In general, existential threats are those that may potentially result in the extinction of the entire human species, if not significantly endanger its living population. Among the said threats include, but not limited to, pandemics and the impacts of a technological singularity. As regards pandemics, significant work has already been done on how to mitigate, if not prevent, the aftereffects of this type of disaster. For one, certain problem areas on how to properly manage pandemic responses have already been identified, (...) like the following: (a) not being able to learn from previous experiences, (b) the inability to act on warning signals, and (c) the failure to reach a global consensus on a problem (i.e., in a timely manner). In terms of a singularity, however, it may be said that further research is still needed, specifically on how to aptly respond to its projected negative outcomes. In this paper, by treating the three problem areas noted above as preliminary assessment measures of a country’s capacity to coordinate a national response to large-scale disasters, we examine the readiness of the Philippines in preparing for an intelligence explosion. By citing certain instances of how the said country, specifically its national government, faced the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, it puts forward the idea that the likely Philippine disaster response towards a singularity needs to be worked on, appealing for a more comprehensive assessment of such for a more informed response plan. (shrink)

Abstract:This visual essay invites renewed reflection on the iconography of the people. In the spring of 2020, Guatemala's President Alejandro Giammattei prohibited citizens from leaving their homes to help contain the spread of the novel coronavirus known as Covid-19. Doing little to manage the spread of the virus, these curfew events gave new aesthetic and political meaning to a familiar visual genre: photographs of empty streets. For more than a century, and especially in the summer of 2020, images of crowds (...) and mass protests have provided both governments on the one hand, and protesting multitudes on the other with an aesthetic representation of the people. But this interest in collective assemblies has tended to engage only one side of the equation. To fully appreciate the visual power of the people, it is also necessary to understand those images from which people are strikingly absent. (shrink)

Throughout the biological and biomedical sciences there is a growing need for, prescriptive ‘minimum information’ (MI) checklists specifying the key information to include when reporting experimental results are beginning to find favor with experimentalists, analysts, publishers and funders alike. Such checklists aim to ensure that methods, data, analyses and results are described to a level sufficient to support the unambiguous interpretation, sophisticated search, reanalysis and experimental corroboration and reuse of data sets, facilitating the extraction of maximum value from data sets (...) them. However, such ‘minimum information’ MI checklists are usually developed independently by groups working within representatives of particular biologically- or technologically-delineated domains. Consequently, an overview of the full range of checklists can be difficult to establish without intensive searching, and even tracking thetheir individual evolution of single checklists may be a non-trivial exercise. Checklists are also inevitably partially redundant when measured one against another, and where they overlap is far from straightforward. Furthermore, conflicts in scope and arbitrary decisions on wording and sub-structuring make integration difficult. This presents inhibit their use in combination. Overall, these issues present significant difficulties for the users of checklists, especially those in areas such as systems biology, who routinely combine information from multiple biological domains and technology platforms. To address all of the above, we present MIBBI (Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations); a web-based communal resource for such checklists, designed to act as a ‘one-stop shop’ for those exploring the range of extant checklist projects, and to foster collaborative, integrative development and ultimately promote gradual integration of checklists. (shrink)

Aunque inicialmente la propuesta de A. Schütz resulta esclarecedora y sugerente, sin embargo, al proponer hablar de ámbitos finitos de sentido en lugar de realidades múltiples, se puede encubrir una posibilidad de mala interpretación del proyecto trascendental de la fenomenología. Ello estaría en función de la gran importancia que detenta en Schütz no sólo la actitud natural, sino el mundo de la “realidad práctica”. Me propongo plantear esta problemática a la luz del proyecto husserliano de fenomenología trascendental presentado en Ideen (...) I.Although initially the proposal of A. Schütz is enlightening and suggestive, nevertheless, on having proposed to speak about finite provinces of meaning instead of multiple realities, it is possible to conceal a possibility of bad interpretation of the transcendental project of Phenomenology. It would be depending on the great importance that holds in Schütz not only the natural attitude, but the world of the “practical reality”. I intend to raise this issue in the light of Husserls transcendental phenomenology project presented in Ideen I. (shrink)

It is plumb evident that nowadays the truth cannot be plainly told without great danger.— Andrés Marcos Burriel, 1750The Spanish Enlightenment was the direct heir of an intellectual elite whose act...

