Background:Moral distress is considered to be the negative feelings that arise when one knows the morally correct response to a situation but cannot act because of institutional or hierarchal constraints.Objectives:To analyze moral distress and its relation with sociodemographic and academic variables in undergraduate students from different universities in Brazil.Method:Quantitative study with a cross-sectional design. Data were collected through the Moral Distress Scale for Nursing Students, with 499 nursing students from three universities in the extreme south of Brazil answering the scale. (...) The data were analyzed in the statistical software SPSS version 22.0, through descriptive statistical analysis, association tests (t-test and analysis of variance), and linear regression models.Ethical considerations:Approval for the study was obtained from the Research Ethics Committee at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande.Findings:The mean intensity of moral distress in the constructs ranged from 1.60 to 2.55. As to the occurrence of situations leading to moral distress in the constructs, the frequencies ranged from 1.21 to 2.43. The intensity level of moral distress showed higher averages in the more advanced grades of the undergraduate nursing course, when compared to the early grades of this course (between 5 and 10 grade, average = 2.60–3.14, p = 0.000).Conclusion:The demographic and academic characteristics of the undergraduate nursing students who referred higher levels of moral distress were being enrolled in the final course semesters, were at a federal university, and had no prior degree as an auxiliary nurse/nursing technician. (shrink)

Metaphysical realism about mental disorder is the thesis that mental disorder exists mind-independently. There are two ways to challenge metaphysical realism about mental disorder. The first is by denying that mental disorder exists. The second is by denying that mental disorder exists mind-independently. Or, differently put, by arguing that mental disorder is mind-dependent. The aim of this paper is three-fold: (a) to examine three ways in which mental disorder can be said to be mind-dependent (namely, by being causally dependent on (...) the human mind, by being weakly dependent on human attitudes, and by being strongly dependent on human attitudes), (b) to clarify their differences, and (c) to discuss their implications regarding metaphysical realism about mental disorder. I argue that mental disorder being mind-dependent in the first two senses is compatible with metaphysical realism about mental disorder, whereas mental disorder being mind-dependent in the third sense is not. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the similarity between Wittgenstein’s use of thought experiments and Relativity Theory. I begin with introducing Wittgenstein’s idea of “thought experiments” and a tentative classification of different kinds of thought experiments in Wittgenstein’s work. Then, after presenting a short recap of some remarks on the analogy between Wittgenstein’s point of view and Einstein’s, I suggest three analogies between the status of Wittgenstein’s mental experiments and Relativity theory: the topics of time dilation, the search for invariants, and (...) the role of measuring tools in Special Relativity. This last point will help to better define Wittgenstein’s idea of description as the core of his philosophical enterprise. (shrink)

Although recent empirical research suggests that there is a gender gap in Anglophone philosophy, no research has been done on the representation of women in non‐Anglophone philosophy. The present study constitutes a first step toward filling this void in the literature by providing empirical evidence on the representation of female students and female faculty members in Greek universities' departments of philosophy. Our findings indicate that the underrepresentation of female students in philosophy is not a universal phenomenon, since female students constitute (...) the majority of philosophy students in Greece at both the undergraduate and the graduate levels. However, our findings also suggest that the low number of women in philosophy at the faculty level is not a problem unique to Anglophone philosophy, since female faculty members comprise, on average, only 29% of philosophy faculty members in Greece. In order to explain these findings, we argue, first, that the teaching of philosophy at the secondary level may motivate female students in Greece to enter and persist in philosophy, and, second, that since the gender gap at the faculty level in Greece cannot be attributed to the low number of female students in the philosophy pipeline, the causes of women's poor participation in philosophy at the faculty level should be looked for elsewhere. (shrink)

