The UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority was right to permit tissue typing preimplantation genetic diagnosisOn July 21 2004, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority , Britain’s regulatory agency for reproductive technologies, revised its policy on preimplantation genetic diagnosis for tissue typing.1,2 The authority of the HFEA to enact such a policy was affirmed by the UK’s highest court, the House of Lords, on April 28 2005.3 Preimplantation genetic diagnosis combines in vitro fertilisation with genetic testing. In PGD, embryos generally (...) undergo biopsy prior to the eight cell stage, followed by genetic testing for a particular trait. Tissue typing PGD is done to identify an embryo that is tissue matched for a child suffering from a severe disease requiring bone marrow or cord blood stem cell transplantation and for whom no living donor exists. This procedure was first performed in 2000.4 Precise matching of tissue types is critical to successful tissue transplant, and the donors of such tissues are often referred to as “saviour siblings”.Where a tissue matched individual already exists, extracting bone marrow from that individual or collecting cord blood already in storage, rather than creating a match, presents the most immediate treatment alternative. Bone marrow donation from adults or other medically competent individuals is not generally ethically contested, and bone marrow donation from medically incompetent individuals is also permissible under certain conditions.5 Where no living tissue donor exists, however, intentionally creating a donor through tissue typing PGD is among a short list of possible treatment options.The July HFEA policy change makes PGD licensable in cases where tissue typing is the only purpose of testing. Previously, PGD was licensable in the UK only for disease testing, and tissue typing PGD was permissible only when …. (shrink)
Peer review is a widely accepted instrument for raising the quality of science. Peer review limits the enormous unstructured influx of information and the sheer amount of dubious data, which in its absence would plunge science into chaos. In particular, peer review offers the benefit of eliminating papers that suffer from poor craftsmanship or methodological shortcomings, especially in the experimental sciences. However, we believe that peer review is not always appropriate for the evaluation of controversial hypothetical science. We argue that (...) the process of peer review can be prone to bias towards ideas that affirm the prior convictions of reviewers and against innovation and radical new ideas. Innovative hypotheses are thus highly vulnerable to being “filtered out” or made to accord with conventional wisdom by the peer review process. Consequently, having introduced peer review, the Elsevier journal Medical Hypotheses may be unable to continue its tradition as a radical journal allowing discussion of improbable or unconventional ideas. Hence we conclude by asking the publisher to consider re-introducing the system of editorial review to Medical Hypotheses. (shrink)
Social systems are always exposed to critical processes in which their organization, or part of it, is questioned by the society that demands solutions through different critical saliences. The traditional approach to such social crises has mainly focused on their anticipation and management, implying that the focus is on trying to deal with crises once they occur, rather than delving in their essential characteristics that seemingly depend on the adaptive nature of the system and the increase in its internal complexity. (...) To address this issue, we propose a dual approach that utilizes both qualitative and quantitative methods in order to delve into the relationship between the complexity of the social system, its adaptation, and critical episodes. Our analysis shows how an explosive economic growth affects a social system, increasing its complexity. This complexity produces different demands from the system itself. These demands manifest signatures of complexity such as a heterogeneous and rich social structure, which emerges during moments when the society acts strongly. (shrink)
Este trabajo analiza ciertas controversias en torno a las interpretaciones biopolíticas de Arendt. Recientemente, algunos de sus comentaristas han enfatizado las nuevas perspectivas teóricas que ciertos conceptos claves de Arendt podrían ofrecer desde el paradigma biopolítico. Sin embargo, estas reinterpretaciones no parecen ser fieles al fundamento original de tales conceptos —la fenomenología—. Intentaré mostrar aquí que es necesario: a) precisar la viabilidad de estas interpretaciones; b) calibrar su alcance; y c) hacer visible el riesgo de operar con ellas una tergiversación (...) del pensamiento aredtiano. Si es plausible mostrar esta incompatibilidad, podremos mostrar también algunos de los límites interpretativos del paradigma biopolítico. (shrink)
El artículo analiza la relación de proximidad y distancia que existe entre los pensamientos de Hannah Arendt y de Inmanuel Kant. La idea de voluntad es la clave hermenéutica de dicha contrastación. Se intenta esclarecer cómo la indeterminación del estatuto teórico de la idea de voluntad en Arendt entraña un punto de inflexión en el examen de la conflictiva relación que Arendt establece con Kant: Tal controversia se refiere a los límites de la Razón Práctica. Finalmente, el análisis se centra (...) tanto en la propuesta arendtiana de pensar la voluntad como facultad política así como en su enigmática conexión con la idea de espontaneidad de Kant. (shrink)