In this issue of the Report, James L. Bernat proposes an innovative and sophisticated distinction to justify the introduction of permanent cessation as a valid substitute standard for irreversible cessation in death determination. He differentiates two approaches to conceptualizing and determining death: the biological concept and the prevailing medical practice standard. While irreversibility is required by the biological concept, the weaker criterion of permanence, he claims, has always sufficed in the accepted standard medical practice to declare death. Bernat argues (...) that the medical practice standard may be acceptable on the ground that proving circulatory or brain permanence is sufficient to assure complete accuracy for death diagnosis. -/- The topic requires public deliberation: processes to survey people's opinions and mechanisms to channel their opinions into policy-making. What is at stake is the nature of our society. Do we want an expertocracy, in which an enlightened few design policies for the greater good of the majority and exploit the lack of public knowledge to achieve compliance? (shrink)

En este ensayo nos proponemos realizar algunas consideraciones argumentativas breves sobre la ética en investigaciones con seres humanos vulnerables. Para ello, examinaremos el conocido caso de Tuskegee (Alabama), ocurrido entre los años 1932-1972, en el que 600 personas afroamericanas fueron inoculadas con sífilis sin su consentimiento. Luego, desde una postura crítica, abordaremos el caso desde tres perspectivas bioéticas. En primer lugar, lo analizaremos desde el plano jurídico-normativo, luego desde el principialismo formulado por Tom Beauchamp y James Childress, y finalmente, (...) desde el enfoque conceptual de la “vulnerabilidad”, referido a las poblaciones participantes en las investigaciones bioéticas. En efecto, nos centraremos en los miramientos que estos enfoques plantean de forma expresa, para realizar un análisis reflexivo sobre el necesario aspecto ético, requerido en el seno de toda investigación bioética con personas vulnerables. (shrink)

How (Not) to Be Secular is what Jamie Smith calls "your hitchhiker's guide to the present" -- it is both a reading guide to Charles Taylor's monumental work A Secular Age and philosophical guidance on how we might learn to live in our times. Taylor's landmark book A Secular Age (2007) provides a monumental, incisive analysis of what it means to live in the post-Christian present -- a pluralist world of competing beliefs and growing unbelief. Jamie Smith's book is a (...) compact field guide to Taylor's insightful study of the secular, making that very significant but daunting work accessible to a wide array of readers. Even more, though, Smith's How (Not) to Be Secular is a practical philosophical guidebook, a kind of how-to manual on how to live in our secular age. It ultimately offers us an adventure in self-understanding and maps out a way to get our bearings in today's secular culture, no matter who "we" are -- whether believers or skeptics, devout or doubting, self-assured or puzzled and confused. This is a book for any thinking person to chew on. (shrink)

The Gifford Lectures were established in 1885 at the universities of St Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Edinburgh to promote the discussion of 'Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term - in other words, the knowledge of God', and some of the world's most influential thinkers have delivered them. The 1901–2 lectures given in Edinburgh by American philosopher William James are considered by many to be the greatest in the series. The lectures were published in book form in (...) 1902 and have been reprinted many times. James, who was educated in the United States and Europe, and spent much of his career teaching philosophy at Harvard, was very influential in the development of modern psychology, and in these twenty lectures he explores the personal experience of religion. Some of the topics include religion and neurology, 'the sick soul', saintliness, and mysticism. (shrink)

Hubert Dreyfus has argued that cases of absorbed bodily coping show that there is no room for self-awareness in flow experiences of experts. In this paper, I argue against Dreyfus’ maxim of vanishing self-awareness by suggesting that awareness of agency is present in expert bodily action. First, I discuss the phenomenon of absorbed bodily coping by discussing flow experiences involved in expert bodily action: merging into the flow; immersion in the flow; emergence out of flow. I argue against the claim (...) that flow experience does not involve an awareness of agency for each of these features, while conceding that fluent agency does not involve self-awareness in the thetic sense. I challenge the assumption that the awareness of fluent agency must be understood in terms of a thetic awareness of agency. Instead, I develop an Anscombean account of the awareness of fluent agency in terms of the phenomenal character of knowing one’s aims. I respond to the challenge that if an Anscombean account of the awareness of agency is to succeed, then agents must be able to answer Anscombean questions. I consider the objection that awareness of agency is not a form of self-awareness by outlining an account of self-awareness as self-synthesis that is distinct from self-perception and self-ascription, but which makes room for self-awareness in expert bodily action. (shrink)

