La ciencia fue cultivada, en el occidente islámico, de manera amplia y eficaz, pero ¿quién la financió y por qué? El artículo explora este vastísimo campo a partir de las fuentes árabes que aportan datos (crónicas históricas y diccionarios biográficos) para trazar un panorama del mecenazgo científico. De este modo, además, se contribuye a situar a la ciencia en su contexto social.

En este artículo se lleva a cabo una descripción detallada del ms. 80 de la Zāwiya Ḥamzawīya. Es un maŷmū‛ recopilado, en su mayor parte, por un mismo copista del que desconocemos su nombre completo, aunque no el de su padre: ‛Umar b. Aḥmad b. Abī-l-Qāsim al-Šarīf. El maŷmu‛ contiene 427 folios con textos de variado contenido, predominando los de carácter astronómico. Entre otras obras, incluye una copia del Kitāb fī-l-‛amal bi-l-asturlāb de Abū-l-Ṣalt de Denia; el Kitāb min ‛ilm al-awqāt (...) bi-l-ḥisāb de Ibn al-Bannā de Marrākuš; el Tanbīh al-anām ‛alà mā yaḥduṯu fī ayyām al-‛ām de al-Ŷādīrī, así como su Urŷuza Rawḍat al-Azhār; y la única copia del Kitāb al-nuŷūm de ‛Abd. al-Mālik b. Ḥabīb. (shrink)

Las fuentes históricas ofrecen un material nada despreciable sobre fenómenos meteorológicos y astronómicos y el Rawḍ al-qirṭās de Ibn Abī Zar‛ es un buen ejemplo de ello. En el artículo se transcribe el texto árabe de acuerdo con la edición de Rabat 1976, a continuación se ofrece la traducción de Huici Miranda y por último se comenta la noticia. Una vez verificados los datos que aporta la obra relativos a eclipses y «cometas » sobresalen dos fenómenos: el primero y más (...) significativo es la observación de la supernova del año 1006 AD. Esta misma noticia ofrece la novedad, dentro de la tradición astronómica árabe, de que el autor atribuya, basándose en las observaciones de los antiguos, un carácter cíclico a los cometas. El segundo evento destacable es la aurora boreal observada, posiblemente, en Córdoba en el siglo IX. Finalmente, la datación exacta de los eclipses permite corregir algunas fechas erróneas del texto árabe cuyos manuscritos difieren bastante entre sí. (shrink)

This study of the interpretations of Aristotle's "Categories" in the thirteenth century provides an introduction to some main themes of medieval philosophical ...

The concept of stage presence in performing arts is generally understood as the ability of the skilled performer to capture the attention of the audience, a prerogative of the talented actor, who occupies a position of power in respect to the audience. This work challenges the classic model of stage presence as an intrinsic quality of the performer and proposes instead a cognitive ecological ethnographic framework which considers the role played by various social actors — the public and the performers, (...) embedded in specific historical, cultural, and social environments — in shaping the performance event. Through an ethnographic and phenomenological analysis of the concept of stage presence in different performative contexts, this work proposes a cognitive ecological approach to the study of stage presence, suggesting possible methodological directions. (shrink)

Taboo, as a space where the prohibited resides, delimits the form of the thinkable in a society. Freud, in Totem and Taboo, attempted to trace an explanation beyond the ‘categorical imperative’ of morality and custom. A century later the YouTuber PrankInvasion (Chris Monroe) seems to continue Freud’s account to his advantage. Through ‘Kissing my actual sister prank’, one of his most controversial videos, he challenged his own followers to fulfil an especially controversial challenge: kiss his own stepsister. It is through (...) these contacts with the limits of the moral, of the acceptable, that capitalism expands the colonized territory, absorbing the profane under its new exposure value. The unthinkable, the purported profanation of dogma (in this case, taboo of incest), disappears under the standardization of all rites as standardized consumable objects. But as Agamben warns about the nature of desecration it can not be related, in its new use, with the consumption realm. And that is not the case with PrankInvasion. Through the apparent absence of ordinary moral limits, Chris Monroe expresses his heartfelt attachment to the most extraordinary limit of capitalism: economic growth. (shrink)

