Este artículo se propone argumentar por qué la reivindicación o el relego del término campesino constituye una apuesta política por excelencia. En esta dirección, se sostiene que la ambigüedad de aquella categoría, lejos de ser una debilidad, puede tornarse una potencia en la medida que el discurso sobre la diferencia específica sea desplazado por la problematización de la (des)igualdad. En efecto, el interrogante sobre qué es lo que distingue a un campesino cede lugar a la pregunta ¿qué relaciones sociales son (...) puestas en cuestión o reinventadas a partir de la identificación como tal? Para ello, la reflexión teórica adopta un anclaje empírico en el surgimiento del Movimiento Campesino de Santiago del Estero (MOCASE), el cual, pese a los múltiples conflictos y divisiones internas, tiene en común haber acuñado la categoría campesino en un sentido positivo, en el marco de la disputa por la tierra. Cabe aclarar que no es la intención explicitar presuntos núcleos duros de la identidad; tampoco concebirla como etapa anterior o posterior de la acción colectiva, sino examinarla como un proceso dialógico. Asimismo, se aborda el lugar de lo campesino en Argentina y su tensión con el concepto de agricultura familiar. (shrink)

Addressing fatigue is useful in a variety of scenarios and activities. Fatigue has recently been studied from a psychophysiological standpoint. As a result, the expression and impact of peripheral and central fatigue has been evaluated. Driving is one occupation where tiredness has disastrous consequences. BAlert is a smartphone app that approaches exhaustion with psychophysiological measures. More specifically, it evaluates the level of fatigue via heart rate variability data and the cognitive compromise via Stroop effect. The goal of this study is (...) to determine if there are gender differences in fatigue levels among professional drivers using the BAlert app. Statistically significant differences were found in the number of hours awake, in different parameters of HRV, in the level of stress, as well as in the cognitive response evaluated through the app. The results are discussed and their implications for the management of work fatigue are presented. (shrink)

Two competing accounts of value incomparability have been put forward in the recent literature. According to the standard account, developed most famously by Joseph Raz, ‘incomparability’ means determinate failure of the three classic value relations ( better than , worse than , and equally good ): two value-bearers are incomparable with respect to a value V if and only if (i) it is false that x is better than y with respect to V , (ii) it is false that x (...) is worse than y with respect to V and (iii) it is false that x and y are equally good with respect to V . Most philosophers have followed Raz in adopting this account of incomparability. Recently, however, John Broome has advocated an alternative view, on which value incomparability is explained in terms of vagueness or indeterminacy . In this paper I aim to further Broome’s view in two ways. Firstly, I want to supply independent reasons for thinking that the phenomenon of value incomparability is indeed a matter of the indeterminacy inherent in our comparative predicates. Secondly, I attempt to defend Broome’s account by warding off several objections that worry him, due mainly to Erik Carlson and Ruth Chang. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the implications of moral vagueness (viz., the vagueness of moral predicates) for non-naturalist metaethical theories like those recently championed by Shafer-Landau, Parfit, and others. I characterise non-naturalism in terms of its commitment to 7 theses: Cognitivism, Correspondence, Atomism, Objectivism, Supervenience, Non-reductivism, and Rationalism. I start by offering a number of reasons for thinking that moral predicates are vague in the same way in which ‘red’, ‘tall’, and ‘heap’ are said to be. I then argue that (...) the moral non-naturalist seeking to countenance moral vagueness faces a dilemma: are moral properties vague, or perfectly sharp? On either horn of the dilemma, serious problems arise for some of the central tenets of non-naturalism: vague properties seem to threaten Objectivism, Supervenience, and Non-reductivism; on the other hand, sharp properties raise problems for Supervenience and Rationalism. The difficulties on each horn of the dilemma are real, and while they may not be insuperable, they do, at the very least, drastically limit the things non-naturalists can consistently say about moral properties, facts, and reasons. (shrink)

Some comparisons are hard. How should we think about such comparisons? According to John Broome, we should think about them in terms of vagueness. But the vagueness account has remained unpopular thus far. Here I try to bolster it by clarifying the notion of comparative vagueness that lies at its heart.