Do Quine and Carnap distort the social nature of inquiry by privileging individual epistemic subjects? This objection is at the heart of Donald Davidson’s claim that Quine fails to grasp the significance of the concept of truth. In Carnap’s case, the objection may be detected in Charles Morris’s call to ground scientific philosophy in semiotics, the science of signs, rather than syntax, the formal investigation of languages. Drawing out the challenge from Morris’s proposal requires examining a neglected influence on this (...) neglected philosopher: his advisor George Herbert Mead’s social theory of mind. I argue that Morris and Davidson can both be understood as demanding that scientific philosophers socialize their conception of objectivity. (shrink)

Background and objectives: Definitions of medical futility, offered by healthcare professionals, bioethicists and other experts, have been rigorously debated by many investigators, but the perceptions of patients of futility have been explored only by a few. Patients were allowed to discuss their concerns about end-of-life care, so that their ideas about treatment futility or utility could be extrapolated by us.Methods: In this cross-sectional study, in-depth, semistructured interviews were conducted with 30 elderly people who were receiving outpatient care in a large, (...) urban Veterans Affairs medical centre in the US. Each of their healthcare providers was also interviewed. Participants were asked to consider four terms commonly used in advance directive forms and to discuss what these terms meant to them. Audiotapes of the open-ended interviews were transcribed and responses were coded and categorised by constant comparison, a commonly used qualitative method.Results: The following four factors were taken into account by the participants when discussing end-of-life interventions and outcomes: expected quality of life; emotional and financial costs of treatment; likelihood of treatment success; and expected effect on longevity.Conclusions: Although the terms “utility” or “futility” were not generally used by the participants, segments of speech indicating their perceptions of these terms were identified. Treatment was not always discussed in the same way by patients and providers, but seemed to reflect the same four concerns. Therefore, it may be fruitful for providers to focus on these concerns when discussing end-of-life treatment options with their patients. (shrink)

In this paper, we first investigate a bit of feminist and hermeneutical aesthetics. Building upon these theories, we expand the discussion of art to include the fleshy canvas.We argue that a feminist philosophy of art suggests a sound theoretical framework by which one can maintain that skin art is just that – art. In its contemporary practice, tattooing has become a new form of art, and feminist theory provides context for interpretation. The tattooed body may agitate conventional conceptions of fine (...) art – but art evolves, and history makes this much clear. Definitions of art tend to develop, as does artistic practice. Artistic innovations subvert what is old and stale within the institutional art world, while art theory empowers that subversion and provides a context for the appreciation of art. (shrink)

1. The Bundle Theory I shall discuss is a theory about the nature of substances or concrete particulars, like apples, chairs, atoms, stars and people. The point of the Bundle Theory is to avoid undesirable entities like substrata that allegedly constitute particulars. The version of the Bundle Theory I shall discuss takes particulars to be entirely constituted by the universals they instantiate.' Thus particulars are said to be just bundles of universals. Together with the claim that it is necessary that (...) particulars have constituents, the fundamental claim of the Bundle Theory is: (BT) Necessarily, for every particular x and every entity y, y constitutes x if and only ify is a universal and x instantiates y. 2 The standard and supposedly devastating objection to the Bundle Theory is that it entails or is committed to a false version of the Principle of Identity of Indiscernibles (Armstrong 1978: 91, Loux 1998: 107), namely: (Pll) Necessarily, for all particulars x and y and every universal z, if z is instantiated by x if and only if z is instantiated byy, then x is numerically identical with y. The most famous counterexample to the Identity of Indiscernibles is that put forward by Max Black, consisting of a world where there are only two iron spheres two miles apart from each other, having the same diameter, temperature, colour, shape, size, etc (Black 1952: 156). Let us from now on think of the properties of the spheres in this world as universals. The possibility of this world, which I shall hereafter refer to as 'Black's world', makes (Pll) false.' And according to common philosophical opinion this means that the Bundle Theory is false.. (shrink)