Philosophical anthropology emerges, partly at least, by dissatisfied and critical followers of Husserl’s phenomenology, such as Max Scheler and the young Martin Heidegger. They were dissatisfied with what they saw as a disregard of the concrete human being as an essential part of phenomenological analysis. They tried instead to claim that philosophy must search for, and anchor, its foundations exclusively in the human being, not as an abstract entity, but as an existential, concrete, physical being. In this specific philosophical, as (...) well as historical, context this paper suggests to locate Hans Blumenberg’s philosophical project by reconstructing his unique version of philosophical anthropology. The main aim of the paper is to describe and understand the way Blumenberg combines his theory of metaphors together with his anthropological considerations regarding the origin and emergence of human culture into his own version of philosophical anthropology. A version that can be seen as joining the original attempt of philosophical anthropology to overcome the deficiency in Husserl’s phenomenological project. (shrink)

In the 1960s, the growing strategic importance of ocean exploration led the French government to develop greater capacity in marine scientific research, aiming to promote cooperative and diplomatic relations with the leading states in ocean exploration. Devised during Charles de Gaulle's government (1958–1969), the restructuring of French oceanography culminated, in 1967, in the establishment of the state‐led Centre National pour l'Exploitation des Océans (CNEXO). Beyond being intended to control the orientation of marine research at a national level, the CNEXO's mission (...) was to use scientific diplomacy to balance a desire for enhancing international cooperative relations in oceanography with French ambitions to equal the USA's leading capacity to explore the oceans. Its director, the naval officer Yves la Prairie, played a crucial role in articulating scientific, national, and diplomatic interests for France in the oceans. (shrink)

In this chapter, we offer a reconstruction of the evolution of Leibniz’s thought concerning the problem of the infinite divisibility of bodies, the tension between actuality, unassignability, and syncategorematicity, and the closely related question of the possibility of infinitesimal quantities, both in physics and in mathematics.Some scholars have argued that syncategorematicity is a mature acquisition, to which Leibniz resorts to solve the question of his infinitesimals – namely the idea that infinitesimals are just signs for Archimedean exhaustions, and their unassignability (...) is a nominalist maneuver. On the contrary, we show that syncategorematicity, as a traditional idea of classical scholasticism, is a feature of young Leibniz’s thinking, from which he moves away in order to solve the same problem, as he gains mathematical knowledge.We have divided Leibniz’s path toward his mature view of infinitesimals into five phases, which are especially significant for reconstructing the entire evolution. In our reconstruction, an important role is played by Leibniz’s text De Quadratura Arithmetica. Based on this and other texts, we dispute the thesis that fictionality coincides with syncategorematicity, and that unassignability can be bypassed. (In this chapter, we employ “syncategorematic” as a shorthand for “eventually identifiable with a procedure of exhaustion” and, as a consequence, “involving only assignable quantities.” We also identify syncategorematicity with potentiality, as suggested by some part of the scholastics, and in Sect. 2.2, we show that the two characterizations are equivalent, provided that “potentiality” is intended in the correct way: namely as in the unending iterative procedures of Greek mathematics.) On the contrary, we maintain that unassignability, as incompatible with the principle of harmony, is the ultimate reason for the fictionality of infinitesimals. (shrink)

In this article I reconsider the issue of ?transfer? in education. Received views of learning transfer tend to rely upon a version of representation in which the world and the learner are held apart. The focus falls on how this gap can be closed; how learning can be transferred. A sociomaterial perspective, by contrast, puts learner and world back together, making each available to the other. Bringing the materialist sensibility of actor-network theory to bear and drawing on empirical data collected (...) as part of a small-scale qualitative study of the experience of graduate teachers when moving from education into work, it is argued that transfer, and by implication, learning, primarily concerns the practical and takes multiple forms: contingently composed of social, textual and material practices of knowledge production, learning transfer is a relational effect of the intersection of these practices. Empirical analyses point to the practice of two broad patterns of learning transfer, termed here the representational and the relational. Thinking learning transfer as performed through disparate agencies and practices challenges the self-evidences of perspectives on learning which characterize contemporary education. Here, learning is primarily seen in terms of the intrinsic capabilities of people, regardless of the object-dependent qualities of their learning and lives. This human-centricity raises significant epistemological and ethical issues which are addressed by way of a discussion of the embedded normativities and politics of the practices of representational and relational transfer. (shrink)

