This paper examines the astrological and religious thinking of Moshe ben Nahman (also known as Ramban or Nahmanides) and the intellectual connections in this field with two of the most outstanding Christian thinkers of his time, Ramon Llull and Arnau de Vilanova. Nahmanides, like many medieval scholars, admitted an astral influence, but he did not accept astrology as a divinatory science. He incorporated astrological doctrines in his exegetical works, assuming that Israel is not determined by any star because it only (...) responds to God. Yet the study of medieval medicine and its application cannot be separated from astrology practice because it was considered that the stars had a direct influence not only on the development of the human body, from birth to death, but also in the disease processes which affect it. Ramban and his disciple Solomon ben Adret accepted and practiced astrological medicine. Llull and de Vilanova also devoted themselves to this discipline. All of them agree on the influence of the stars on humankind but condemned astral magic. Like Ramban, Llull rejects other astrological methods considered non-scientific in his time, such as prediction through horoscope. Thus, these thinkers tried to develop an astrology that was not in contradiction with divine omnipotence or free will. (shrink)

O revezamento de protagonismo de um dos Três Poderes, em determinado momento histórico, é sazonal; acarretando o aperfeiçoamento de mecanismos que recomponham o equilíbrio (freios e contrapesos - checks and balances). Ocorre que a crise dos Poderes Estatais dificilmente é diagnosticada pelas próprias instituições, que se escoram no discurso de “estabilidade institucional” para evitar mudanças. A simples positivação de direitos e garantias fundamentais, também chamada por Marcelo Neves de “legislação simbólica” ou “legislação álibi”; somada à adoção de ritos meramente formais (...) nos processos pelos Três Poderes, sem que se atenha aperspectiva substancial ou à efetividade dos princípios constitucionais - identificada como “procedimentalismo” por Lênio Streck e Écio Oto Ramos Duarte - acaba por acarretar verdadeira letargia institucional. (shrink)

Tudo se passa como se a escrita filosófica de Voltaire se desenvolvesse em uma dupla oposição: de um lado, ela visa denunciar o palavrório dos fazedores de sistemas e a cacofonia a que ele conduz, opondo-lhes a prudência e a modéstia; de outro, ela pretende restaurar, contra a tentação cética, o direito à busca da verdade. Em Voltaire, o discurso filosófico nasce desta tensão, do desejo de dizer o mundo e da vontade de se calar, tensão que a escolha do (...) diálogo tem por função explicitar, dramatizando-a. Perguntamo-nos, então, sobre o lugar e o estatuto da filosofia nos Diálogos. Conteúdo ou continente, conjunto de temas ou modalidade discursiva, a filosofia não está tranquila nesses textos, ela aparece em muitos aspectos como uma exigência problemática. (shrink)

Nicolas Pujol | : L’auteur montre, à partir d’une analyse critique de la catégorie de « sacré », que le modèle d’intégration de la spiritualité à l’hôpital proposé par Kenneth I. Pargament véhicule des normativités qui peuvent générer des tensions éthiques sur le plan de la clinique. Cet article rappelle qu’une catégorie comme celle de « spiritualité » doit demeurer un outil opérationnel qui participe à la connaissance du monde, et que, pour cela, elle doit sans cesse faire l’objet (...) de questions et d’évaluation de la part de ceux et celles qui l’utilisent. | : The author of the article proposes a critical analysis of the way in which Kenneth I. Pargament approaches the concept of “sacred” to define “spirituality” in the medical context. It shows how his definition of “spirituality” using the concept of “sacred” potentially creates ethical tensions in the hospital. “Spirituality” has to remain an “operational tool” and must always be examined before being used by care professionals. (shrink)

Ian Rumfitt (2000) developed a bilateralist account of logic in which the meaning of the connectives is given by conditions on asserted and rejected sentences. An additional set of inference rules, the coordination principles, determines the interaction of assertion and rejection. Fernando Ferreira (2008) found this account defective, as Rumfitt must state the coordination principles for arbitrary complex sentences. Rumfitt (2008) has a reply, but we argue that the problem runs deeper than he acknowledges and is in fact related to (...) the challenge of establishing proof-theoretic harmony. We motivate a distinctively bilateral criterion for harmony and show how the bilateralist can meet it. This also resolves Ferreira's complaint. (shrink)

Discusses the nature of choice in terms of discovering God's will, tells how to face the fear of choosing, and looks at the role of compromise.