JANET DELGADO RODRIGUEZ | : The concept of vulnerability is central to current developments in bioethics, not only because of its analytic nature, but also due to its capacity for criticism. However, this concept has not been sufficiently developed, neither in the area of moral philosophy nor in bioethics. For this reason, it is necessary to define and analyze the conceptual framework in which the notion of vulnerability has been developed within the scope of bioethics. Thus, the purpose of this (...) paper is to indicate how the concept of vulnerability in the field of bioethics has been developed and what the main problems that derive from this approach are. Secondly, the paper analyzes some of the main philosophical approaches that I consider should be articulated in the expansion of a critical bioethics approach focused on the notion of vulnerability. To address this issue, I analyze the reflections that we find in the work of Martha Fineman, emphasizing the main relevant aspects for bioethics. Finally, I highlight the main implications of a theory of vulnerability for bioethics. | : Le concept de vulnérabilité est au coeur des développements actuels de la bioéthique, non seulement en raison de sa nature analytique, mais aussi en raison de son potentiel critique. Cependant, ce concept n’a pas été suffisamment développé, que ce soit dans le domaine de la philosophie morale ou de la bioéthique. Pour cette raison, il est nécessaire de définir et d’analyser le cadre conceptuel dans lequel la notion de vulnérabilité a été développée en bioéthique. Ainsi, le but de cet article est d’indiquer comment le concept de vulnérabilité a été développé dans le domaine de la bioéthique et quels sont les principaux problèmes découlant de cette approche. Deuxièmement, l’article analyse certaines des principales approches philosophiques qui devraient selon moi être articulées à une approche bioéthique critique centrée sur la notion de vulnérabilité. Pour traiter ce problème, j’analyse la réflexion de Martha Fineman, en soulignant les principaux aspects pertinents pour la bioéthique. Enfin, je souligne les principales implications d’une théorie de la vulnérabilité pour la bioéthique. (shrink)

Now in a third edition, Introduction to Philosophy: Classical and Contemporary Readings is a highly acclaimed, topically organized collection that covers five major areas of philosophy--theory of knowledge, philosophy of religion, philosophy of mind, freedom and determinism, and moral philosophy. Editor Louis P. Pojman enhances the text's topical organization by arranging the selections into a pro/con format to help students better understand opposing arguments. He also includes accessible introductions to each chapter, subsection, and individual reading, a unique feature for an (...) anthology of this depth. While the book focuses on a compelling sampling of classical material--including selections from Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant--it also incorporates some of philosophy's best twentieth-century and contemporary work, featuring articles by Bertrand Russell, Richard Taylor, John Searle, Thomas Nagel, and others. This third edition contains an expanded glossary, more extensive section introductions, and twelve new selections: Karl Popper: "Epistemology without a Knowing Subject" Richard Rorty: "Dismantling Truth: Solidarity Versus Objectivity" Daniel Dennett: "Postmodernism and Truth" Bruce Russell: "The Problem of Evil: Too Much Suffering" David Chalmers: "Against Materialism: Can Consciousness Be Reductively Explained?" Baron Paul Henri d'Holbach: "A Defense of Determinism" Michael Levin: "A Compatibilist Defense of Moral Responsibility" Plato: Socratic Morality: "Crito" Herodotus: "Custom Is King" J. L. Mackie: "The Subjectivity of Values" Louis P. Pojman: "A Critique of Mackie's Theory of Moral Subjectivism" Thomas Nagel: "Moral Luck". (shrink)

The Epicurean philosophical system has enjoyed much recent scrutiny, but the question of its philosophical ancestry remains largely neglected. It has often been thought that Epicurus owed only his physical theory of atomism to the fifth-century BC philosopher Democritus, but this study finds that there is much in his ethical thought which can be traced to Democritus. It also finds important influences on Epicurus in Democritus' fourth-century followers such as Anaxarchus and Pyrrho, and in Epicurus' disagreements with his own Democritean (...) teacher Nausiphanes. The result is not only a fascinating reconstruction of a lost tradition, but also an important contribution to the philosophical interpretation of Epicureanism, bearing especially on its ideal of tranquillity and on the relation of ethics to physics. (shrink)

