Starting from Peter Berger’s analysis about the discovery of the supernatural in the modern society and its suggestions for the theology about the methods to be assumed in the process of identification of transcendence signals in society as well as the Max Weber's considerations about the so-called disenchantment of world, doubly introduced by science and religion itself, looking up to identify what challenges are presenting themselves for reflection and theological action at interface between disenchanted social realities and new enchanted religiosity, (...) with much more immediate prospects and focused on the present life than in anticipation of a future supplanter of material reality. (shrink)

Coletânea de textos sobre temas em direito como planejamento familiar, reprodução humana, orientação sexual e doação de sangue, carreiras jurídicas da mulher na atualidade, sistema prisional, extinção dos contratos, penhora de animais, evidência cautelar e satisfativa, implicação criminal decorrente das relações virutais, terceirização de atividade fim e intolerância religiosa.

We conducted a philosophical analysis of economic concepts and presented a proposal for a practical approach to the issues. Economic Value is defined in relation to potential or actual economic exchanges, while Social Value is defined in relation to actions to promote people, that is, human development. In the capitalist society, there is a dissociation between the two, since Social Value is only remunerated when it has Economic Value, which leads to two types of problem: the increase in economic inequality, (...) disfavoring the sectors of society that generate Social, without Economic, Value, and the degradation of the environment, which occurs when environmental goods are used in the exclusive prism of Economic Value. In this essay, we seek to investigate these concepts, relating them to the concept of Consciousness, which would operate historically not only in the generation of Economic Value, but also in the process of recognition and remuneration of Social Value. In the transition from theory to practice, we also make suggestions on how to solve the problem within the framework of public economic policy. (shrink)

Asperger's syndrome is a pervasive developmental condition characterized by features of autism. As observed in clinical practice, individuals with Asperger's syndrome present an impairment related to inflexibility in their everyday routine, an immediate manner of experiencing and relating, and difficulties in estimating periods of time. Following a phenomenological perspective, this study is an attempt to examine these aforementioned aspects in terms of temporality. Thirteen participants with Asperger's syndrome, from 13 to 20 years old, were interviewed about their experience of periods (...) of time, personal history, their past, present and future; and their concept of time and finitude. After the interviews, it was possible to identify three general themes which emerged in the invariant aspects of their experience of time: factual experience of present and future dimensions, chronological time and the past experience. Moreover, participants' descriptions evidenced aspects of experience based on the specificity of lived facts and a sense of time specifically related to what was lived in the past. (shrink)

Ángel Gómez (a), J. Francisco Morales (a), Sonia Hart (b), Alexandra Vázquez (a) y William B. Swann Jr. (b) (a) … Read More →.

José Otero Espasandín (1900-1987) was an important science popularizer in Argentina during the 1940´s, who belonged to the Misiones Pedagógicas (Educational Missions) group in Spain. This paper presents his biography and his work as a science and technology popularizer. It focused on his features, value and significance for that period.