Resumo: O corpo está por toda parte: ele é aquele que «está irreparavelmente aqui» onde estou, eu que não «posso me deslocar sem ele», já disse o filósofo. Talvez por isso mesmo seja tão antigo e tão insistente o movimento que, multiplicando as metáforas para dizer sua presença, visa de fato a maior parte do tempo seu ocultamento. Assim, se é possível falar aqui de uma cartografia, ela sem dúvida designará o intenso movimento filosófico de ocultamento do corpo, que paradoxalmente (...) dá a ver o que tanto se buscou evitar: é que o corpo sempre resiste, insistindo em se fazer disponível aos «mundos múltiplos e divergentes» que a cada vez a arte aproxima. Palavras-chave: Corpo. Movimento. Formação humana. Cartography of the body and unmanageability: The body is everywhere: he is «is irreparably here» where I am, for «I cannot move without him», as the philosopher said. Perhaps it is why this ancient and persistent movement that multiplies the metaphors to tell its presence seeks in fact its concealment most of the time. Thus, if it is possible to speak about a cartography, it will undoubtedly designate the intense philosophical movement of body concealment, which paradoxically hints at what it has sought so much to avoid: is that the body always resists, insisting on making itself available to « multiple and divergent worlds» which art approaches each time. Keywords: Body. Mouvement. Human Formation. Cartographies du corps et de l’ingovernabilité Résumé: Le corps est partout: « il est ici irréparablement» où je suis, car «je ne peux pas me déplacer sans lui», comme le philosophe l’a dit. Et c’est peut-être là la raison par laquelle, à force de multiplier les métaphores pour signaler as présence, ce que lui vise, finalement, la plupart du temps est bien son effacement. Ainsi, s’il nous est permis de parler de cartographie, elle devra sans doute désigner cet intense mouvement philosophique d’oubli du corps, qui finalement révèle ce qui l’on a tellement voulu éviter : car le corps résiste, à chaque fois, et qu’il insiste de se faire disponible aux «mondes multiples et divergents» que, à chaque fois, l’art rend présent. Mots-clés: Corps. Mouvement. Formation humaine. (shrink)

Theodor Adorno has often been portrayed as the prototypical example of the permanent exile, even though, after living fifteen years in Britain and the US, he returned to Germany in 1949 and spent the last twenty years of his life there. This article traces Adorno’s reflections on his homecoming and analyses how his experiences of exile and return shaped his mature thought. Conceiving homecoming not simply as a return to one’s origins but as a continuation of a radical experience of (...) the foreign, it builds on the remarkable continuity of Adorno’s theory of intellectual experience over time. The article also explores homecoming in relation to Adorno’s thought on language and translation, an aspect that has been little studied in the existing literature, both in terms of the articulation of a philosophy of language where the foreign plays an important role, and in terms of how language and translation were directly connected with Adorno’s return. (shrink)

Tudo se passa como se a escrita filosófica de Voltaire se desenvolvesse em uma dupla oposição: de um lado, ela visa denunciar o palavrório dos fazedores de sistemas e a cacofonia a que ele conduz, opondo-lhes a prudência e a modéstia; de outro, ela pretende restaurar, contra a tentação cética, o direito à busca da verdade. Em Voltaire, o discurso filosófico nasce desta tensão, do desejo de dizer o mundo e da vontade de se calar, tensão que a escolha do (...) diálogo tem por função explicitar, dramatizando-a. Perguntamo-nos, então, sobre o lugar e o estatuto da filosofia nos Diálogos . Conteúdo ou continente, conjunto de temas ou modalidade discursiva, a filosofia não está tranquila nesses textos, ela aparece em muitos aspectos como uma exigência problemática. (shrink)

Recommender Systems (RecSys) have been around since the early days of the Internet, helping users navigate the vast ocean of information and the increasingly available options that have been available for us ever since. The range of tasks for which one could use a RecSys is expanding as the technical capabilities grow, with the disruption of Machine Learning representing a tipping point in this domain, as in many others. However, the increase of the technical capabilities of AI-powered RecSys did not (...) come with a thorough consideration of their ethical implications and, despite being a well-established technical domain, the potential impacts of RecSys on their users are still under-assessed. This paper aims at filling this gap in regards to one of the main impacts of RecSys: personal autonomy. We first describe how technology can affect human values and a suitable methodology to identify these effects and mitigate potential harms: Value Sensitive Design (VSD). We use VSD to carry out a conceptual investigation of personal autonomy in the context of a generic RecSys and draw on a nuanced account of procedural autonomy to focus on two components: competence and authenticity. We provide the results of our inquiry as a value hierarchy and apply it to the design of a speculative RecSys as an example. (shrink)

