In the present meta-analysis, we examined the effect of cognitive training on the Executive Function (EF) of preschool children (age range: 3-6 years). We selected a final set of 32 studies from 27 papers with a total sample of 123 effect sizes. We found an overall effect of cognitive training for improving EF (g =.352; k = 123; p <.001), without significant difference between near and far transfer effects on executive domains. No significant additional outcome effects were found for behavioral- (...) and learning-related outcomes. Cognitive training programs for preschoolers are significantly more effective for developmentally at-risk children (ADHD or low socio-economic status) than for children with typical development and without risks. Other significant moderators were computerized versus non-computerized training, individual versus group sessions, and length of training. The number of sessions was not a significant moderator. This is the first demonstration of cognitive training far transfer effects among different executive processes. We discuss this result in relationship with the lower level of modularization of EFs in younger children. (shrink)

Over the last decade many emerging economies, and in particular Brazil, have established themselves as major players in global food animal production. Within these countries much of the increase in food animal production has been achieved by the adoption of intensive housing systems similar to those found in most industrialized countries. However, it is now well established that many of these systems are associated with numerous welfare problems, particularly with respect to restriction of movement. Previous work has shown that people (...) living in industrialized’ countries broadly support farm animal welfare reform, and that similar criticisms may be voiced from citizens living in developing countries as they become more aware of confinement housing and potentially contentious husbandry practices. Given the developments that have taken place in other countries, there are lessons that could be learned and applied by emerging economies that would undoubtedly ease or prevent the challenges observed in other countries. Thus, we briefly describe the vehicles used by different countries when addressing animal welfare that may provide insights into identifying possible challenges and potential solutions for Brazil and other emerging economies. Where available we review the associated science and identify gaps where more research is needed. We conclude by providing a possible roadmap on how farm animal welfare reform may be addressed in emerging countries. Solutions will need to be tailored, culturally relevant, and science must play a key role in supporting animal welfare reform in the emerging countries. (shrink)

U ovom članku raspravljamo o hipotezi proširenog jastva Andyja Clarka i Davida Chalmersa, a osobito o prigovoru prema kojemu proširenom jastvu nedostaje stabilnost i kontinuitet koji su potrebni da bismo ga smatrali identičnim kroz vrijeme. Pokušavamo pokazati da je taj prigovor neodrživ. Raspravljamo i o gledištu prema kojemu se drugi tip jastva, to jest narativno jastvo, također može shvatiti kao prošireno, i tvrdimo da stabilnost i kontinuitet toga tipa jastva također nisu ugroženi ako ga proširimo izvan granica čovjekova tijela. Stoga, (...) barem što se tiče tih tipova jastva, kada razmišljamo o problemima osobnog identiteta, nije potrebno ograničiti se na internalizirano jastvo. (shrink)

According to Orthodox theology, philanthropy refers to the love of God toward man, which man is called to imitate by loving his neighbor as himself. This love consists not just in emotions but requires specific acts of philanthropy toward our fellow man in need. The church, in keeping the commandments of Christ, has developed throughout her history a rich philanthropic work. The diaconia of the church has taken many forms, thus responding to historical change and to the specific human needs (...) at different times. Concentrating on diaconia for those who are in need of long-term care, this article presents the Orthodox view of the diaconia of the church, as realized through her own philanthropic organizations as well as through her very specific contribution to the diaconia offered by state sponsored charitable institutions. (shrink)

The paper explores the process of the Czech journalists setting the EU agenda in the media during the ‘hot phase’ of the Czech national parliament election campaigns in 2002, 2006, and 2010. Unlike most studies that concentrated on the media agenda in the European Parliament election campaigns, we focused on periods that were neither strictly key events nor routine, but that were more intensively covered by the media and simultaneously generated more influential political representation defining national political attitudes towards the (...) EU. Articles that referred to the EU during the ‘hot phase’ were content analyzed. The results suggest that in the Czech press, the EU agenda is less and less visible, and, moreover, that it is increasingly negatively framed and reduced to an economic agenda. (shrink)