Las trayectorias del arte caribeño, luego de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, experimentan profundas transformaciones en sus prácticas creativas y modos de comprensión cultural. Las complejas realidades sociales y políticas en las islas del Caribe hispano condujeron a un punto de giro en los procesos regionales, una transformación del campo del arte y replanteamientos de los discursos periféricos desde las manifestaciones, los temas de interés y el rol del artista en la sociedad. La fotografía, y especialmente aquella procedente de espacios periféricos (...) en las lógicas internacionales del arte, aportaron los iconos más contestatarios del momento. Los símbolos culturales de una nueva voz, que responde a un pensamiento emancipatorio y descolonizador, se expresan en la construcción de un discurso visual de paradigmas éticos y libertarios. Los lenguajes más renovadores de la época apelan a una base fotográfica de trasfondo por la relación entre la inmediatez y la pregnancia de la imagen, o la inherente reproductibilidad que propicia una función comunicativa más efectiva. (shrink)

BackgroundAlthough gait patterns disturbances are known to be related to cognitive decline, there is no consensus on the possibility of predicting one from the other. It is necessary to find the optimal gait features, experimental protocols, and computational algorithms to achieve this purpose.PurposesTo assess the efficacy of the Stable Sparse Classifiers procedure for discriminating young and healthy older adults, as well as healthy and cognitively impaired elderly groups from their gait patterns. To identify the walking tasks or combinations of tasks (...) and specific spatio-temporal gait features that allow the best prediction with SSC.MethodsA sample of 125 participants was studied. They underwent assessment with five neuropsychological tests that explore different cognitive domains. A summarized cognitive index, based on the Mahalanobis distance from normative data, was calculated. The sample was divided into three groups using k-means clustering of MDCog in addition to Age. The participants executed four walking tasks and their gait patterns, measured with a body-fixed Inertial Measurement Unit, were used to calculate 16 STGF and dual-task costs. SSC was then employed to predict which group the participants belonged to. The classification's performance was assessed using the area under the receiver operating curves and the stable biomarkers were identified.ResultsThe discrimination HE vs. MCI-E revealed that the combination of the easy dual-task and the fast walking task had the best prediction performance. The features related to gait variability and to the amplitude of vertical acceleration had the largest predictive power. SSC prediction accuracy was better than the accuracies obtained with linear discriminant analysis and support vector machine classifiers.ConclusionsThe study corroborated that the changes in gait patterns can be used to discriminate between young and healthy older adults and more importantly between healthy and cognitively impaired adults. A subset of gait tasks and STGF optimal for achieving this goal with SSC were identified, with the latter method superior to other classification techniques. (shrink)

En el presente artículo se hace una descripción de las variables fenomenológicas del movimiento, la ipseidad y la sensibilidad que propone la filosofía de Michel Henry. A partir de esta lectura se profundiza en el papel epistémico que ejerce la corporeidad, como horizonte de sentido para una ‘fenomenología de la vida material’.

One of the minor works that has been immortalized and remains amongst the most cited essays in the history of philosophy courses is the 1874 publication entitled: An Answer to the Question: “What is Enlightenment”? by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. We propose an hermeneutics of the main topics and problems that Kant addresses in this fundamental text; in addition, we will connect its arguments with the thesis that will be supported in this work: namely, that modern philosophy is an (...) exercise of critical thinking that has implications on the educational views, as well as on the ethical and political bets that aim at finding solutions for a society that has been historically traversed by an armed conflict, in a complex scenario where economic crises and asymmetric and fratricidal confrontations have been used, in conventional and unconventional ways, to obtain political power. (shrink)

Scepticism about ought simpliciter is the view that there is no such thing as what one ought simpliciter to do. Instead, practical deliberation is governed by a plurality of normative standpoints, each authoritative from their own perspective but none authoritative simpliciter. This paper aims to resist such scepticism. After setting out the challenge in general terms, I argue that scepticism can be resisted by rejecting a key assumption in the sceptic’s argument. This is the assumption that standpoint-relative ought judgments bring (...) with them a commitment to act in accordance with those judgments. Instead, I propose an alternative account of our normative concepts according to which only ought simpliciter judgments commit one to acting in accordance with those judgments. In addition to answering the sceptical challenge, the proposal offers an independently motivated account of what makes a concept normatively authoritative. (shrink)