Se analizan en este artículo una serie de revistas y libros, así como otro tipo de manifestaciones producidas en España en el período 1968-1976, que se refirieron a la denominada crítica de la ciencia. Este movimiento tuvo su mayor vigencia en los países occidentales en la década de los setenta del pasado siglo. El análisis muestra la presencia de esta crítica en diferentes medios, aun cuando se puede considerar que su relevancia fue relativamente minoritaria en el conjunto de la sociedad (...) española. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Imagined Apotheoses: Drake, Harriot, and Ralegh in the AmericasWilliam M. HamlinPerhaps the two best known stories of Europeans being taken for gods by non-European peoples are those of Hernan Cortés in Mexico and Captain James Cook in Hawaii. Separated by two hundred sixty years, five thousand miles, and vast differences in cultural and linguistic context, these two incidents nonetheless share many traits in the conventional telling. Cortés and Cook (...) were both strong leaders, for instance, both capable of inspiring devotion among their subordinates. Both men became amateur ethnographers during their lengthy sojourns away from Europe, both sought to promote an image of respectful rather than rapacious foreign incursion, and both are said to have been taken for returning gods by the native peoples among whom they landed: Cortés for the Toltec culture-hero and demigod Quetzalcoatl, Cook for the Hawaiian deity Lono. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.“The Far Side” cartoon by Gary Larson. Courtesy of Chronicle Features, San Francisco.Recent scholarly studies and debates—among them the rather strident dispute between Gananath Obeyesekere and Marshall Sahlins over the alleged deification of Cook by eighteenth-century Hawaiians—have opened up these returning-god theories to skeptical critique and detailed justification; but such discussions have had little, if any, impact on popular imagination. 1 [End Page 405] Indeed, the idea that redoubtable European explorers can be (and often are) perceived as supernatural beings by non-European “primitives” has been uncritically perpetuated to this day by filmmakers, fantasists, writers of popular history, and purveyors of cultural literacy. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., for instance, informs our children that Caribbean islanders encountered by Columbus “asked if he had come from heaven”—the implication being, of course, that they took him for a god. 2 And in the recent film, 1492: Conquest of Paradise, we hear the indefatigable Admiral (played by Gerard Depardieu) claim that “on every island the natives welcome us with great generosity and trust.... Because of our appearance, we have been mistaken for gods, and are treated accordingly.” 3 Fortunately, we also have a “Far Side” parody of the cultural conceit on which such ideas in part rely, but the cartoon serves as well to demonstrate just how thoroughly the conceit has permeated our collective awareness (see figure 1). 4 Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 2.“It’s against my programming to impersonate a deity.” From The Return of the Jedi, dir. Richard Marquand, Lucasfilm, Ltd., 1983. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy of Lucasfilm, Ltd.Let me offer just one other example. Near the end of the popular 1983 film The Return of the Jedi, the forest-dwelling Ewoks begin to chant and salaam upon first glimpsing the golden robot C-3PO, who in turn tells his captured comrades, “I do believe they think I am some sort of god.” When Han Solo sarcastically asks the robot to use his “divine influence” to help extricate them from their predicament, C-3PO replies that such an action would be improper: “It’s against my programming to impersonate a deity.” Here we see, embedded within a film romance, both the classic trope of the apotheosized foreigner and the related motif of the foreigner’s reluctance to [End Page 406] play the god-role (see figure 2). It is worth noting, however, that while C-3PO may be unwilling to exploit the Ewoks’ misperception, Luke Skywalker is not; he uses the “Force” to convince the Ewoks of the robot’s magical prowess and, more to the point, to perpetuate their misapprehension. 5What I wish to suggest in this essay is that certain habitual Western assumptions or conceits regarding cross-cultural encounters—assumptions which have been usefully termed “myth models” inasmuch as they condition human perception and find frequent discursive expression—coexist easily but in fact disjunctively with certain other ideological structures in many early modern travel narratives and colonial accounts. Obeyesekere, in his provocative book on the supposed deification of Captain Cook in Hawaii, has linked such myth models to the conceptual structures of the longue durée as characterized by Fernand Braudel, and it is possible that they may also be... (shrink)

Let me attempt a drastic summary, or symbolic reduction, of Mr. Foss's adeptly metaphorical exposition. The use of the copula is, implicit in the appositive series, will do some violence to the complexity of the argument, but since causes and parts are frowned on by the same argument, the simpler arrangement cannot be altogether out of keeping. In logical and grammatical terms, we have on two sides of a profound ledger: "symbolic reduction," the divisive subject and predicate,--and "metaphoric process," the (...) underlying and unifying energy of the proposition, the subjectum. The negations of dialectic operate to show the insufficiency of symbolic concepts and are the "door to philosophic truth." And in ontological terms, we have on the one hand number, time, space, cause and effect, coincidence and contingency; and on the other the different, the naught, the apeiron, the potential, the tension of process, freedom and necessity in metaphoric lawful unity. There are two closely similar extremes of reduction between which one locates the transcendent philosophy of metaphor: that of sensationalism, the philosophy of the brute and atomic, and that of rationalism, the philosophy of expedient action. And in more or less theological terms, we have on the one hand the environment and its complement the ego, purposive and possessive; on the other, World, the I and the Thou, prayer, sin and grace in the metaphorical unity of consciousness, the widening power of personality in intercession or metaphorical representation. On the one hand, birth and death, past and future, and a present extending ad libitum into either; on the other, the eternal present of the integrated process stretching over past and future, expressed in its purest form in art. And so in aesthetic terms: on the one hand catharsis, a rationalized mixture of the ego's pleasure and pain, asceticism and hedonism, play; on the other, drama--especially tragedy, which par excellence action--Eudaimonia, purification, artistic distance, stylization, imagination, conscience, love. On the one hand, comedy in the sense of farce, environment symbolically reduced, actions and persons according to type, the mechanism of means and ends, rules, rituals, tricks, chance, the caricature of symbolic fixation--producing laughter: on the other hand, true and great comedy, the attempt to understand life in all its contradictions, producing the smile. (shrink)