El presente artículo es un extracto de la Tesis Doctoral leída en la Facultad de Filosofía de la Universidad de Oviedo el 16 de abril de 2010 titulada Educación para la Libertad en el pensamiento de John Stuart Mill. Este artículo recoge de forma resumida, a lo largo de sus páginas, los aspectos más destacables de dicha Tesis Doctoral. Se subraya el aspecto de la educación como elemento fundamental en el pensamiento del filósofo inglés John Stuart Mill, en el sentido (...) de mostrar la educación como aquello que permite sacar al exterior las capacidades, talentos, destrezas que la persona posee. Al mismo tiempo es la educación, en el marco de la cultura, la que afina y refina a la persona, ayudándola a construirse como una persona que se incorpore a la ciudadanía con derechos y deberes y que ejerza esa ciudadanía responsablemente en aras del bien común. La educación hace al ser humano más libre, y la libertad es la esencia de la persona en el pensamiento de Stuart Mill. (shrink)
Nuestro texto no trata el tema lógico-lingüístico de las proposiciones, sino el tema ético de la comunicación humana. Comunicar es vincularse a otro ser humano mediante alguna referencia al mundo. A la ética importa describir y clasificar las diversas especies que se crean a través de la acción comunicativa y sus posibles transgresiones. Tema importante para comprender por qué toda acción humana -pero, en especial, la acción comunicativa-es éticamente evaluable, es el estudio que aquí se hace del concepto aristotélico-tomista de (...) ‘circunstancia'. Our text is not about the logical-linguistic issue proposais, but rather about the ethical issue of human communication. To communicative is to link to another human being using some reference to the world. Ethics is concerned with describing and classifying every single kind of links that are created by communicative action and its possible transgressions. An important issue to understand why every single human action -but specially, communicative action- is subject of ethical evaluation, is the study we do here about the Thomist-Aristothelic concept for ‘circumstance'. (shrink)
The present research aims to explore and describe the opinion of primary education teachers about performance evaluation. It is applied in the State of Tlaxcala, Mexico. The focus of the study is quantitative, since a questionnaire is applied based on a Likert scale, the data are analyzed with the program Statistical Package for Social Sciences. The results show that the study population is mostly at odds with the evaluation.
Nuestro texto no trata el tema lógico-lingüístico de las proposiciones, sino el tema ético de la comunicación humana. Comunicar es vincularse a otro ser humano mediante alguna referencia al mundo. A la ética importa describir y clasificar las diversas especies que se crean a través de la acción comunicativa y sus posibles transgresiones. Tema importante para comprender por qué toda acción humana -pero, en especial, la acción comunicativa-es éticamente evaluable, es el estudio que aquí se hace del concepto aristotélico-tomista de (...) ‘circunstancia'. Our text is not about the logical-linguistic issue proposais, but rather about the ethical issue of human communication. To communicative is to link to another human being using some reference to the world. Ethics is concerned with describing and classifying every single kind of links that are created by communicative action and its possible transgressions. An important issue to understand why every single human action -but specially, communicative action- is subject of ethical evaluation, is the study we do here about the Thomist-Aristothelic concept for ‘circumstance'. (shrink)
We carry out a critical analysis of the so-called “knowledge society” in order to show in what way the European Space for Higher Education (ESHE) constitutes the paradoxical culmination of this society. The “knowledge society” begins to solidify when the technologies, progressively specialized and separated from the possible basic scientific control of their consequences, begin to make possible a process of economic optimization between the investment and the productive profitability that is in turn feedbacked for a consumption increasingly unstoppable. This (...) process requires in principle to promote the sociological map that provides the educational support for a labor market in agreement with this economic-technologically optimized and full of consumerism society. But due to the increasingly unstoppable dynamics of consumerism which is the axis of rotation of all this process, the relationships between supply and demand within the consumption market, and with them the requirements of the labor market, will begin foreseeably to become random or unforeseeable, which will requires the creation of the corresponding educational support that generates a new type of maximum and indefinitely versatile professional. This one would be the necessity to which the project of the ESHE seeks basically to respond, but this project will thus be wrapped in the paradoxical task of. (shrink)
Este libro es un ensayo filosófico que expresa la relevancia que para John Stuart Mill tiene la educación, hasta el punto de considerarla como un derecho fundamental de las personas, teniendo en cuenta que en su tiempo no existían los hoy conocidos Derechos Humanos. Stuart Mill se adelanta a nuestra época y presenta a la educación como ese derecho básico de toda persona que ha de ser protegido, potenciado y proporcionado por los diversos Estados.