This article argues for a non-reductive approach to translation as a basic social process that shapes both the world that sociologists study and the sociological endeavour itself. It starts by referring to accounts from the sociology of translation and translation studies, which have problematized simplistic views of processes of cultural globalization. From this point of view, translation can offer an approach to contemporary interconnectedness that escapes from both methodological nationalism and what can be designated as the monolingual vision, providing substantive (...) perspectives on the proliferation of contact zones or borderlands in a diversity of domains. The article centrally argues for a sociological perspective that examines not just the circulation of meaning but translation as a process of linguistic transformation that is necessarily embodied in words. Only if this more material aspect of translation is attended to can the nature of translation as an ordinary social process be fully grasped and its intervention in meaning-making activities explored. This has far-ranging implications for any reflexive account of the production of sociological works and interpretations. (shrink)

This essay interrogates ignored works of art as a special kind of object that can shed some light on the nature of contemporary art worlds, as well as on wider social processes regarding our relationship with things and with our past. It provides a materialist perspective focused on discarded objects as an alternative to a mystifying view of the artworld that takes artistic autonomy for granted and obliterates the social conditions of creativity and success. Ignored works are normally outside the (...) reach of art history and the sociology of art, yet the increasingly bigger realm of unrecognized and unvalued art provides, after the failure of the historical avant-garde, a space where critical autonomy can still develop. This essay attempts to illuminate this mostly invisible realm by relating it to other similar categories such as waste and forgetting. Finally, ignored works’ connection to notions of authenticity is pointed out. (shrink)

Aristotelismos y antiaristotelismoen los ss. XVI y XVII. Se dan en esta época dosaristotelismos en ltalia y otro en Espaiía. El antiaristotelismoconoce dos momentos fuertes. 2. La relaciónentre la Physica y la Metaphysica. Se discuteentre los autores si la Filosofia Primera constituyeuna ciencia aparte, o si debe considerarse comouna Physica Generalis, es decir, como la exposiciónde las defíniciones primeras. 3. Tres modalidades:los Comentarias a Aristóteles: concebidosa la manera tradicional, pero caracterizados yapor un marcado eclecticlsmo; los Manuales:repeticiones de la Física que (...) nacen a raiz de lainstauración de la ratio studiorum de los jesuitas;las obras sobre ffsica escritas iuxta propria principia:investigaciones originales que, si bien noocultan la lectura de Aristóteles, se apartannotablemente de su filosofia. 4. Tres conceptosbásicos: espacio, tiempo y movirniento, en algunosautores significativos: Bernardino Telesio,Francesco Patrizi, los Coninbricenses, BenitoPereira y Francisco Suárez. (shrink)

L’article « Droit naturel » de Diderot est sans doute l’un des articles les plus lus et les plus commentés de l’Encyclopédie. Certains critiques y voient une rupture décisive avec le droit naturel moderne, d’autres considèrent au contraire que Diderot s’efforce d’en donner une lecture personnelle et non métaphysique. La plupart s’accordent à y reconnaître les symptômes d’une « crise », qui n’est pas sans annoncer celle qui caractérisera un peu plus tard la pensée de Rousseau. Qu’il y ait une (...) « crise » du droit naturel dans cet article, personne ne le contestera. Plutôt que de considérer ce texte comme une simple réfutation, on peut se demander si Diderot ne cherche pas à refonder le droit naturel en posant autrement la question de sa « naturalité », à travers une série de propositions indécidables. Notre idée est que l’article de Diderot aménage et discute vigoureusement certains aspects de ce droit sans en récuser sa légitimité. Il introduit notamment la notion de volonté générale, absente des théories jusnaturalistes, pour proposer une nouvelle théorie des droits et des devoirs dont la fonction est d’ouvrir le champ de la morale. L’implicite de ce texte serait en effet le souci de donner les moyens conceptuels permettant de sortir d’un régime de prescription trop contraignant qui fait traditionnellement reposer la morale sur toute une série d’interdits. En confiant notamment à la « volonté générale » la charge de « fixer les limites de tous les devoirs », Diderot défait le carcan dans lequel s’enferme à des degrés divers toute morale déontique. (shrink)