In das paper 1 consider the reliability condition in Alvin Platinga’s proper functionalist account of epistemic warrant I begin by reviewing m some detail the features of the reliability condition as Platinga has articulated a From there, 1 consider what is needed to ground or secure the sort of reliability which Plantinga has m mind, and argue that what is needed is a significant causal condition which has generally been overlooked Then, after identifying eight versions of the relevant sort of (...) reliability, I exam me each alternative as to whether as requirement, along with Platinga’s other proposed conditions, would give us a satisfactory account of epistemic warrant I conclude that there is bale to no hope of formulating a reliability condition that would yield a satisfactory analysts of the sort Plantinga desires. (shrink)

In das paper 1 consider the reliability condition in Alvin Platinga’s proper functionalist account of epistemic warrant I begin by reviewing m some detail the features of the reliability condition as Platinga has articulated a From there, 1 consider what is needed to ground or secure the sort of reliability which Plantinga has m mind, and argue that what is needed is a significant causal condition which has generally been overlooked Then, after identifying eight versions of the relevant sort of (...) reliability, I exam me each alternative as to whether as requirement, along with Platinga’s other proposed conditions, would give us a satisfactory account of epistemic warrant I conclude that there is bale to no hope of formulating a reliability condition that would yield a satisfactory analysts of the sort Plantinga desires. (shrink)

In the analysis of Aquinas, instrumental causation is central to his doctrine of providence, yet their connection is not widely understood. On the one hand, early modern thinkers like Nicolas Malebranche claim that any notion of instrumental causation is unintelligible as a mode of divine operation. Alternatively, certain Thomists commit Aquinas to the doctrine of premotion, which partially resolves the problem of instrumental causation, but only at the cost of eliminating the causal freedom of creatures. In this paper I address (...) these two issues. After providing an outline of Aquinas’s position on instrumental causation, I first argue that Thomistic instrumentalism is not the target of Malebranche’s objections, for Malebranche endorses a view very much like that of Aquinas. Secondly, I discuss the doctrine of premotion and offer some reasons for thinking that Aquinas was not a premotionist. (shrink)

I attempt to describe and defend an alternative definition of insanity. I claim that my definition follows from an adequate general understanding of legal excuse and that it describes correctly the question that jurors in the recent Andrea Yates case and others like it ought to be faced with. My essay has three parts. In the first, I briefly criticize M'Naghten- and Durham-inspired insanity statutes. In the second, I sketch and defend a general understanding of legal excuse and try to (...) show how an adequate insanity statute follows from it. Finally, in the third section, I describe and defend a rough version of the statute itself. In the course of doing so, I try to explain why I believe that statute is superior to the American Law Institute's various model insanity statutes. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Ethical Issues in Social Research. Edited by Tom L. Beauchamp, Ruth R. Faden, R. Jay Wallace, Jr., and LeRoy Walters. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. xii + 436 pp. $25.00 (hardcover); $8.95 (paper). Ethics of Human Subject Research. Edited by Allan J. Kimmel, Jr. San Francisco: Jossey‐Bass, 1981. 106 pp. $6.95 (paper). Social Research Ethics. Edited by Martin Bulmer. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1982. xiv + 284 pp. $39.50 (hardcover); $14.50 (paper). (...) The Ethics of Social Research: Field‐work, Regulation and Publication. Edited by Joan E. Sieber. New York: Springer‐Verlag, 1982. x + 187 pp. $23.50 (hardcover). The Ethics of Social Research: Surveys and Experiments. Edited by Joan E. Sieber. New York: Springer‐Verlag, 1982. xii + 249 pp. $23.50 (hardcover). (shrink)

Hurricane Katrina offered a revealing snapshot of the historical vulnerability that New Orleans and Gulf Coast residents have long experienced and continue to face. In particular, population groups with special health needs—those suffering from debilitating chronic diseases—were among those most at risk during the storm. Focusing specifically on diabetic evacuees during and after Katrina, this essay examines how the lack of planning during the disaster led to diminished access to dialysis as well as poor food and inadequate insulin management in (...) evacuation shelters. In so doing, it underscores the strong links between disasters and public health concerns such as elevated risks for complications, emergency room visits, hospitalizations, and reduced life expectancy for individuals with diabetes. As the case of Katrina powerfully illustrates, populations suffering from chronic diseases like diabetes suffer disproportionately from disasters and other disruptive events. (shrink)

WITHTHE OVERWHELMINGLY DISPROPORTIONATE NUMBER OF BLACK MEN on death row, some argue that today's death penalty executions in the United States are the equivalent of legalized lynching. Others may charge this equivalence as hyperbole, but the numbers betray a system of racialized injustice that people of good will ought to reject today as did like-willed people of the churches, synagogues, and community organizations of the years leading up to the civil rights movement and beyond. This essay exposes the factors of (...) race and poverty that lead to determinations of the guilt or innocence and the likelihood of a death or life sentence to those convicted of capital crimes. (shrink)