A presente proposta tem como objetivo dialogar sobre o papel social da religião e sua relação com o desrespeito à alteridade no espaço escolar. Partindo do conceito de Lévinas sobre alteridade, buscar-se-á analisar a relação conflituosa existente entre alunos adeptos de religiões de matriz africana e alunos que professam outra religião, buscando assim refletir para sobre o papel do professor nesses casos. Discussões como estas se fazem necessárias, pois buscam meios para amenizar esses conflitos; para isso, fundamenta-se em pensadores que (...) abordam a importância da não banalização do outro e da valorização das religiões de matriz africana, compreendendo que as mesmas fazem parte da realidade dos alunos e que, por muito tempo, foram inviabilizadas, demonizadas e hoje ainda passam por um processo de não aceitação por parte da sociedade, neste caso no meio escolar. Parte deste artigo foi apresentado durante o I Colóquio Internacional Bullying Submerso: Religião e Etnicidade na Escola, promovido pelo Programa de pós Graduação em Ciências da Religião da Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Goiás, em outubro de 2015, e é fruto de pesquisas realizadas[1] no doutorado e de vivências enquanto professora de 1° e 2° fase da rede estadual da mesma cidade, e como umbandista Omó Ifá e abiã de orisá. [1] Essa pesquisa não recebeu financiamento, porém, parte dela foi realizada durante os estudos de doutorado. (shrink)

The paper focuses on the current conditions of the Shoah’s memory transmission. The purpose is to point out the frames where a contemporary theory and praxis of the collective memory can be formulated. The first section, reffering to most recent studies, shows both components caracterizing today’s process of memorizing the Shoah: the passagge from memory to post-memory (Hirsh) and the whirling increase of the chance to record and reproduce the past (Derrida, Ferraris). In the second secion, referring to this theoretical (...) frame, I analyse the radical trasformations of the monument as the traditional media of the european public memory. The reference to the empirical case of the Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas, the Shoah’s Memorial designed by Peter Eisenman, underlines the shift from monument to counter-monument (Young, J. E.) by materializing both the troubles and an inventive strategy to exit the saturation of the current memorial speech. (shrink)

Philosophy courses help students develop logical reasoning and argument skills or so it is widely assumed. To test if this is actually the case, we examined university students’ familiarity with the basic tools for argument. Our findings, based on a sample of 651 students enrolled in philosophy courses at six Greek universities, indicate that students who have prior experience with philosophy are more familiar with the basic tools for argument, and that students who have taken philosophy courses at the university (...) have stronger argument-recognition and argument-evaluation skills compared to university students with no prior experience with philosophy. Moreover, our findings suggest that students get more familiar with the basic tools for argument as their level of engagement with philosophy increases, and that they get significantly better at evaluating arguments when they become graduate students in philosophy. However, our findings also suggest that the majority of students in philosophy classrooms haven’t developed fluency in basic argument-related concepts and skills. To remedy this, we argue that philosophy instructors need to re-think the place that the teaching of argument has in philosophy courses, and the way that they teach students about argument. (shrink)

Chaque fois que nous "donnons forme" à quelque chose, cette représentation nous figure, par signes, l'objet évoqué, mais nous confirme également qu'il ne s'agit que d'un simulacre. D'où le besoin, à chaque époque, de créer du vivant pour pallier cette déception : tel est le sens du mythe de Pygmalion. Ce livre s'organise donc autour de deux pôles : d'un côté la nécessité de figurer, et de figurer l'acte même de la perception (voir le chapitre "Un oeil immense artificiel") ; (...) de l'autre, l'impératif de dépasser le signe. Il s'agit d'un défi radical, qui concerne l'avenir même des arts. C'est la raison de ce titre, A vif, qui témoigne d'un "coup d'oeil" : un regard et une incision pratiquée à vif dans l'objet, un désir de définitif qui ne caresse plus la forme, mais qui pénètre, met à nu, éviscère dans les paroles et dans les actes. Dedans et derrière l'oeil, comme dans l'un des plus impassibles traités d'anatomie du Cinquecento. Aujourd'hui, est-il encore vif notre oeil qui cherche le vivant? N'est-il pas lui-même défiguré par l'informe qui s'est logé en nous? Où est la pupilla viva qui illumine le Paradis et qui, de Dante à Baudelaire, a animé, de longs siècles durant, tant de quête mentale? Il faut remonter à ces origines, parcourir les espaces séculaires et sidéraux dans lesquels le cosmos était ordre, beauté, compréhension ; où, justement, il était nécessaire de "captiver les yeux pour avoir l'âme". Cet essai se voudrait une parabole déployée au fil de l'ardente soif humaine d'"exorbiter", de brûler la distance du point de vue, pour accéder, maintenant et à jamais, au vivant. (shrink)