While practitioners think highly of randomized studies, some philosophers argue that there is no epistemic reason to randomize. Here I show that their arguments do not entail their conclusion. Moreover, I provide novel reasons for randomizing in the context of interventional studies. The overall discussion provides a unified framework for assessing baseline balance, one that holds for interventional and observational studies alike. The upshot: practitioners’ strong preference for randomized studies can be defended in some cases, while still offering a nuanced (...) approach to evidence-appraisal, one where not all non-randomized studies are treated equally. (shrink)

What is a valid measuring instrument? Recent philosophy has attended to logic of justification of measures, such as construct validation, but not to the question of what it means for an instrument to be a valid measure of a construct. A prominent approach grounds validity in the existence of a causal link between the attribute and its detectable manifestations. Some of its proponents claim that, therefore, validity does not depend on pragmatics and research context. In this paper, I cast doubt (...) on the possibility of a context-independent causal account of validity. I assess several versions, arguing that all of them fail to judge the validity of measuring instruments correctly. Because different research purposes require different properties from measuring instruments, no account of validity succeeds without referring to the specific research purpose that creates the need for measurement in the first place. (shrink)

Although for the last 50 years, ethicists dealing with human experimentation have focused primarily on the need to protect individual research subjects and vulnerable groups, biomedical research, especially in genetics, now requires the establishment of standards for the protection of communities. We have developed such a strategy, based on five steps. (i) Identification of community characteristics relevant to the biomedical research setting, (ii) delineation of a typology of different types of communities using these characteristics, (iii) determination of the range of (...) possible community protections, (iv) creation of connections between particular protections and one or more community characteristics necessary for its implementation, and (v) synthesis of community characteristics and possible protections to define protections appropriate for each type of community. Depending on the particular community, consent and consultation, consultation alone, or no added protections may be required for research. (shrink)

The present article aims to offer a synoptic picture of communist Romania’s relations with Third World countries during the Ceaușescu regime. Within these relations, economic and geopolitical motivations coexisted along with ideological ones, thus making the topic one of the most interesting and relevant key for understanding RSR’s complex and cunning international strategy. However, I intend to prove that mere pragmatism is not enough to comprehend the drive behind Ceaușescu’s diplomatic efforts in post-colonial Africa; ideological factors need also to be (...) taken into account. (shrink)

Allocation of very scarce medical interventions such as organs and vaccines is a persistent ethical challenge. We evaluate eight simple allocation principles that can be classified into four categories: treating people equally, favouring the worst-off, maximising total benefits, and promoting and rewarding social usefulness. No single principle is sufficient to incorporate all morally relevant considerations and therefore individual principles must be combined into multiprinciple allocation systems. We evaluate three systems: the United Network for Organ Sharing points systems, quality-adjusted life-years, and (...) disability-adjusted life-years. We recommend an alternative system—the complete lives system—which prioritises younger people who have not yet lived a complete life, and also incorporates prognosis, save the most lives, lottery, and instrumental value principles. (shrink)

Partindo de uma relevante premissa de Paulo Freire, a de que “a compreensão crítica do ato de ler […] não se esgota na decodificação pura da palavra escrita ou da linguagem escrita, mas que se antecipa e se alonga na inteligência do mundo. A leitura do mundo precede a leitura da palavra, daí que a posterior leitura desta não possa prescindir da continuidade da leitura daquele”, o vertente artigo procura analisar os primeiros anos do processo de construção social de um (...) indivíduo-leitor, a saber, Vitor Silva Tavares, timoneiro, a partir de 1974, da histórica casa editora & etc. Com uma infância vivida num meio nada culto ou diletante, e tendo abandonado precocemente os estudos liceais, Vitor Silva Tavares acabou por tornar-se, contra toda a probabilidade, numa figura marcante do campo da edição literária em Portugal na segunda metade do século XX. Ganhando ele espessura de caso, trata-se aqui de reflectir, a partir de elementos obtidos através do recurso à história de vida do referido editor, como sob a colagem de diversos efeitos, socializações e acasos se foi produzindo um perfil singular de indivíduo, perfil esse onde a atividade da leitura ocupou um papel determinante, gerando predisposições mentais, desafios, condicionando a própria vida que Vitor Silva Tavares quis levar, dedicada à prescrição editorial, à mediação da leitura, transferindo para outros impressões que foram primeiramente suas. (shrink)

