanical quantitative explanation can be questioned. Further on, with the introduction of narcissism, Ricœur shows (...) that attention, insofar as it opens a space for the “wounding truth,” opposes narcissism. Finally, the article explains how in the therapeutic setting an attentional epochē allows the therapist to be “the reality principle in flesh and in act,” so that the ego can gain control. According to Ricœur, this non-judgmental gaze opens a space of truthfulness for the patient’s self-knowledge which, although not being the totality of ethics, constitutes its threshold. (shrink)

Autorretratar-se é um dos objetivos de Michel de Montaigne, em seus Ensaios. Para que sua imagem se manifeste, ele utiliza-se de vários recursos literários a fim de despertar a sensibilidade do leitor. O apelo ao lugar-comum relativo ao elogio a um amigo, não deixa de seu um importante recurso da Arte Retórica utilizado pelo autor, como o fizeram filósofos anteriores e posteriores a Montaigne. No seu caso, no entanto, por ser verídico o seu relato, mais uma vez, apesar do uso (...) de artifício retórico, Montaigne confere naturalidade ao texto, envolvendo sensivelmente o leitor e possibilitando ainda mais que ele adentre no plano de significação imagético.Palavras-chave: Montaigne; Arte Retórica; Pintura; Amizade. (shrink)

This article explores one aspect of Kant's crucial contribution to the philosophy of culture. It does so by analysing two different approaches to the notion of culture, which are explicit in his work. The first, which may be called "genetical", presents culture almost as a result of a natural dialectic. The second, which I call "practical", regards culture as a task for the human being.

O presente artigo propõe-se a analisar as vantagens do acesso aos documentos digitais e ao mesmo tempo, apontar desafios encontrados ao pesquisar em documentos impressos. Neste intuito, discorre-se brevemente sobre uma experiência vivida ao pesquisar em acervos físicos e digitais em bibliotecas portuguesas. Como fundamentação teórica, busca dar ênfase aos documentos de valor histórico e ressaltar a relevância do uso da tecnologia no acesso à informação. Como resultado, o estudo permitiu constatar que o uso da tecnologia da informação aplicada ao (...) patrimônio documental oferece inúmeros ganhos tanto em relação à redução de tempo quanto aos custos empregados com a reprodução de cópias e da massa documental acumulada. Por fim, pode-se perceber que ainda é insignificante o número de instituições que investem nesses recursos, o que dificulta o acesso a esse patrimônio e consequentemente compromete o papel de responsabilidade social, o de disponibilizar os documentos à sociedade em tempo hábil. (shrink)

Recent progress in our understanding of mitotic chromosome dynamics has been accelerated by the identification of two essential protein complexes, cohesin and condensin. Cohesin is required for holding sister chromatids (duplicated chromosomes) together from S phase until the metaphase‐to‐anaphase transition. Condensin is a central player in chromosome condensation, a process that initiates at the onset of mitosis. The main focus of this review is to discuss how the mitotic metaphase chromosome is assembled and shaped by a precise balance between the (...) cohesion and condensation machineries. We argue that, in different eukaryotic organisms, the balance of cohesion and condensation is adjusted in such a way that the size and shape of the resulting chromosomes are best suited for their accurate segregation. BioEssays 23:924–935, 2001. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

Resumo: Focamos neste trabalho algumas das tensões vivenciadas por professores pesquisadores vinculados ao sistema de Pós-graduação brasileiro, no contexto das transformações recentes da universidade. Os protagonistas da PG buscam alternativas éticas para o que consideram descaminhos na produção de conhecimentos no contexto científico. O trabalho decorre dos resultados de um conjunto de pesquisas sobre temas associados à produção em nível stricto sensu, desenvolvidas na última década por diversos pesquisadores em grupos ou projetos de investigação. Os resultados vêm mostrando cada vez (...) maior interferência de organismos nacionais de regulação, controle e avaliação do sistema de PG no funcionamento da universidade, ferindo a sua autonomia. Em consequência, os professores pesquisadores que atuam na PG veem-se compelidos a obedecer a dois ‘patrões’, ou ‘senhorios’, cujas exigências são distintas e não raro antagônicas. Diante dos frequentes conflitos entre as exigências, prevalece a subserviência ao órgão externo, já que as próprias IES estão sob avaliação destes órgãos. Neste contexto, emerge o debate sobre a excelência da produção acadêmico-científica, trazendo-se à tona os limites da produção/produtivismo. Como contribuição trazemos a noção de pertinência territorial para pensar outra possível modalidade de excelência. Por fim, enriquecemos a discussão da problemática, a partir da perspectiva do pensamento decolonial, que envolve a crítica ao eurocentrismo vigente em nossa academia e propõe o ‘penso onde sou’ como caminho para que a produção científica encontre alternativas, conectadas com as realidades e necessidades dos territórios em que estão instaladas as universidades e seus programas de PG. (shrink)

The maintenance of professional competence is a core ethical responsibility of health professionals. Continuing Education (CE) is one quality assurance mechanism that helps health professionals to...

This book provides insights on how emerging technosciences come together with new forms of governance and ethical questioning. Combining science and technologies and ethics approaches, it looks at the emergence of three key technoscientific domains - body enhancement technologies, biometrics and technologies for the production of space -exploring how human bodies and minds, the movement of citizens and space become matters of technoscientific governance. The emergence of new and digital technologies pose new challenges for representative democracy and existing forms of (...) citizenship. As citizens encounter and have to adapt to technological change in their everyday life, new forms of conviviality and contestation emerge. This book is a key reference for scholars interested in the governance of emerging technosciences in the fields of science and technology studies and ethics. (shrink)

The novels of the Civil Rights Era are the place where voices speak the unspeakable, where the reader is showed from various angles the human character in times of conflict. The novels chosen for analysis—The Color Purple and Native Son uncover oppression and trauma, ways to cope with the ills of a society, and the forms of redemption or healing methods according to the case. The issues tackled are not just racial, they are human issues too. In every story there (...) are universal lessons for times of conflict when the power of reason should prevail. The message is to learn from history and thus prevent evil from reappearing. (shrink)