En este artículo se repasan algunas de las líneas de investigación más influyentes en el área de los estudios sobre biología y género y libros publicados al respecto por un grupo creciente de autoras. Como es habitual entre los estudios de género, en este caso los referentes a la biología cuentan con estudios sobre investigadoras en el área de la biología, mujeres que participaron activamente en la generación de saberes y prácticas de esta disciplina, por una parte, y con trabajos (...) sobre los sesgos epistémicos de género y sobre el androcentrismo en el conocimiento biológico, por otra. La genealogía se relaciona con la autoridad y ésta con el género como agencia en las ciencias y las experimentaciones contemporáneas. (shrink)

This essay details a historical crossroad in biochemistry and microbiology in which penicillin was a co-agent. I narrate the trajectory of the bacterial cell wall as the precise target for antibiotic action. As a strategic object of research, the bacterial cell wall remained at the core of experimental practices, scientific narratives and research funding appeals throughout the antibiotic era. The research laboratory was dedicated to the search for new antibiotics while remaining the site at which the mode of action of (...) this new substance was investigated. This combination of circumstances made the bacterial wall an ontology in transit. As invisible as the bacterial wall was for clinical purposes, in the biological laboratory, cellular meaning in regard to the action of penicillin made the bacterial wall visible within both microbiology and biochemistry. As a border to be crossed, some components of the bacterial cell wall and the biochemical destruction produced by penicillin became known during the 1950s and 1960s. The cell wall was constructed piece by piece in a transatlantic circulation of methods, names, and images of the shape of the wall itself. From 1955 onwards, microbiologists and biochemists mobilized new names and associated conceptual meanings. The composition of this thin and rigid layer would account for its shape, growth and destruction. This paper presents a history of biochemical morphology: a chemistry of shape – the shape of bacteria, as provided by its wall – that accounted for biology, for life itself. While penicillin was being established as an industrially-manufactured object, it remained a scientific tool within the research laboratory, contributing to the circulation of further scientific objects. (shrink)

El desarrollo de la competencia comunicativa en una lengua extranjera y el estudio de los fenómenos lingüísticos a través del análisis del discurso y de la pragmática son dos pilares funda-mentales en la formación de estudiantes que eligen las Humanidades como ámbito para sus estudios universitarios. En el marco de la adquisición de una segunda lengua con finalidades académicas y didácticas esta comunicación presenta una refexión desde la docencia sobre la adquisición de español como vehículo para el conocimiento de la (...) realidad multicultural y diversa del mundo hispanohablante reflejada en la fraseología y en el discurso oral. (shrink)

The notion of “individuality” in Plotinus is one of the most discussed. Throughout the Enneads, the problem of the individual subject arises from the complexity in understanding the relation between man and soul. To the intelligible man, also known as the inner or first man, a second man is added, so that “we have come to be the pair of them” 14.28-30). This question has been extensively addressed from different angles that lead either to a purely structuralist solution, or to (...) its criticism and the search for a more stable definition of subjective identity. The thesis that we will defend in this article, and that will indicate our position in the debate, tries to give a new perspective of the issue alluding to the sphere of life and its forms. The continuity between the different men will be determined by the continuity between their different forms of life, a primary issue to which the problem of individuality and the different modes of consciousness are subject. (shrink)

A political discourse of peace marked the distribution and use of radioisotopes in biomedical research and in medical diagnosis and therapy in the post-World War II period. This occurred during the era of expansion and strengthening of the United States' influence on the promotion of sciences and technologies in Europe as a collaborative effort, initially encouraged by the policies and budgetary distribution of the Marshall Plan. This article follows the importation of radioisotopes by two Spanish research groups, one in experimental (...) endocrinology and one in molecular biology. For both groups foreign funds were instrumental in the early establishment of their laboratories. The combination of funding and access to previously scarce radioisotopes helped position these groups at the forefront of research in Spain. (shrink)