In this article, I focus on the problem of body as it is developed in Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminars, in contrast with its enigmatic concealment in Being and Time. In the first part, I emphasize the implicit connection of Heidegger’s approach of body with Husserl’s problematic of Leib and Körper, and with his phenomenological analyses of tactility. In the second part, I focus on Heidegger’s distinction between the limits of the lived body and the limits of the corresponding corporeal thing, opening (...) to an ontological understanding of the ecstatic bodying forth of the body. In the third part, I analyse this ecstatic bodiliness in relation to the problem of spatiality, exploring the tension between the here and the over there in the experience of the embodiment. Heidegger not only refuses to understand the space starting from the here of the body, but he also refuses to understand the body starting from the here of the space. Thus, there are two interconnected inversions that Heidegger operates in relation to Husserl: In the topic of spatiality, he rejects the pre-eminence of the here; in relation to the body, he contests the primacy of tactility. Finally, the conclusion stresses that, even if the bodying forth penetrates almost all behaviour of Dasein in the world, there is however a limit of embodiment, an unreachable frontier beyond any possibility of the bodying forth, namely the understanding of being. This also implies that the problem of body needs be understood in the context of the ontological difference. (shrink)

In this article, I will discuss the Husserlian phenomenology of animality, by focusing on several texts of the 1920s in which the animal is determined as an abnormal variation of the human being. My aim is to address the question of the abnormality of the animal by reintegrating it in its original context, which is Husserl’s theory of normality. I will sketch the general framework of this theory, its articulations and strata, in order to eventually raise some paradoxical issues, specifically (...) in relation to how the question of animality is interpreted through the couple normality/abnormality. (shrink)

There is a widely held view on measurement inferences, that goes back to Stevens’s ([1946]) theory of measurement scales and ‘permissible statistics’. This view defends the following prohibition: you should not make inferences from averages taken with ordinal scales (versus quantitative scales: interval or ratio). This prohibition is general—it applies to all ordinal scales—and it is sometimes endorsed without qualification. Adhering to it dramatically limits the research that the social and biomedical sciences can conduct. I provide a Bayesian analysis of (...) this inferential problem, determining when measurements from ordinal scales can be used to confirm hypotheses about relative group averages. The prohibition, I conclude, cannot be upheld, even in a qualified sense. The beliefs needed to make average comparisons are less demanding than those appropriate for quantitative scales. I illustrate with the alleged paradigm ordinal scale, Mohs’ scale of mineral hardness, arguing that the literature has mischaracterized it. (shrink)

Owing to various reasons, Stalinism still represents, according to this essay, a fertile intellectual topic. Therefore, my aim here is to offer a reading of Pavel Campeanu’s works on Stalinism – a relatively unknown Romanian Marxist – through the social history of the Soviet Union in general and of Stalinism in particular advanced by Moshe Lewin. The argumentation advances by taking into account the overall historical frame of the debate (Eastern and Western Marxism during the Cold War) and by stressing (...) some key issues like primitive accumulation, legitimacy, a certain overstretching of the concept of Stalinism and, finally, the issue of totalitarianism. The stake of the essay resides in claiming that Campeanu’s analyses of Stalinism, original and convincing as they are, may favor, in the above-mentioned issues, and regardless the author’s intentions, interpretations belonging to or deriving from the totalitarian school of Cold War and Soviet Studies. (shrink)