Many of the computing systems programmed using Machine Learning are opaque: it is difficult to know why they do what they do or how they work. Explainable Artificial Intelligence aims to develop analytic techniques that render opaque computing systems transparent, but lacks a normative framework with which to evaluate these techniques’ explanatory successes. The aim of the present discussion is to develop such a framework, paying particular attention to different stakeholders’ distinct explanatory requirements. Building on an analysis of “opacity” from (...) philosophy of science, this framework is modeled after accounts of explanation in cognitive science. The framework distinguishes between the explanation-seeking questions that are likely to be asked by different stakeholders, and specifies the general ways in which these questions should be answered so as to allow these stakeholders to perform their roles in the Machine Learning ecosystem. By applying the normative framework to recently developed techniques such as input heatmapping, feature-detector visualization, and diagnostic classification, it is possible to determine whether and to what extent techniques from Explainable Artificial Intelligence can be used to render opaque computing systems transparent and, thus, whether they can be used to solve the Black Box Problem. (shrink)

In order to highlight the intimate relationship between imagining, drawing and making worlds, this essay questions the educational meaning of children to initiate in the action of drawing in face of the growing cultural tendency of the body being less and less required to produce senses. The incarnated action of drawing, as an aesthetic action of touching and being touched by the world when transposing the visible limits and entering into the intimacy of worldly invisibility, constitutes an experience that is (...) as recurrent and trivialized in school daily life as it is existentially complex due to its poetic power to enter the invisible and inaugurate worldviews. The historical disqualification of the image and imagination in Western thought, supported by the separation between subjectivity of the body and objectivity of the world, does not allow educational thought to consider the phenomenon of poetic imagination as an existential experience of language insertion in the world from the gesture of drawing. Gesture that finds its specificity in the instant the hand traces and inscribes lines on the surface of the supports as infinitely creative writing. The aesthetic gesture of drawing, temporalized by the rhythm of the body in the emergence of the fabulation that accompanies the repetition of the marks, implies a poetic experience of language that involves the fusion of two senses: that of the gesture in materiality and that of the mark configured in it, marked and cicatrized in the surface of the support by the body’s action that performed it. The approximation between education, arts and childhood allows us to highlight the philosophical and pedagogical tensions that involve the question of poetic imagination and to take another look at the action of drawing in the context of children's education. What emerges, from the dialogue between Gaston Bachelard, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Luc Nancy, is the relevance of the educational intention of caring for the vital function of language as an aesthetic and poetic experience that is constituted in the processuality of the body to make something appear that produces and contains presence, that which promotes and expands the existential density of the real. (shrink)

The received view of dynamical explanation is that dynamical cognitive science seeks to provide covering law explanations of cognitive phenomena. By analyzing three prominent examples of dynamicist research, I show that the received view is misleading: some dynamical explanations are mechanistic explanations, and in this way resemble computational and connectionist explanations. Interestingly, these dynamical explanations invoke the mathematical framework of dynamical systems theory to describe mechanisms far more complex and distributed than the ones typically considered by philosophers. Therefore, contemporary dynamicist (...) research reveals the need for a more sophisticated account of mechanistic explanation. (shrink)