Resumen: Este artículo intenta visibilizar algunos aspectos del rol fundacional de la narrativa de Juan Emar en las letras nacionales, en particular, su fecundo diálogo con la antipoesía de Parra. Se propone que tanto en Miltín 1934 de Emar como en la Antipoesía de Parra asistimos a la práctica de una carnavalización del motivo de lo divino-sublime. En esta dirección, ambas poéticas vanguardistas modulan en el espacio hispanoamericano una de las aristas del “proyecto inconcluso de la modernidad” : la muerte (...) nietzscheana de Dios y de su espacio simbólico; connotado por el tópico de la música de las esferas. Tópico que en ambos autores se da en el marco de un cuestionamiento a una estética de lo sublime que predominaba en la crítica de la época.: This article attempts to draw attention to the foundational role of the literary production of Juan Emar in the national letters, in particular, its fruitful dialogue with the antipoesía de Parra. It is proposed that both in Miltín 1934 and the Antipoesía de Parra we attend the practice of carnivalization of the divine-sublime. In this direction, both avant-garde poetics modulate one of the edges the “unfinished project of modernity” : the simbolic death of God and the simbolic space; connotated by the topico of the spheres music. Topico that in both authors is given in a questioning of a critique of an aesthetic of the sublime; that prevailed in criticism of that period. (shrink)

'Risquons-Tout' is an ambitious, thematic group exhibition that explores the potential of transgression and unpredictability. It examines how art challenges the homogenisation of thought in the now infamous echo chambers of our overcrowded info-sphere. 'Risquons-Tout' presents some of the most innovative and influential artists and authors from the Eurocore region, which extends between Amsterdam, Paris, Cologne, Düsseldorf and London, with Brussels at its centre. The title is borrowed from a place located on the Belgian-French border, a real yet liminal space (...) of transition, passage and informal exchanges, notably smuggling. The invited artists negotiate different dynamics of bridging, passing, translating and transgressing. In doing so they burst the safe bubbles generated by prediction algorithms, designed to avoid any risk, whether intellectual, financial, emotional or physical. The exhibition's geographic and political scope addresses today's global connectivity, trans-national circulation and diasporic movements. 'Risquons-Tout' will occupy the entire WIELS building and range out into neighbouring exhibition and performance spaces. It will present the works of 38 internationally recognised or emerging artists. The exhibition proposes a rich array of practices that defy easy categorisation. 'Risquons-Tout' will also include a performative section and an Open School that will serve as a laboratory for artists and scholars to draw upon questions of risk, unpredictability and borders through a range of alternative methods for the transmission of knowledge. Exhibition: WIELS, Brussels, Belgium (12.09.2020 - 10.01.2021). (shrink)

Although Boyle has been regarded as a champion of the seventeenth century Cartesian mechanical philosophy, I defend the position that Boyle’s views conciliate between a strictly mechanistic conception of fundamental matter and a non-reductionist conception of chemical qualities. In particular, I argue that this conciliation is evident in Boyle’s ontological distinction between fundamental corpuscles endowed with mechanistic properties and higher-level corpuscular concretions endowed with chemical properties. Some of these points have already been acknowledged by contemporary scholars, and I actively engage (...) with their ideas in this paper. However I attempt to contribute to the debate over Boyle’s mechanical philosophy by arguing that Boyle’s writings suggest an emergentist, albeit still mechanistic, notion of chemical properties. I contrast Boyle’s views against those of strict reductionist mechanical philosophers, focusing on the famous debate with Spinoza over the redintegration of niter, and argue that Boyle’s complex chemical ontology provides a more satisfactory understanding of chemical phenomena than is provided by a strictly reductionist and Cartesian mechanical philosophy. (shrink)

In this essay, we argue that there exist obvious parallels between questions that inform philosophy of chemistry and the so-called hard problem of consciousness in philosophy of mind. These include questions regarding the emergence of higher-level phenomena from lower-level physical states, the reduction of higher-level phenomena to lower-level physical states, and 'downward causation'. We, therefore, propose that the 'hard problem' of consciousness should be approached in a manner similar to that used to address parallel problems in philosophy of chemistry. Thus, (...) our contribution begins by scrutinizing the ways chemists and quantum chemists think about and use different levels of organization and chemical relations and relata and then investigates the problem of 'downward causation' as it relates to the question of emergence. We demonstrate that the science of the transformation of 'substances', namely chemistry, enables us to go beyond substantialism and to develop, instead, a non-substantialist account of levels of reality. Similarly, the 'hard problem' of consciousness will require that we transcend traditional emergentism and its substantialist conception of mind. As with chemical phenomena, mental phenomena must be examined in terms of the relationality of wholes and parts, and this will require the development of a mereology that explains how parts and wholes may co-define each other. Like the non-classical and non-transitive mereology that has been proposed for quantum chemistry, an extended mereology for philosophy of mind must be one that entangles the whole, its parts, and the environment, thus rendering 'downward causation' into a relational concept. This proposal is neither a reductionist analysis that only needs the parts to define the whole, nor a merely holistic description within which the whole is necessary to define the parts. Rather, we propose that the parts, the whole, and the environment co-define each other so that our understanding of parts, wholes, and environment as independent concepts must itself be altered. (shrink)