As genetic research increasingly focuses on communities, there have been calls for extending research protections to them. We critically examine guidelines developed to protect aboriginal communities and consider their applicability to other communities. These guidelines are based on a model of researcher-community partnership and span the phases of a research project, from protocol development to publication. The complete list of 23 protections may apply to those few non-aboriginal communities, such as the Amish, that are highly cohesive. Although some protections may (...) be applicable to less-cohesive communities, such as Ashkenazi Jews, analysis suggests substantial problems in extending these guidelines in toto beyond the aboriginal communities for which they were developed. (shrink)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) developments are proliferating at an astonishing rate. Unsurprisingly, the number of meaningful studies addressing the social impacts of AI applications in several fields has been remarkable. More recently, several contributions have started exploring the ecological impacts of AI. Machine learning systems do not have a neutral environmental cost, so it is important to unravel the ecological footprint of these techno-scientific developments. In this chapter, we discuss the sustainability of AI from environmental ethics approaches. We examine the moral (...) trade-offs that AI may cause in different moral dimensions and analyse prominent conflicts that may arise from human and more-than-human-centred concerns. (shrink)

In this paper, we develop an organizational account that defines biological functions as causal relations subject to closure in living systems, interpreted as the most typical example of organizationally closed and differentiated self-maintaining systems. We argue that this account adequately grounds the teleological and normative dimensions of functions in the current organization of a system, insofar as it provides an explanation for the existence of the function bearer and, at the same time, identifies in a non-arbitrary way the norms that (...) functions are supposed to obey. Accordingly, we suggest that the organizational account combines the etiological and dispositional perspectives in an integrated theoretical framework. IntroductionDispositional ApproachesEtiological TheoriesBiological Self-maintenance Closure, teleology, and normativityOrganizational differentiationFunctions C1: Contributing to the maintenance of the organization C2: Producing the functional trait Implications and Objections Functional versus useful Dysfunctions, side effects, and accidental contributionsProper functions and selected effectsReproductionRelation with other ‘unitarian’ approachesConclusions. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to examine the problematic frontier that separates the phenomenology of the body and the phenomenology of animality. The main difficulty is to differentiate phenomenologically not only between embodiment and animality, but also between specifically human embodied experience and what is accessible to us through empathy in relation to the corporeality of the animal. I will tackle these questions by considering relevant textual material from the writings of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. On the one (...) hand, I will show that although embodiment and animality are convergent on the level of the naturalistic attitude in Husserl’s Ideas II, they are divergent as soon as we place ourselves in the personalistic attitude, where the body enters into a different conjunction—namely, with the idea of person and of the spiritual world. On the other hand, Heidegger claims that, in spite of the abysmal bodily kinship with the animal, there is an essential difference between the human body and the animal organism, thus opposing the tendencies to humanize the animal and to animalize the human. (shrink)

Recent years have witnessed intensive efforts to specify which requirements ethical artificial intelligence (AI) must meet. General guidelines for ethical AI consider a varying number of principles important. A frequent novel element in these guidelines, that we have bundled together under the term explicability, aims to reduce the black-box character of machine learning algorithms. The centrality of this element invites reflection on the conceptual relation between explicability and the four bioethical principles. This is important because the application of general ethical (...) frameworks to clinical decision-making entails conceptual questions: Is explicability a free-standing principle? Is it already covered by the well-established four bioethical principles? Or is it an independent value that needs to be recognized as such in medical practice? We discuss these questions in a conceptual-ethical analysis, which builds upon the findings of an empirical document analysis. On the example of the medical specialty of radiology, we analyze the position of radiological associations on the ethical use of medical AI. We address three questions: Are there references to explicability or a similar concept? What are the reasons for such inclusion? Which ethical concepts are referred to? (shrink)

Commentators often claim that medical research subjects are coerced into participating in clinical studies. In recent years, such claims have appeared especially frequently in ethical discussions of research in developing countries. Medical research ethics is more important than ever as we move into the 21st century because worldwide the pharmaceutical industry has grown so much and shows no sign of slowing its growth. This means that more people are involved in medical research today than ever before, and in the future (...) even more will be involved. However, despite the pressing need for reflection on research ethics, it is important to carefully identify the concerns we have about research. Otherwise we run the risk that the moral language we use, and which we hear other people use, may do our moral thinking for us. We argue that many recent claims about the occurrence of coercion in medical research are misguided and misuse the word "coercion." We try to identify the real problems, and urge people to attend carefully to the implications of their descriptions of moral problems in research. (shrink)