Models developed using machine learning are increasingly prevalent in scientific research. At the same time, these models are notoriously opaque. Explainable AI aims to mitigate the impact of opacity by rendering opaque models transparent. More than being just the solution to a problem, however, Explainable AI can also play an invaluable role in scientific exploration. This paper describes how post-hoc analytic techniques from Explainable AI can be used to refine target phenomena in medical science, to identify starting points for future (...) investigations of causal relationships, and to generate possible explanations of target phenomena in cognitive science. In this way, this paper describes how Explainable AI—over and above machine learning itself—contributes to the efficiency and scope of data-driven scientific research. (shrink)

Although there is a growing acknowledgement of the potential of a more nuanced healthcare paradigm and practice, the discourses of health promotion—and with that nursing and other healthcare professionals’ practice—still tend to focus on the medical diagnosis, disease and the rationale of biomedicine. There is a need for shifting to a human practice that draws on a broader perspective related to illness. This requires a transformation of practices which can be constructed within a narrative understanding. A narrative approach appreciates the (...) importance of emotion and intersubjective relation in the telling and listening that occur in the clinical encounter. The essence of nursing lies in the creative imagination, the sensitive spirit and the intelligent understanding of the individuals’ possibilities of becoming empowered in his or her own life. This entails that the focus of the use of patients’ narratives is, ultimately, not the story itself, but the nurses’ and other healthcare professionals’ ability to support the patients in finding useful meaning in their stories. Herein, it is of particular importance to let the patients narrate about what is sparkling moments or events in the lived life. Stories with such focus can open up for patients’ hopes and dreams, which gives inspiration for finding meaningful ways to cope in life empowering personal recovery. It is, therefore, crucial to transform clinical settings into places that acknowledge the need for imagination and creativity, aiming at creating the opportunity for sensibility and vision essential to encouraging a narrative approach and thereby the ability to reflect upon and promote a healing process. (shrink)

To date, no definition of life has been unequivocally accepted by the scientific community. In frustration, some authors advocate alternatives to standard definitions. These include using a list of characteristic features, focusing on life’s effects, or categorizing biospheres rather than life itself; treating life as a fuzzy category, a process or a cluster of contingent properties; or advocating a ‘wait-and-see’ approach until other examples of life are created or discovered. But these skeptical, operational, and pluralistic approaches have intensified the debate, (...) rather than settled it. Given the failure of even these approaches, we advocate a new strategy. In this paper, we reverse the usual line of reasoning and argue that the “life problem” arises from thinking incorrectly about the nature of life. Scientists most often conceptualize life as a class or kind, with earthly life as a single instance of it. Instead, we advocate thinking about Earth’s Life as an individual, in the way that species are now thought to be. In this view, Life is a monophyletic clade that originated with a last universal common ancestor, and includes all its descendants. We can continue to use the category ‘life’ pragmatically to refer to similarities between various phenomena and Life. But the relevant similarities are a matter of interest and preference, not a matter of fact. The search for other life in the Universe, then, is merely a search for entities that resemble parts of Life in whatever sense astrobiologists find most appealing. This does not mean that the search for evolved complexity elsewhere in the universe or its creation in the lab are futile endeavors, but that debates over whether they count as ‘life’ are. Ironically, finally abandoning the concept ‘life’ may make our searches for evolved complexity more fruitful. We explain why. (shrink)

"Epistola a Memeceo, Maximas capitales, Sentencias vaticanas, fragmentos y testimonios; texto griego y traduccion": p. [87]-161.

This paper discusses the varieties of capitalism in transitional societies in Latin America and Central / Eastern Europe. The intended purpose of these transitions from semi-closed import-substituting economies in the first case and state socialist ones in the second was to institutionalize open-market economies. Twenty or thirty years later, there is a variety of types of capitalism in these countries, which I classify into three: open-market, neo-mercantilist, and anemic. The question for sociology is whether these quite different variants represent temporary (...) stages or distortions in the same process of transition or whether, on the contrary, they may institutionalize as discrete forms of peripheral capitalism. Neither standard “legacy” argu­ments nor institutionalist theories offer satisfactory answers to this question. The multiple modernities approach, on the other hand, is more appropriate as a theoretical perspective, but it has not produced yet specific propositions applicable to this question. My paper makes two claims. First, the successful transfer of institutions depends on the congruence between these institutions and the broader institutional framework of the recipient economies, a point not developed by institutionalist theories. I offer a hypothesis in this regard: Two critical nodes of congruence are the regulatory and extractive capacity of the state and the strength of civil society. Second, market capitalism (as liberal democracy as well) is a complex institution, and some of its components “travel” more easily across societies and institutional frameworks, and therefore are easier to institutionalize. This is the source of the hybrid variants. (shrink)