El presente texto muestra, dentro del pensamiento de John Stuart Mill, una idea de ser humano diverso y distinto que vive en una realidad también diversa. La convivencia de seres diversos en las distintas sociedades requiere de una organización política en la que la democracia representativa juega un papel importante, pero también unida a la política está la ética, la cual en Stuart Mill ha de ser una ética cívica, esto es, una ética en la que los ciudadanos, sujetos de (...) derechos y de deberes, desplieguen sus capacidades de modo libre, sin más freno que el perjuicio al semejante. (shrink)
El artículo trata de mostrar las influencias de los ideales de la Ilustración en el pensamiento de John Stuart Mill. Así, puede comprobarse como en esos ideales de libertad, igualdad, tolerancia, respeto a la diferencia que propugna la Ilustración están presentes en el pensamiento de Mill y vertebran su filosofía.
This work tries to demonstrate, in first place, that the “gnoseological” approach to the question for the science defended by Gustavo Bueno in fact only fits in the gnoseological materialism, the theory proposed by Bueno, while adequationism, theoreticism and descriptionsm would be theories of the science that genuinely would adopt the “epistemological” approach. In second place, we sustain that the epistemological and gnoseological approaches are generated in the soul/body alternative outlined by Cartesian dualism, because while the first one conceives the (...) subject that makes the sciences as a mere mind that operates with propositions or concepts “about the things”, the second one understands it as a (soulless) mechanical body that builds the sciences operating “with the things themselves”. Since in Descartes the soul is the instance that knows, the option for the body of the gnoseological materialism explains its (self) positioning regardless of the question of knowledge. Lastly, we examine some problems that this Cartesian notion of subject implicates for the gnoseological materialism’s conception of “human and ethological sciences”. (shrink)
El artículo tiene por objetivo mostrar la unión entre la moral y la educación en el pensamiento de John Stuart Mill. De dicha unión se sigue un modelo que conjuga transversalmente la diversidad, costumbres sociales y opinión pública. La sociedad es plural y diversa, siguiendo de ello la necesidad de una educación moral que esté dirigida por la tolerancia entre todos los ciudadanos.
The concept of populism has generated endless controversy marked by both the contrasting political feelings it conveys and a particular problem of definition. This article—based on political speeches, academic literature, and relevant online sources, such as Google Ngram Viewer, catalogs of great libraries, and digital archives of newspapers—adopts a pragmatic approach to the concept throughout its history, from the moment when the noun appeared in North American political life in the late nineteenth century until the most recent “populist moment” in (...) response to the economic crisis that started in 2008. The study of its changing meanings shows, however, some elements of continuity that make sense of what Margaret Canovan defined as “a notoriously vague term.”. (shrink)
This article deals with totalitarianism and its language, conceived as both the denial and to some extent the reversal of liberalism and its conceptual framework. Overcoming liberal language meant not only setting up new political terminology, but also replacing words with symbols, ideas with sensations. This is why the standard political lexicon of totalitarianism became hardly more than a slang vocabulary for domestic consumption and, by contrast, under those regimes—mainly Italian fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism—a amboyant universe of images, sounds, and (...) metaphors arose. Many of these images revolved around the human body as a powerful means to represent a charismatic leadership and, at the same time, an organic conception of their national communities. Totalitarian language seems to be a propitious way to explore the “dark side” of conceptual history, constituted by symbols rather than words. (shrink)
Este artículo trata de mostrar la idea de sociedad y de convivencia política de los ciudadanos en el pensamiento de John Stuart Mill desde su perspectiva utilitarista, en la cual el objetivo es la felicidad de las personas.
El artículo de investigación rememora en 2019 el 150 aniversario de la publicación de John Stuart Mill titulada La Esclavitud Femenina (1869). Recorre los principales ejes temáticos del autor acerca de su idea de mujer, de la necesidad de liberar a la mujer e igualarla al varón en los terrenos de la familia, laboral, educativo y político.
El presente artículo tiene por objeto mostrar la idea de persona en el pensamiento de John Stuart Mill. Esa idea es la de un ser humano cuya esencia es la libertad, y cuya existencia ha de configurarse en el autodespliegue de ese ser humano libre que debe respetar a sus semejantes.