We present the model construction technique called Linear Realizability. It consists in building a category of Partial Equivalence Relations over a Linear Combinatory Algebra. We illustrate how it can be used to provide models, which are fully complete for various typed λ-calculi. In particular, we focus on special Linear Combinatory Algebras of partial involutions, and we present PER models over them which are fully complete, inter alia, w.r.t. the following languages and theories: the fragment of System F consisting of ML-types, (...) the maximal theory on the simply typed λ-calculus with finitely many ground constants, and the maximal theory on an infinitary version of this latter calculus. (shrink)

This essay offers a novel approach for understanding the poetry of negritude and its role in the struggle for black liberation by appealing to Giambattista Vico’s insights on the historical, cultural, and myth-making function of poetry and of the mythopoetic imagination. The essay begins with a discussion of Vico’s aesthetic historicism and of his ideas regarding the role of imagination, poetry, and myth-making and then brings these ideas to bear on the discussion of the function of negritude poetry, focusing primarily (...) on the writings of Aimé Césaire and on Jean-Paul Sartre’s essay, Black Orpheus. (shrink)

The 16th and 17th centuries marked a period of transition from the vitalistic ontology that had dominated Renaissance natural philosophy to the Early Modern mechanistic paradigm endorsed by, among others, the Cartesians and Newtonians. This paper focuses on how the tensions between vitalism and mechanism played themselves out in the context of 16th and 17th century chemistry and chemical philosophy. The paper argues that, within the fields of chemistry and chemical philosophy, the significant transition that culminated in the 18th century (...) Chemical Revolution was not a transition from vitalism to full-blown mechanism. Rather, chemical philosophy shifted from a vitalistic theory of matter and spirits to a naturalistic, physicalistic, and corpuscularian conception of chemical properties and reactions. Despite being naturalistic, physicalistic, and corpuscularian, however, this theory was not fully mechanistic. Special attention is paid to the contributions made by Paracelsus, Sebastien Basso, Jan Baptista van Helmont, and Robert Boyle to this ontological transition. (shrink)

This essay proposes to discuss the manner in which Jan Baptista van Helmont helped to transform the Neoplatonic notions of vital spirit and of ferment by giving these notions an unambiguously chemical interpretation, thereby influencing the eventual naturalization of these ideas in the work of late seventeenth century chymists. This chemical interpretation of vital spirit and ferment forms part of Helmont’s hybrid ontology, which fuses a corpuscular conception of minima naturalia with a non-corporeal conception of semina rerum. For Helmont, chemical (...) alterations involve the minima as physical units but also depend upon ferments that are contained in the semina, which function as formative spiritual agents. Helmont’s nuanced ontology ultimately contributes to the development of modern corpuscularian theory by explaining many chemical reactions in fundamentally corpuscular terms, as the addition and subtraction of particles. (shrink)

Mi problema es como reconciliar una fundamentación racional de instituciones democráticas, que en nuestras sociedades tienden a ser de índole liberal, con la creciente complejidad demográfica de las sociedades contemporáneas. Mi punto de vista es que esta fundamentación debería ser deliberativa y discursiva, es decir, debería garantizar una participación reflexiva de todos los ciudadanos en el diseño y sostenimiento de sus instituciones públicas. Ahora bien, ¿cómo alcanzar este ideal en sociedades cuyas complejidades dificultan la coordinación de intereses y la participación (...) discursiva, lo que vuelve a sus ciudadanos dispuestos a sacrificar sus libertades para rendirlas a un poder político despótico y totalitario? Palabras claves: instituciones democráticas y sociedades complejas; democracia deliberativa. The constitution of democratic citizenship and the problem of the foundation of knowledge in complex societiesMy problem is how to reconcile a rational foundation of democratic institutions, which in our societies tend to be of a liberal nature, with the increasing demographic complexity of contemporary societies. My contention is that this rational and liberal foundation ought to be deliberative and discursive, that is to say, it must guarantee a reflective participation of all citizens in the design and maintenance of their public institutions. However, how could this ideal be achieved within societies with such complexities that make coordination of interests and discursive participation difficult, thus making their citizens willing to sacrifice their liberties, in order to surrender them to a despotic or totalitarian political power? Keywords: Democratic institutions and complex societies; Deliberative democracy. (shrink)