In this paper I respond to Marcus William Hunt’s argument that vegan parents have pro tanto reasons for not raising their children on a vegan diet because such a diet is potentially harmful to children’s physical and social well-being. In my rebuttal, first I show that in practice all vegan diets, with the exception of wacky diets, are beneficial to children’s well-being ; and that all animal-based diets are potentially unhealthful. Second, I show that vegan children are no more socially (...) outcast than any other group. In other words, veganism does not harm the lives of children. Having considered several studies, I show that the moral reasons that vegan parents may have for raising their children on a vegan diet significantly outweigh the reasons for raising their children on an animal-based diet. Thus, I conclude that parents have a moral obligation to raise their children on a vegan diet. (shrink)

Proceeding on a limited number of general, widely accepted equity criteria, we develop a proposal for distributing common resources. In particular, the proposed fair division mechanism is individually rational, envy-free, Pareto-efficient and satisfies the stand alone test, which follows as a minimum requirement from the resource and population monotonicity criteria. Applied to international climate policy, the thrust of this proposal is that the South should initially be fully compensated for the greenhouse gas abatement measures it is to undertake as a (...) result of efficiency considerations. (shrink)

Bayesian reverse-engineering is a research strategy for developing three-level explanations of behavior and cognition. Starting from a computational-level analysis of behavior and cognition as optimal probabilistic inference, Bayesian reverse-engineers apply numerous tweaks and heuristics to formulate testable hypotheses at the algorithmic and implementational levels. In so doing, they exploit recent technological advances in Bayesian artificial intelligence, machine learning, and statistics, but also consider established principles from cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Although these tweaks and heuristics are highly pragmatic in character and (...) are often deployed unsystematically, Bayesian reverse-engineering avoids several important worries that have been raised about the explanatory credentials of Bayesian cognitive science: the worry that the lower levels of analysis are being ignored altogether; the challenge that the mathematical models being developed are unfalsifiable; and the charge that the terms ‘optimal’ and ‘rational’ have lost their customary normative force. But while Bayesian reverse-engineering is therefore a viable and productive research strategy, it is also no fool-proof recipe for explanatory success. (shrink)

The philosophical conception of mechanistic explanation is grounded on a limited number of canonical examples. These examples provide an overly narrow view of contemporary scientific practice, because they do not reflect the extent to which the heuristic strategies and descriptive practices that contribute to mechanistic explanation have evolved beyond the well-known methods of decomposition, localization, and pictorial representation. Recent examples from evolutionary robotics and network approaches to biology and neuroscience demonstrate the increasingly important role played by computer simulations and mathematical (...) representations in the epistemic practices of mechanism discovery and mechanism description. These examples also indicate that the scope of mechanistic explanation must be re-examined: With new and increasingly powerful methods of discovery and description comes the possibility of describing mechanisms far more complex than traditionally assumed. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the question of whether divine passibility is metaphysically possible using the work of Hartshorne, Creel, Shields, Taliaferro and Sarot. Passibilism is seen to be difficult to assert because of the problem of radical particularity, which is the problem of how God might feel in exactitude the experience of many diverse creatures which are radically particular while also feeling different experiences of other equally radically particular beings. I conclude that the question of passibility is an unresolved problem (...) and should be addressed from the perspective of specific attributes of God such as omniscience and omnipresence. (shrink)