Innovation in medieval studies is the creative ability to go back to sources. Digging, exploring, and connecting material pieces of evidence, facts, and individuals uncover new knowledge. One of the most significant sources for the medieval textual production is the university. Understanding the writings stemming from different faculties of medieval universities requires skills, curiosity, and tools. Among such instruments, the statutes of universities help researchers not only to decipher the organization of the academic institutions and interpret the rules that apply (...) to scholars and to their professors, but also to decode how and why texts were produced. The faculty of theology represents the highest level where education led during the Middle Ages and delivers the highest degree such as the master in theology. All over Europe, such faculties become the impetus that drives the intelligentsia to produce a textual heritage that today generates inspiration for magisterial carriers. Among them, Professor Maarten Hoenen is one to praise today. Taking as a point of departure a recent publication of Maarten Hoenen, 1 I will propose to investigate the relation between the statute of universities and of intellectual practices within medieval academia-more precisely, how a researcher should dig for complementary sources when the main documentation depicting an intellectual practice, such as the protestatio and gratiarum actio, is missing. I do not intend to be exhaustive, but simply to focus on how we should understand these two actions, protestatio and gratiarum actio, in connection with the Sentences commentaries. 2 The paradox is that we have traces of these two practices in the surviving manuscripts stemming from the university, but we do not always have a description of these actions in their statutes. Protestatio represents an oath that bachelors take at the beginning of an academic exercise, and the gratiarum actio is the final paragraph that closes the same exercise by thanks addressed to the public. The span of time I will focus on is between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, since this is the period from which some testimonies survived that today help to better clarify how these actions were performed in medieval academia. It is also the period of naissance of the new faculties of theology all around Europe, as it is the case with Bologna, Vienna, Cracow, or Prague. They all embraced the model disseminated in Paris and Oxford on reading on the Sentences of Peter Lombard to obtain the degree of doctor in theology, and they contribute to building tradition, and therefore to produce sources for us today. (shrink)

In exploring skilled performance in Contact Improvisation, we utilize an enactive ethnographic methodology combined with an interdisciplinary approach to examine the question of how skill develops in CI. We suggest this involves the development of subtleties of awareness of intra- and interkinaesthetic attunement, and a capacity for interkinaesthetic negative capability—an embodied interpersonal ‘not knowing yet’—including an ease with being off balance and waiting for the next shift or movement to arise, literally a ‘playing with’ balance, falling, nearly falling, momentum and (...) gravity. We draw on insights from an interdisciplinary approach, including from a developmental perspective concerning the experience of dyadic interpersonal embodied skill development in both infancy and CI. Building on Ravn and Høffding’s definition of expertise in improvisation as an “oscillatory process of assuming and relinquishing agency” we propose that a key aspect of expertise in CI involves oscillation between levels and processes of interkinaesthetic sense of agency. These interdisciplinary insights also elucidate limitations within current conceptualisations of sense of agency, including the relationship between sense of agency and sense of control. (shrink)

This text, commissioned by the OSUN Global Observatory of Academic Freedom, discusses how the concept of academic freedom is codified in Colombian Law and regulations of public and private higher education institutions. It also explores common conceptions of academic freedom among Colombian scholars, as well as commonly observed threats to it.

This paper offers an account of Hans Blumenberg’s unique approach to myth. §1 shows that Blumenberg’s thought on myth, like his thought on metaphor, has been widely misconstrued. §2 argues that Blumenberg’s account of myth should be seen as part of the discussion of non-conceptuality. It explains that Blumenberg, invoking conceptuality’s epistemic limitations, challenges modern philosophy’s denigration of non-conceptuality. Blumenberg argues that conceptuality should not be understood in terms of mathematical-scientific rationality, but more broadly, and claims that myth and metaphor (...) are themselves conceptual. When conceptuality is understood broadly, what is taken to be quintessentially non-conceptual can be seen to be conceptual. §3 examines Blumenberg’s nuanced characterization of myth, focusing on the key notions of ‘work on myth’ and ‘work of myth’, and showing that the corresponding distinction between structure and function is insufficient to define myth. §4 explores ‘significance’ (Bedeutsamkeit), the additional concept needed to fully characterize myth. ‘Significance’ comes to light in the encounter between myth and myth’s deployment in subjective life experiences. Whether there can be an end to myth is discussed in §5. Cartesian rationalism and German Idealism were touted as bringing myth to an end, but Blumenberg contends that myth’s functional role in human life precludes its elimination. (shrink)

This exploration of Hegel's critique of the individualistic ethos of modernity and the genesis of his alternative vision traces the conceptual schemes Hegel experimented with to show how he settled on the concepts of 'ethical life' (Sittlichkeit) and Spirit as the means for overcoming subjectivity and domination.