This essay presents the early days of human cytogenetics, from the late 1950s until the mid 1970s, as a historical series of images. I propose a chronology moving from photographs of bodies to chromosome sets, to be joined by ultrasound images, which provided a return to bodies, by then focused on the unborn. Images carried ontological significance and, as I will argue, are principal characters in the history of human cytogenetics. Inspired by the historiography of heredity and genetics, studies on (...) visual cultures, the conceptualization of circulation, and the sociology of pregnancy, I suggest that cytogenetics, through its focus on pregnancy, pregnant women, and their offspring, found strategic living materials that stabilized human chromosome studies as a biomedical, post-eugenics practice. The historicity of each path displays a wide circulation of objects, tools, and methods that condensed on images that shared in the centuries-old visual expertise that medicine and botany had manufactured. (shrink)

From the mid-1960s onwards, a set of Spanish molecular biology research groups emerged in Spain. The factors contributing to this included: the return of a group of molecular biologists from their postdoctoral period abroad, the negotiations for the return of Spanish-born Nobel prize winner Severo Ochoa from New York, the negotiations for Spanish membership in the European Conference of Molecular Biology, and national policy towards university reform. As a result, the early molecular biologists’ research groups began to be recognised as (...) research schools by Spanish authorities and postgraduate courses and new research centres for molecular biology were set up. Foreign influence in the whole process was crucial. (shrink)

En este breve escrito se pretende únicamente recordar algunas de las intuiciones fundamentales del pensamiento de Josef Pieper, intuiciones que han constituido sin duda una aportación única y original a la filosofía del siglo XX.

Según L. Polo la libertad es un trascendental de carácter donal; esa índole donal significa que se ejerce entendiendo y aceptando el don recibido. Se reconoce entonces que ser libre implica saberse uno mismo enteramente dependiente de Dios. Desde estas tesis mantenidas al final de La libertad trascendental, se expondrá la concepción poliana de la criatura en consonancia con esa condición de la libertad. Se mostrará que la teoría poliana acerca de la libertad así entendida encuentra algunos antecedentes en la (...) noción de libertad que fue desarrollada por Nicolás de Cusa en su doctrina acerca de la imagen; doctrina que entiende la libertad como posesión de sí en el autoconocimiento y profunda unión con la trascendencia. (shrink)

Alongside the renowned male pioneers of medical cytogenetics, many women participated in investigations at the laboratory bench and the bedside, both in Europe and the Americas. These women were committed to this new biological and clinical practice—cytogenetics, the origins of contemporary genetic diagnosis—and contributed to the creation of new biological concepts and settings centered on the study of chromosome imaging. This paper will review the contributions made by a group of woman scientists from a wide geographical distribution, situating their names (...) and research agendas within the history of a field dating back to early plant and insect cytogenetics. Rather than an exhaustive compendium of women geneticists, this essay presents a kind of historical reconstruction that can be achieved by placing women at center stage in their geographies and networks of circulating cytogenetic knowledge and practices thereby relating a history of genetic images though the work carried out by women, retrieving their agency and constructing an inclusive history of an influential contemporary biomedical practice as it gained increasing influence in the laboratory and the clinic. (shrink)

The complexity of the epistemological framework developed in the philosophy of Iamblichus does not allow to be captured from the polarity that underlies the categories of rational and irrational. After the projection of such categories, the core of this philosophy remains itself misunderstood. In this paper we intend to point to the need for a hermeneutic that respects the Neoplatonism that, from their own internal assumptions, display models that allow open understanding about the meaning and coherence of this thought. A (...) serious approach to the texts foregrounds the importance of the method. This must accompany the complexity of its meaning without projecting beyond categories that hide their cores basic sense, attempting an inside their outlines. The deployment of this path indicates the result of the demonstration of the precariousness of certain exegetical lines that tend to hide behind the projection of conceptual parameters strangers, basic access key to this thought. (shrink)