Im Beitrag wird ausgeführt, wie Krisensituationen wie die Coronapandemie Zirkel der Entgrenzung von Misstrauen, Projektionen und Spaltungen in Gang bringen können. Im Zuge dessen werden dann auch individuelle Pathologie und psychische Desintegration, wie sie sich zum Beispiel in Verfolgungsängsten zum Ausdruck bringen, kollektiv neu gerahmt und damit normalisiert. Anhand von Befunden einer Pilotstudie werden entsprechende Dynamiken nachgezeichnet, und es wird aufgezeigt, welche psychosozialen Funktionen der Triumph des Misstrauens erlangen kann.

In a context of pervasive digitalization of the social world, both before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, the field of education has undergone major changes with the development of digital practices and settings. However, the physical presence of the subjects and the body remain something primordial and irreplaceable in traditional educational processes. Thus, it is often assumed that virtuality is opposed to the corporeal reality of the subjects involved in teaching, learning and studying. In this paper we aim to critically (...) challenge this assumption by addressing the phenomenon of virtuality in a more original sense: as a fundamental dimension of corporeality itself. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological insights, we argue that the experience of the virtual is inherently embodied and fully real. We understand corporeality and virtuality as entangled and multidimensional phenomena. At the same time, this leads us to rethink the digital as only one possible medium in which virtuality can appear as inherent to embodied experience. We develop our phenomenological approach in three instances. First, we question and bracket two common assumptions about corporeality. From our critical perspective, assumptions about a disembodied digitality and a devirtualized corporeality represent extremes within which educational discourses currently move. Second, we address the inherent virtuality of embodied experience. We outline the heuristic concept of the virtual body to describe corporeality and virtuality as entangled and multidimensional phenomena that encompass extension, intercorporeality and intermediality. Finally, we make some remarks on the relationships of corporeality and virtuality considering the challenges of digital education. (shrink)

This chapter subsumes David Marr’s levels of analysis account of explanation in cognitive science under the framework of mechanistic explanation: Answering the questions that define each one of Marr’s three levels is tantamount to describing the component parts and operations of mechanisms, as well as their organization, behavior, and environmental context. By explicating these questions and showing how they are answered in several different cognitive science research programs, this chapter resolves some of the ambiguities that remain in Marr’s account, and (...) shows that many different areas and traditions of cognitive scientific research can be unified under the mechanistic framework. (shrink)

At least since Kuhn’s Structure, philosophers have studied the influence of social factors in science’s pursuit of truth and knowledge. More recently, formal models and computer simulations have allowed philosophers of science and social epistemologists to dig deeper into the detailed dynamics of scientific research and experimentation, and to develop very seemingly realistic models of the social organization of science. These models purport to be predictive of the optimal allocations of factors, such as diversity of methods used in science, size (...) of groups, and communication channels among researchers. In this paper we argue that the current research faces an empirical challenge. The challenge is to connect simulation models with data. We present possible scenarios about how the challenge may unfold. (shrink)

Previous research has demonstrated that ratings of the perceived pleasantness and quality of odors can be modulated by auditory stimuli presented at around the same time. Here, we extend these results by assessing whether the hedonic congruence between odor and sound stimuli can modulate the perception of odor intensity, pleasantness, and quality in untrained participants. Unexpectedly, our results reveal that broadband white noise, which was rated as unpleasant in a follow-up experiment, actually had a more pronounced effect on participants’ odor (...) ratings than either the consonant or dissonant musical selections. In particular, participants rated the six smells used as being less pleasant and less sweet when they happened to be listening to white noise, as compared to any one of the other music conditions. What is more, these results also add evidence to support the existence of a close relationship between an odor’s hedonic character and the perception of odor quality. So, for example, independent of the sound condition, pleasant odors were rated as sweeter, less dry, and brighter than the unpleasant odors. These results are discussed in terms of their implications for the understanding of crossmodal correspondences between olfactory and auditory stimuli. (shrink)