Ethical leadership matters in the context of organizational change due to the need for followers to trust the integrity of their leaders. Yet, there have been no studies investigating ethical leadership and organizational change. To fill this gap, we introduce a model of the moderating role of involvement in change. Organizational change and involvement in change are proposed as context-level moderators in the relationships of ethical leadership and work-related attitudes and performance. We employ a sample of 199 supervisor–subordinate pairs from (...) a wide variety of organizations. Results support a three-way interaction (ethical leadership, organizational change, and involvement in change) for performance and OCBs. Our results have important implications for organizational change since ethical leadership appears to complement follower involvement when change is happening. (shrink)

El objetivo de este artículo es describir la percepción de riesgo y los factores de protección y de riesgo frente al consumo de sustancias psicoactivas legales e ilegales en estudiantes de la Universidad de Boyacá. Es un estudio cuantitativo y descriptivo de corte transversal, para el cual se tomó una muestra de 573 estudiantes que fueron seleccionados mediante muestreo estratificado probabilístico. El instrumento utilizado fue la encuesta sobre consumo de drogas, factores y percepción de riesgo en estudiantes universitarios (CODEU) diseñado (...) por Beverido, Salas, De San Jorge, Pavón, Blázquez, Gogeascoechea y Cruz (2012), que consta de 73 preguntas. Este instrumento fue validado y obtuvo un alpha de Cronbach de 0.787. Los hallazgos muestran que entre los factores protectores se encuentran: adecuadas relaciones familiares y practicar un deporte, como factores de riesgo se identifican principalmente: la permisividad social y las construcciones de reconocimiento social presentes ante el consumo de sustancias legales. De las sustancias ilegales, la marihuana es la que se percibe como de menor riesgo frente a la cocaína, el bazuco, los inhalantes y la heroína. (shrink)

Through cultural transmission, repeated learning by new individuals transforms cultural information, which tends to become increasingly compressible . Existing diffusion chain studies include in their design two processes that could be responsible for this tendency: learning and reproducing . This paper manipulates the presence of learning in a simple iterated drawing design experiment. We find that learning seems to be the causal factor behind the increase in compressibility observed in the transmitted information, while reproducing is a source of random heritable (...) innovations. Only a theory invoking these two aspects of cultural learning will be able to explain human culture's fundamental balance between stability and innovation. (shrink)

As a neonatal neurologist, I serve families facing tragic decisions in which they must balance trade-offs between death and life with profound disability. I often find myself in complex discussions about future outcome, in which families sort through in real-time what information they value most in making such a choice. Will he laugh? Will he be in pain? Will he know how much he’s loved? In this month’s feature article, Brick et al share the results of an online survey aimed (...) at assessing public views on when a life is not worth living, in an effort to inform ongoing legal and clinical debates about withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment for children. These findings raise important questions about how we define and measure outcomes that matter to parents as they make these tragic decisions. It is challenging to interpret these findings in the absence of context of how decision-making for infants occurs in real-time. The nature of this study and its objective required that cases be substantially simplified. As the authors acknowledge, the prognoses and function of the children involved in these cases were often deeply contested. Prognostic uncertainty is common for children with significant …. (shrink)

Giorgio Pini - Duns Scotus on God - Journal of the History of Philosophy 45:3 Journal of the History of Philosophy 45.3 497-498 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Giorgio Pini Fordham University Richard Cross. Duns Scotus on God. Ashgate Studies in the History of Philosophical Theology. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005. Pp. xi + 289. Paper, $34.95. In this volume, Richard Cross gives us an excellent treatment of Duns Scotus's teaching on God, admirable for both its comprehensiveness and (...) philosophical rigor. Scotus's positions on God's existence and nature, and on the Trinity, are reconstructed and evaluated with close attention to their argumentative soundness. Cross's method is particularly well-suited to his subject. As he notices, Scotus is, among theologians, "the least likely to appeal to mystery, and most likely to try to solve a.. (shrink)

This paper examines folk theories of algorithmic recommendations on Spotify in order to make visible the cultural specificities of data assemblages in the global South. The study was conducted in Costa Rica and draws on triangulated data from 30 interviews, 4 focus groups with 22 users, and the study of “rich pictures” made by individuals to graphically represent their understanding of algorithmic recommendations. We found two main folk theories: one that personifies Spotify and another one that envisions it as a (...) system full of resources. Whereas the first theory emphasizes local conceptions of social relations to make sense of algorithms, the second one stresses the role of algorithms in providing a global experience of music and technology. We analyze why people espouse either one of these theories and how these theories provide users with resources to enact different modalities of power and resistance in relation to recommendation algorithms. We argue that folk theories thus offer a productive way to broaden understanding of what agency means in relation to algorithms. (shrink)