"Artists are trying to move away from the influence of competitive corporate culture that has increasingly defined art as an abrasive urban career. Artists are trying to replace this with the humbler notion of art as a practice, as a mindful way of life, consisting of consciously creative gestures, visible and invisible, large and small. Art practice is a private and public, selfless and generous, creative life process resulting in a conscious cultural product." "Walking Art Practice" brings together the author's (...) experiences as a monk, performance artist, social choreographer and educator. It serves as a provocation, walkers' manifesto, and teaching guide for walking as a mindful cultural activity and as mindful cultural activism. It is an inspirational text for artists, art students and anyone who loves to walk. Ernesto Pujol combines elements from an art book, field journal and walkers' manifesto. It is a text for performative artists, art students, and all who walk as cultural activism. This book is an invitation to: Rethink what it means to walk and explore different ways in which to walk as: a cultural practice; a meditative practice; a radical practice; art; healing; and social engagement; Reconsider how to attend to the inner and outer landscape whilst walking; Treat walking as a performance resource; Walk as an everyday pilgrimage; Walk slowly, walk in and with awareness, walk with and without skill, walk to regain and to lose. [Subject: Performance Art, Walking, Meditation]. (shrink)

Two decades ago, the eminent evolutionary biologist George C. Williams and his physician coauthor, Randolph Nesse, formulated the evolutionary medicine research program. Williams and Nesse explicitly made adaptationism a core component of the new program, which has served to undermine the program ever since, distorting its practitioners’ perceptions of evidentiary burdens and in extreme cases has served to warp practitioner’s understandings of the relationship between evolutionary benefits/detriments and medical ones. I show that the Williams and Nesse program more particularly embraces (...) the panselectionist variety of adaptationism (the empirical assumption that non-adaptive evolutionary processes are causally unimportant compared to natural selection), and argue that this has harmed the field. Panselectionism serves to conceal the enormous evidentiary hurdles that evolutionary medicine hypotheses face, making them appear stronger than they are. I use two examples of evolutionary medicine texts, on neonatal jaundice and on asthma, to show that some evolutionary medicine practitioners have allowed their fervent panselectionism to directly shape their recommendations for clinical practice. I argue that this escalation of panselectionism’s influence is inappropriate under Williams’ and Nesse original stated standards, despite being inspired by their program. I also show that the examples’ conflation of clinical and evolutionary considerations is inappropriate even under Christopher Boorse’s controversial evolution-rooted concepts of disease and health. (shrink)

Cheryl Cox MacPherson recently argued, in an article for this journal, that ‘Climate Change is a Bioethics Problem’. This article elaborates on that position, particularly highlighting bioethicists' potential ability to help reframe the current climate change discourse to give more attention to its health risks. This reframing process is especially important because of the looming problem of climate change skepticism. Recent empirical evidence from science framing experiments indicates that the public reacts especially positively to climate change messages framed in public (...) health terms, and bioethicists are particularly well positioned to contribute their expertise to the process of carefully developing and communicating such messages. Additionally, as climate framing research and practice continue, it will be important for bioethicists to contribute to the creation of that project's nascent ethical standards. The discourse surrounding antibiotic resistance is posited as an example that can lend insight into how communicating a public health-framed message, including the participation of bioethicists, can help to override public skepticism about the findings of politically contentious scientific fields. (shrink)

The application of artificial intelligence technology has evolved into an influential endeavor to improve firm performance, but little research considers the relationship among artificial intelligence capability, management, driven decision making, and firm performance. Based on the resource-based view and existing findings, this paper constructs a higher-order model of AIC and suggests a research model of e-commerce firm AIC and firm performance. We collected 394 valid questionnaires and conducted data analysis using partial least squares structural equation modeling. As a second-order variable, (...) AIC was formed by three first-order variables: basic, proclivity, and skills. AIC indirectly affects firm performance through creativity, AIM, and AI-driven decision making. Firm creativity, AIM, and AIDDM are essential variables between AIC and firm performance. Innovation culture positive moderates the relationship between firm creativity and AIDDM as well as the relationship between AIDDM and firm performance. Environmental dynamism positive mediates the connection between AIM and AIDDM. Among the control variables, firm age negatively affects firm performance, and employee size does not. This study helps enterprises leverage AI to improve firm performance, achieve a competitive advantage, and contribute to theory and management practice. (shrink)