El presente artículo se centra en el estudio de la exégesis que lleva a cabo Plotino en torno a la significación de la inefabilidad del uno, planteada en el Parménides platónico al hilo de la primera hipótesis. Este ubica a este primer uno inefable en el centro mismo de su sistema, lo que tendrá fuertes implicaciones tanto a nivel ontológico como por lo que respecta a la comprensión del lenguaje. la concepción de la realidad que se deriva de esta inefabilidad (...) del primer principio, de un lado, y las implicaciones en la naturaleza del lenguaje filosófico que abre este postulado, de otro, ocuparán la centralidad de nuestras reflexiones. Atenderemos a los textos originales en los que se plantea la cuestión, apoyándonos en la labor de la crítica, discutiendo los puntos fundamentales a fin de esclarecer la posición que encontramos en las Enéadas. Tomaremos, asimismo, en consideración la actualidad que tiene esta posición y su capacidad de ir más allá de la crítica heideggeriana a la metafísica. (shrink)

This study looks at the emerging branch of everyday aesthetics from the perspective of the fracture which exists in its core, as a result of the double reading of the everyday: the first, which elevates it to the realm of the extraordinary and the second, in which it remains strictly ordinary. Our purpose here is to repair this fracture by turning to David Hume’s functionalist aesthetics, where disinterest and utility are reconciled through sympathy and the affective experience of otherness that (...) it provides. Once transferred to the everyday sphere, sympathy facilitates understanding between these two versions, since the aesthetic appreciation of everyday objects or common activities requires, like the second version, that they remain in the practical environment and, like the first, to see something special in them, which is the possibility of one’s own or another’s well-being. (shrink)

_This article presents the main ethical challenges faced by social work professionals in Spain during the "first wave" of COVID-19 in 2020. The pandemic had a serious impact not only on the health sector, but also in the field of social work. During this time, social workers had to address serious ethical questions regarding issues such as confidentiality breaches, how to fairly distribute available resources, the lack of personal contact and emotional connection with the service users, the difficulties of working (...) in isolation and online, doubts about the reliability of the information they were handling and the difficulty of making proper diagnoses. An international research group led by Dr. Sara Banks conducted a broader research project in collaboration with the International Federation of Social Workers, which collected information through an online questionnaire aimed at social workers from various countries. In this article we analyse the results related to the main ethical challenges faced by social workers in Spain. The research group identified two types of ethical challenges that they have separated into two sections: the first section is related to direct intervention with users, which includes topics such as the lack of emotional support, reliability, use of technology, the appropriate care, compliance with the highest professional standards, confidentiality, vulnerability, and the fair distribu-tion of resources. The other section is related to the ethical challenges around the daily work within social entities, which involved dealing with issues such as the e-social work and coordination difficulties, the management of pressure in social bodies and changes in the intervention methodology__._ _Keywords_: Social work ethics, pandemic, international research, COVID. (shrink)

El estudio del cine como medio para el análisis sociológico es poco frecuente todavía en nuestro país. Existen numerosos artículos analizando el cine desde diversos ángulos, también el femenino, especialmente roles como el de la mujer fatal en el cine negro. Pero es menos habitual emplear este formato como parte de un método analítico del que extraer un reflejo social de lo que las pantallas proyectan y, a un tiempo, contribuyen a legitimar como base de una sociedad futura. No obstante, (...) existen pocos medios que sean capaces de reflejar el gran cambio acaecido en la historia reciente de la sociedad española. Este interés documental incrementa su potencial al enfocar en primer plano a las mujeres. Este artículo es una contribución a estudiar un campo tan atractivo como es el cine de migraciones a través de la óptica de los imaginarios sociales. (shrink)

We study twentieth-century biological sciences as experimental sciences by historically reconstructing the uses of experiments. Concepts like artificial, natural, and inventions, are handled so as to show how much current biological thought has been constructed on the basis of the invention of different kinds of experiments, instruments, and technical devices, experimental systems, and ideas concerning the fonctioning of nature. It is suggested that the frontier that may separate the natural from the artificial has already been crossed. Human intervention in the (...) natural phenomena through reproducible experiments hints to a view of current biological knowledge as a permanent invention of nature. (shrink)

This article exposes the neoplatonic element present in the metaphysics of causality elaborated in the seventeenth century by Leibniz. It explains this question in relation with medieval Neoplatonism, whose metaphysics of the Verb appears as the nucleus of the explanation of the relationship between causality and otherness.