There is a received view on measurement scales. It includes both a classification of scales and a set of prescriptions regarding measurement inferences. This article casts doubt on the adequacy of this received view. To do this, I propose an epistemic characterization of the ordinal/interval distinction, that is, one in terms of researchers’ beliefs. This novel characterization reveals the ordinal/interval distinction as too coarse grained and thus the received view as too restrictive of a framework for measurement research.

RésuméDans cet article, j'analyse deux approches du phénomène du geste, tel qu'il est constitué par l'incarnation, l'intersubjectivité, l'affectivité et le langage : tandis que Martin Heidegger affirme que le mouvement corporel humain dans son ensemble doit être compris comme geste par opposition au mouvement spatial des choses, Vilém Flusser intègre sous cette notion une multitude de pratiques et d'activités humaines que le sens commun hésite à appeler gestes. Le dilemme de la phénoménologie du geste consiste dans cette tension entre la (...) concrétude plurielle des apparences gestuelles et la tentation irrépressible d'identifier une couche unitaire qui leur permettrait de tenir ensemble. (shrink)

Global health is at a crossroads. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development has come with ambitious targets for health and health services worldwide. To reach these targets, many more billions of dollars need to be spent on health. However, development assistance for health has plateaued and domestic funding on health in most countries is growing at rates too low to close the financing gap. National and international decision-makers face tough choices about how scarce health care resources should be spent. Should (...) additional funds be spent on primary prevention of stroke, treating childhood cancer, or expanding treatment for HIV/AIDS? Should health coverage decisions take into account the effects of illness on productivity, household finances, and children's educational attainment, or just focus on health outcomes? Does age matter for priority setting or should it be ignored? Are health gains far in the future less important than gains in the present? Should higher priority be given to people who are sicker or poorer? Global Health Priority-Setting provides a framework for how to think about evidence-based priority-setting in health. Over 18 chapters, ethicists, philosophers, economists, policy-makers, and clinicians from around the world assess the state of current practice in national and global priority setting, describe new tools and methodologies to address establishing global health priorities, and tackle the most important ethical questions that decision-makers must consider in allocating health resources. (shrink)

Emanuel Copilaș ABSTRACT: The present article aims to offer a synoptic picture of communist Romania’s relations with Third World countries during the Ceaușescu regime. Within these relations, economic and geopolitical motivations coexisted along with ideological ones, thus making the topic one of the most interesting and relevant key for understanding RSR’s complex and cunning international...

Solidarity within bioethics is increasingly being recognized as an important means of improving health for all. Its contribution seems particularly relevant when there are injustices or inequalities in health and different individuals or groups are disadvantaged. But the current context of ecological collapse, characterized mainly by a loss of biodiversity and ecosystem decline, affects global health in a different way to other factors. This scenario creates new challenges, risks and problems that require new insights from a bioethical perspective. I, therefore, (...) propose an argument in favor of ecological solidarity. The aim of this article is to re-define this concept, outlining which causes should incite action through ecological solidarity and who should be the main recipient of it. To this end, I discuss what the background for practicing ecological solidarity might be: an intrinsically altruistic motivation to attempt to be a better person or a forced response to a political obligation. Finally, by way of example, I argue for rewilding as an effective, practical strategy through which ecological solidarity can be applied in the belief that building ecological solidarity supports a number of key interdependencies and ensures ethical care for the health of the planet. (shrink)

An important approach to understand how the brain gives rise to consciousness is to probe the depth of unconscious processing, thus to define the key features that cause conscious awareness. Here, we investigate the possibility for subliminal stimuli to shape the context for unconscious processing. Context effects have generally been assumed to require consciousness. In the present experiment, unconscious context processing was investigated by looking at the impact of the context on the response activation elicited by a subliminal prime. We (...) compared the effects of the same subliminal prime on target processing when the prime was embedded in different unconscious contexts. Results showed that the same prime can evoke opposite responses depending on the unconscious context in which it is presented. Taken together, the results of this study show that context effects can be unconscious. (shrink)

I share the authors' stance on the dialogic or interactional character of language. The authors, however, have left actual interaction out of their conception of dialogue. I sketch a number of organizations of practices of talking and understanding that supply the basic arena for talk-in-interaction. It is by reference to these that mechanisms for speech production and understanding need to be understood.