BackgroundHIV prevention research in resource-limited countries is associated with a variety of ethical dilemmas. Key amongst these is the question of what constitutes an appropriate standard of health care (SoC) for participants in HIV prevention trials. This paper describes a community-focused approach to develop a locally-appropriate SoC in the context of a phase III vaginal microbicide trial in Mwanza City, northwest Tanzania.MethodsA mobile community-based sexual and reproductive health service for women working as informal food vendors or in traditional and modern (...) bars, restaurants, hotels and guesthouses has been established in 10 city wards. Wards were divided into geographical clusters and community representatives elected at cluster and ward level. A city-level Community Advisory Committee (CAC) with representatives from each ward has been established. Workshops and community meetings at ward and city-level have explored project-related concerns using tools adapted from participatory learning and action techniques e.g. chapati diagrams, pair-wise ranking. Secondary stakeholders representing local public-sector and non-governmental health and social care providers have formed a trial Stakeholders' Advisory Group (SAG), which includes two CAC representatives.ResultsKey recommendations from participatory community workshops, CAC and SAG meetings conducted in the first year of the trial relate to the quality and range of clinic services provided at study clinics as well as broader standard of care issues. Recommendations have included streamlining clinic services to reduce waiting times, expanding services to include the children and spouses of participants and providing care for common local conditions such as malaria. Participants, community representatives and stakeholders felt there was an ethical obligation to ensure effective access to antiretroviral drugs and to provide supportive community-based care for women identified as HIV positive during the trial. This obligation includes ensuring sustainable, post-trial access to these services. Post-trial access to an effective vaginal microbicide was also felt to be a moral imperative.ConclusionParticipatory methodologies enabled effective partnerships between researchers, participant representatives and community stakeholders to be developed and facilitated local dialogue and consensus on what constitutes a locally-appropriate standard of care in the context of a vaginal microbicide trial in this setting.Trial registrationCurrent Controlled Trials ISRCTN64716212. (shrink)

El artículo pretende analizar, a través de la historia, la cuestión de la patologización trans*, que ha contado y cuenta con una oposición bastante amplia por parte de diversos colectivos. El debate político de la cuestión (por medio de la petición de normativas y leyes que regulen determinados aspectos de la identidad) hace que una cuestión individual como es la identidad haya pasado a ser un tema colectivo. Que sea asunto colectivo hace que sea imposible desligar la biología de la (...) medicina, el derecho o la política. Es esta interdisciplinariedad lo que dota hoy en día a la cuestión trans* de tanta relevancia, tampoco exenta de polémica con otros movimientos sociales, como las redes sociales han venido mostrando últimamente. No obstante, es la gran visibilidad que ha obtenido por diferentes medios la cuestión trans* lo que la hace susceptible de múltiples análisis, que, como se ha dicho anteriormente, no se limitan a una única disciplina o a un único punto de vista. (shrink)

In order to develop a collaborative experience of reflexive writing, this article explores the ethnographic process through two communication devices used by the authors in their respective fieldwork: tarot readings and evolutionary astrology. Reflecting on their distinct (if not opposing) backgrounds, the authors explore and interpret how their different backgrounds and conversational devices shape their ethnographic experience as a process of revealing the unknown, following the not-knowing approach (Anderson, 1997). The dialogic exchange also reveals how the not-knowing approach affects the (...) collaborative aspect of the reflexive writing experience. (shrink)

El autor ofrece un análisis de la obra escultórica de quien conocemos principalmente como poeta, Ernesto Cardenal, presentándolo como un escultor representativo, que ha desarrollado las temáticas de la religiosidad, y la fauna y flora de América, permitiendo que confluyan en él las culturas primitivas y el arte moderno. Afirma Valle-Castillo que el trabajo de Cardenal ha llevado la escultura a una expresión de lo esencial, a partir de la contemplación, de la conciencia, y de un estudio largo y profundo (...) de los modelos. (shrink)