Blockchain is an open digital ledger technology that has the capability of significantly altering the way that people operations operate in organizations. This research takes a first step in proposing several ways in which the blockchain technology can be used to improve current organizational practices, while also considering the ethical implications. Specifically, the paper examines the role that blockchain technology plays in three primary areas of people operations: entry to the organization, intraorganizational processes, and exit. In each section, the paper (...) reviews the ethical implications from the lenses of virtue ethics, utilitarianism, deontology and contractarianism. The paper concludes that in whole the implementation of blockchain technology in people operations processes can create a more ethical work environment. However, careful implementation is necessary and requires extensive examination of ethical implications in advance. (shrink)

There is growing interest in the role of new urban agriculture models to increase local food production capacity in cities of the Global North. Urban rooftop greenhouses and hydroponics are examples of such models receiving increasing attention as a technological approach to year-round local food production in cities. Yet, little research has addressed the unintended consequences of new modes of urban farming and food distribution, such as increased competition with existing peri-urban and rural farmers. We examine how small-scale farmers perceive (...) and have responded to a recently established rooftop greenhouse and online marketplace enterprise in Montréal, Canada. Drawing on interviews with key informants and small-scale farmers, we find that peri-urban and rural producers have been affected in three key ways that represent tensions, adaptations, and synergies arising from this new urban agriculture and food distribution enterprise. First, many farmers are concerned about increased competition and value conflation with the ideals of community supported agriculture and organic farming. Second, some farmers have adapted by developing novel marketing strategies and working with local bridge organizations to collectively market their produce to urban consumers. Third, a few farmers have decided to wholesale their produce to this new enterprise, allowing them to specialize production and avoid marketing their produce directly to urban consumers. Our study suggests that the emergence of a new form of alternative food network in Montréal has created both positive and negative disruptions for existing small-scale producers. Advocates for the expansion of new urban food production and distribution models should therefore give greater consideration to the effects on other actors in the local food system. (shrink)

Given that mitigating climate change is a large-scale global issue, what obligations do individuals have to lower their personal carbon emissions? I survey recent suggestions by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Dale Jamieson and offer models for thinking about their respective approaches. I then present a third model based on the notion of structural violence. While the three models are not mutually incompatible, each one suggests a different focus for mitigating climate change. In the end, I agree with Sinnott-Armstrong that people have (...) limited moral obligations to directly lower personal emissions, but I offer different reasons for this conclusion, namely that the structural arrangements of our lives place a limit on how much individuals can restrict their own emissions. Thus, individuals should focus their efforts on changing the systems instead (e.g., the design of cities, laws and regulation, etc.), which will lead to lower emissions on a larger scale. (shrink)

We investigate the emergence of iconicity, specifically a bouba-kiki effect in miniature artificial languages under different functional constraints: when the languages are reproduced and when they are used communicatively. We ran transmission chains of participant dyads who played an interactive communicative game and individual participants who played a matched learning game. An analysis of the languages over six generations in an iterated learning experiment revealed that in the Communication condition, but not in the Reproduction condition, words for spiky shapes tend (...) to be rated by naive judges as more spiky than the words for round shapes. This suggests that iconicity may not only be the outcome of innovations introduced by individuals, but, crucially, the result of interlocutor negotiation of new communicative conventions. We interpret our results as an illustration of cultural evolution by random mutation and selection. (shrink)

This essay examines how early moderns used birth horoscopes (genitures) to assess the compatibility of prospective spouses before marriage. Astrologers could probe the horoscope of an individual to investigate his or her present and future physical and moral qualities or compare charts to reveal the personal compatibility of a couple and help establish the best time to consummate their marriage. These practices aimed at ensuring a fruitful marriage and the harmony and happiness of the couple and their families. Focusing on (...) a few key examples, the essay outlines both the astrological theories and the social politics that propelled astrological matching, suggesting that its appeal lay in the promise of informed choice while also preserving free will. Finally, the author suggests ways in which astrological practices and the use of vast amounts of astronomical data share affinities with data-driven matching in our own time. (shrink)

This paper provides an exploratory comparative assessment of the institutional pressures influencing corporate social responsibility in a developed country, UK, vs. a developing country, Brazil, based on a survey of different actors. Information on sustainability concerns, organizational strategies and mechanisms of pressure was collected through interviews with environmental regulatory agencies, financial institutions, media and non-governmental organizations. Our results confirm that the more advanced awareness and CSR responsiveness in the UK is a consequence of a predominance of coercive and normative forces (...) on the organizational field. The institutional forces tend to build a Brazilian organizational field that is relational based and risk intensive. The findings lend support to the view that CSR responses are unlikely to be easily transformed into uniform standardized practices across the globe. This paper contributes to a collective understanding of the organizational field and a common template for CSR in the context of developed and developing countries. (shrink)