This book presents a collection of original essays by leading thinkers in political theory, philosophy, and bioethics on key issues concerning global justice and bioethics. It is the first collection to comprehensively address these pressing theoretical and practical questions about international distributive justice, humans rights, health care and medical research.

Our goal in this paper is to articulate a precise concept of at least a certain kind of disease-mongering, showing how pharmaceutical marketing can commercially exploit certain diseases when their best definition is given through the success of a treatment in a clinical trial. We distinguish two types of disease-mongering according to the way they exploit the definition of the trial population for marketing purposes. We argue that behind these two forms of disease-mongering there are two well-known problems in the (...) statistical methodology of clinical trials (the reference class problem and the distinction between statistical and clinical significance). Overcoming them is far from simple. (shrink)

In this article, we explore whether cross-linguistic differences in grammatical aspect encoding may give rise to differences in memory and cognition. We compared native speakers of two languages that encode aspect differently (English and Swedish) in four tasks that examined verbal descriptions of stimuli, online triads matching, and memory-based triads matching with and without verbal interference. Results showed between-group differences in verbal descriptions and in memory-based triads matching. However, no differences were found in online triads matching and in memory-based triads (...) matching with verbal interference. These findings need to be interpreted in the context of the overall pattern of performance, which indicated that both groups based their similarity judgments on common perceptual characteristics of motion events. These results show for the first time a cross-linguistic difference in memory as a function of differences in grammatical aspect encoding, but they also contribute to the emerging view that language fine tunes rather than shapes perceptual processes that are likely to be universal and unchanging. (shrink)

According to the subjective view of lying, speakers can lie by asserting a true proposition, as long as they believe this proposition to be false. This view contrasts with the objective view, according to which lying requires the actual falsity of the proposition asserted. The aim of this paper is to draw attention to pairs of assertions that differ only in intuitively redundant content and to show that such pairs of assertions are a reason to favour the subjective view of (...) lying over the objective one. (shrink)

Recent developments in the Arab world reopen one of the most fertile debate topics in international relations theory: the universal nature of the concept “fundamental human rights” and their content. The perspectives are different, being influenced by an ideological background, especially theological, apparently contradictory, affecting the positions of major international actors, stimulating the revival of controversies on major differences between Western world and the developing societies. Through a balanced analysis, specific to critical postmodernism, of the way each civilization (according to (...) Samuel Huntington) relates to the human being and to its place within its own legal architecture, one can notice that, beyond any differences, joint elements can be identified for further integration into a common fundamental text conferring the consensual universality indispensable to such an important principle. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage est la première monographie systématique d’expression française dédiée exclusivement au problème heideggérien de la mort. Il se donne pour tâche de clarifier tout l’enjeu de cette question capitale de la pensée de Martin Heidegger. La nouveauté de cette étude réside dans une approche systématique et précise de Sein und Zeit, à partir d’une clarification rigoureuse de la notion d’Existenzial, en interprétant le problème de la mort dans l’articulation des structures fondamentales de l’être du Dasein. Cette approche permet non (...) seulement d’expliciter les différentes couches ontologiques où intervient le phénomène de la mort dans l’analytique existentiale, mais aussi de mettre en lumière la rigueur de l’analyse heideggérienne et la systématicité de sa démarche. En outre, cette investigation explore l’intégralité de la pensée de Heidegger: des écrits de jeunesse jusqu’aux textes les plus tardifs, l’ouvrage retrace non seulement la genèse complexe de cette question, mais aussi son évolution arborescente.​ -/- . (shrink)