International borders concentrate opportunities in some societies while limiting them in others. Borders also prevent those in the less favored societies from gaining access to opportunities available in the more favored ones. Both distributive effects of borders are treated here within a comprehensive framework. I argue that each state should have broad discretion under international law to grant or deny entry to immigration seekers; but more favored countries that find themselves under immigration pressure should be legally obligated to fund development (...) assistance for countries that generate immigration pressure. Funding should be subject to conditions of fair and effective use in recipient countries, and should aim at a near-term target of immigration-pressure equilibrium. Equilibrium obtains between two countries when, given appropriate background circumstances, the same proportion of individuals in each manifests a preference to migrate to the other. If meeting the equilibrium target in the short term would be to the long-term disadvantage of the worst-off countries, then a Pareto-superior alternative target supersedes. It mandates development assistance at the level that yields the most favorable human development projections for the worstoff countries. An implementable set of institutions is described that can achieve the equilibrium goal in the long term without unduly sacrificing other important ends, including economic growth, political stability, cultural integrity, the political autonomy of distinct societies, and their proper accountability for policy choices. Key Words: global justice • immigration • borders • development • distributive justice • development assistance • equality • international law • cosmopolitanism. (shrink)

Individuals who become ill as a result of personal lifestyle choices often shift the monetary costs of their healthcare needs to the taxpaying public or to fellow members of a private insurance pool. Some argue that policies permitting such cost shifting are unfair. Arguments for this view may seem to draw support from luck egalitarian accounts of distributive justice. This essay argues that the luck egalitarian framework provides no such support. To allocate healthcare costs on the basis of personal responsibility (...) would arbitrarily and publicly burden socially detectable risk-takers while undetectable risk-takers continue to get a free ride. That problem is unavoidable even on the assumption that distributive institutions outside the healthcare sector are fully just. In actual, farfrom-just societies, imposing personal liability for the costs of voluntary risk taking would be wrong for an additional reason. Doing so would tend to magnify existing distributive injustices. These conclusions draw attention to two common ‘moral fallacies of the second best’ that can arise when applying ideal normative theory to matters of institutional design and in real-world policy contexts. (shrink)

Wealth and income are highly predictive of health and longevity. Egalitarians who maintain that this “socioeconomic-status gradient” in health is unjust are challenged by the fact that a significant component of it is owed to the higher prevalence of certain kinds of voluntary risk-taking among members of lower socioeconomic groups. Some egalitarians have argued that these apparently free personal choices are not genuinely free, and that those who make them should not be held morally responsible for the resulting harms to (...) their health. I argue to the contrary that such choices usually are fully free, and that those who make them are responsible for their consequences. This does not imply, however, that society cannot also be responsible for those consequences. It is responsible for them if they are statistically foreseeable and avoidable outcomes of unjust public institutions and policies. I show that many of the harms to health that contribute to the voluntary behavioral component of the SES health gradient satisfy that description. Society can therefore be morally responsible for those harms, even though the individuals who suffer them are also fully responsible for them. (shrink)

Necropolitics by Achille Mbembe takes us back to his seminal text on “Necropolitics” translated and published in the US in 2003. At this point, 40 years after Foucault’s Biopolitics, Mbembe was re-theorizing biopolitics through a necro horizon, which turned out to be a robust conceptual shift from Western thought. Not much else is explicitly said about necropolitics in the titular book, which comes 17 years after the seminal text that had a significant impact on the theory and practice of philosophy, (...) politics, anthropology, and esthetics. Mbembe presents the layers of forms, modes, and procedures of the necropolitical working through contemporary neoliberal global societies. It is therefore not surprising that Mbembe makes reference to theory in forms, form is the way to redefine or rephrase content, and “who should live and who must die” is currently the beginning. But how this is done in the 21st century, what are the methods and procedures to implement this central act in neoliberal global democracy —that is the task of this book. (shrink)

The Extent of the Literal develops a strikingly new approach to metaphor and polysemy in their relation to the conceptual structure. In a straightforward narrative style, the author argues for a reconsideration of standard assumptions concerning the notion of literal meaning and its relation to conceptual structure. She draws on neurophysiological and psychological experimental data in support of a view in which polysemy belongs to the level of words but not to the level of concepts, and thus challenges some seminal (...) work on metaphor and polysemy within cognitive linguistics, lexical semantics and analytical philosophy. (shrink)