One of the most influential men of his time, philosopher, psychologist, educator, and author William James (1842-1910) helped lead the transition from a predominantly European-centered nineteenth-century philosophy to a new "pragmatic" American philosophy. Helping to pave the way was his seminal book Pragmatism (1907), in which he included a chapter on "Truth," an essay which provoked severe criticism. In response, he wrote the present work, an attempt to bring together all he had ever written on the theory of knowledge, (...) including an article on the function of cognition, later polemic and expository contributions, and some replies to previous criticism. The result was a full and definitive expression of the pragmatist "epistemology" from James' point of view. In the book, he urges the reader to "turn away from abstractions, verbal solutions, fixed principles, and pretended absolutes and look for concreteness and facts, action and power," arguing that "the ultimate test for us of what a truth means is the conduct it dictates or inspires." For students, scholars--anyone interested in William James or the history of American philosophical thought--this book offers an in-depth exposition of the influential ideas of one of the greatest American thinkers. Unabridged republication of the edition originally published by Longmans, Green and Co., New York and London, 1909. (shrink)

In addition to being one of the world's most influential philosophers, Aristotle can also be credited with the creation of both the science of biology and the philosophy of biology. He was the first thinker to treat the investigations of the living world as a distinct inquiry with its own special concepts and principles. This book focuses on a seminal event in the history of biology - Aristotle's delineation of a special branch of theoretical knowledge devoted to the systematic investigation (...) of animals. Aristotle approached the creation of zoology with the tools of subtle and systematic philosophies of nature and of science that were then carefully tailored to the investigation of animals. The papers collected in this volume, written by a pre-eminent figure in the field of Aristotle's philosophy and biology, examine Aristotle's approach to biological inquiry and explanation, his concepts of matter, form and kind, and his teleology. (shrink)

Para entender esta creación literaria indeformable debemos reflexionar sobre el concepto de semejanza en la obra barroca. La semejanza entendida como búsqueda de creación espiritual del hombre que se va haciendo a medida que las inquietudes intelectuales y científicas trabajan para retratar su alma. Siguiendo el pensamiento de M. Foucault la semejanza, con sus cuatro similitudes, guiará este estudio de triángulos invisibles que les propongo. La parodia, crea una écfrasis en la que la imagen del alma de Cervantes y el (...) texto literario no pueden separarse. El triángulo de la semejanza se moverá en la metaficción combinando los tres conceptos fundamentales de la mimesis: la representación, la interpretación y la recreación, que va a sacar a la luz una historia escrita en árabe titulada Historia de don Quijote de la Mancha.Un duelo entre dos autores mantendrá el misterio del alma retratada. (shrink)

A lineage of prominent philosophers who have discussed the second-person relation can be regarded as advancing structural accounts. They posit that the second-person relation effects one transformative change to the structure of practical reasoning. In this paper, I criticise this orthodoxy and offer an alternative, substantive account. That is, I argue that entering into second-personal relations with others does indeed affect one's practical reasoning, but it does this not by altering the structure of one's agential thought, but by changing what (...) reasons can become available. The importance of second-personal thought for action is heterogenous. Second-person relations make possible the emergence of a wide variety of different kinds of practical reasons: creating some, revealing others. Recognising this diminishes the appeal of the traditional, structural accounts of the practical significance of such second-personal relations. Moving away from structural accounts facilitates a more thorough understanding of the intersubjective form of action. (shrink)

We applaud the spirit of MacNeilage's attempts to better explain the evolution and cortical control of speech by drawing on the vast literature in nonhuman primate neurobiology. However, he oversimplifies motor cortical fields and their known individual functions to such an extent that he undermines the value of his effort. In particular, MacNeilage has lumped together the functional characteristics across multiple mesial and lateral motor cortex fields, inadvertantly creating two hypothetical centers that simply may not exist.