A normative account of global political organization must address three fundamental questions. One concerns the way in which political jurisdictions are to be delimited and their territorial boundaries drawn; another concerns the allocation of powers of sovereignty to those jurisdictions; the third concerns the principles for the distribution of economic benefits and burdens worldwide. The aim of my dissertation is to defend an account of global justice that extends to each of these questions. In doing so, I reject the answers (...) embodied in the prevailing international states system. ;In Chapter One, I consider one of the most sophisticated attempts to defend the states system on grounds of political morality---John Rawls's "The Law of Peoples." I argue that Rawls's defense fails because it is not adequately responsive to its own animating moral ideal, namely the ideal of popular sovereignty. Properly understood, popular sovereignty imposes on global political institutions constraints that are inconsistent with the features of the states system that Rawls defends. These constraints are expressed in two conditions: a deliberativeness condition, which ensures the integrity of the communicative structures required for rational collective will formation; and a pre-commitment condition, which ensures the willing acceptance by individuals of membership in the same polity. Together, these conditions entail a set of political human rights for individuals, and a set of self-determination rights for groups. ;Thomas Pogge has proposed a federative model of global political organization that, suitably modified, is responsive to these rights. His account calls for a federative dispersion of sovereign powers among nested jurisdictions, and incorporates a voluntaristic principle for the demarcation of borders. However, Pogge's defense is incomplete. In Chapter Two, I argue that the ideal of popular sovereignty provides the necessary foundation for his model. The same ideal leads us to reject Pogge's assertion of a universal right to democratic governance. ;In Chapter Three I articulate and defend a conception of global distributive justice that mandates transfers of wealth from more- to less-affluent societies with the disjunctive target of either immigration-pressure equilibrium---roughly, the point at which all economically motivated applications for immigration are granted---or maximal human development rates for the worst-off societies worldwide. (shrink)

Abstract: In this essay a set of principles is defended that yields a determinate allocation of sovereign competences across a global system of territorially nested jurisdictions. All local sovereign competences are constrained by a universal, justiciable human rights regime that also incorporates a conception of cross-border distributive justice and regulates the competence to control immigration for a given territory. Subject to human rights constraints, sovereign competences are allocated according to a conception of global democracy. The proposed allocation scheme can accommodate (...) substantial local autonomy while at the same time ensuring that everyone has a voice in the political decisions that affect his or her interests. The relevant class of affected interests is fully specified. Relevant affects are of two kinds: those that impose norms of governance on individuals, and those that impose external costs on them. The favored sense of "an external cost" is developed and defended. (shrink)

Against those who dismiss Kant's project in the "Religion" because it provides a Pelagian understanding of salvation, this paper offers an analysis of the deep structure of Kant's views on divine justice and grace showing them not to conflict with an authentically Christian understanding of these concepts. The first part of the paper argues that Kant's analysis of these concepts helps us to understand the necessary conditions of the Christian understanding of grace: unfolding them uncovers intrinsic relations holding between God's (...) justice and grace. Parts two and three provide an analysis of two concepts of grace used by Kant. Getting clear on their differences is the key to understanding why Kant's account is not Pelagian. (shrink)

According to the popular-choice theory of secession, the inhabitants of any territory, as a group, should have an internationally recognized right to secede from a sovereign state if their majority chooses by referendum to do so, and if they are capable of sustaining legitimate state institutions. Prior efforts to defend this group right on individualistic grounds—such as the individual right to associate freely or to participate as an equal in democratic decision-making—have failed. As a result, some recent defenders of the (...) choice theory have suggested that the group right the theory implies is “irreducibly collective.” I argue, to the contrary, that this group right can be grounded fully in the fundamental right of each individual to be treated as an equal by the political institutions to which he is subject. The territorial implications of the choice theory are, moreover, consistent with a plausible account of the territorial rights of states. (shrink)

Autonomy generally is a valued condition for persons in liberal cultures such as the United States. We uphold autonomous agents as the exemplar of persons who, by their judgment and action, authenticate the social and political principles and policies that advance their interests. But questions about the value of autonomy are often problematic. They are problematic because they concern the kind of value autonomy has and not just how much value autonomy has when weighed against competing goods. The two questions (...) are frequently conflated. For example, in asking what happens when the putative right to autonomy is tested against competing goods, such as personal contentment or political security, we might overlook the fact that we are comparing goods that are valued for different reasons. My aim in this paper is to explore in a very general way some of the issues surrounding these questions about the value of autonomy. I plan to do so by focusing on the phenomenon of being “blinded” by an inarticulate ideal of the value of autonomy. (shrink)

La aproximación al problema del Holocausto requiere también una contextualización: la de nuestra propia historia. Si las formas de denegación del Holocausto son frecuentes -y eficaces- en una cultura que no acepta los límites ni la responsabilidad solidaria, la que nos impide volver sobre nuestras propias huellas, la memoria de Sefarad, puede ser especialmente grave, pues convertiría a la Shoah en un tema más que en un proceso que nos implica. Analizar las formas de estigmatización y exclusión de los judíos (...) que se dieron en la Península y la denegación de esta historia de nuestro pasado más reciente, es un paso previo a la reflexión sobre las causas de la «distancia» respecto al Holocausto en la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Las razones morales se encarnan también como razones biográficas. (shrink)