How do professionals working in pre-implantation genetic diagnosis reflect upon their decision making with regard to ethical challenges arising in everyday practice? Two focus group discussions were held with staff of reproductive genetic clinics: one in Utrecht with PGD-professionals from Dutch PGD-centres and one in Prague with PGD-professionals working in centres in different European countries. Both meetings consisted of two parts, exploring participants’ views regarding treatment requests for conditions that may not fulfill traditional indications criteria for PGD, and treatment and (...) transfer requests involving welfare-of-the-child considerations. There was general support for the view that people who come for PGD will have their own good reasons to consider the condition they wish to avoid as serious. But whereas PGD-professionals in the international group tended to stress the applicants’ legal right to eventually have the treatment they want, participants in the Dutch group sketched a picture of shared decision-making, where professionals would go ahead with treatment in cases where they are able to understand the reasonableness of the request in the light of the couple’s reproductive history or family experience. In the international focus group there was little support for guidance stating that welfare-of-the child considerations should be taken into account. This was different in the Dutch focus group, where shared decision-making also had the role of reassuring professionals that applicants had adequately considered possible implications for the welfare of the child. (shrink)

In this article, we introduce and demonstrate the concept-metaphor of broken data. In doing so, we advance critical discussions of digital data by accounting for how data might be in processes of decay, making, repair, re-making and growth, which are inextricable from the ongoing forms of creativity that stem from everyday contingencies and improvisatory human activity. We build and demonstrate our argument through three examples drawn from mundane everyday activity: the incompleteness, inaccuracy and dispersed nature of personal self-tracking data; the (...) data cleaning and repair processes of Big Data analysis and how data can turn into noise and vice versa when they are transduced into sound within practices of music production and sound art. This, we argue is a necessary step for considering the meaning and implications of data as it is increasingly mobilised in ways that impact society and our everyday worlds. (shrink)

This study analyses joint decisions. Drawing on video-recorded planning meetings in a workplace context as data, and on conversation analysis as a method, I investigate what is needed for a proposal to get turned into a joint decision: How do people negotiate the outcome of the decision-making processes in terms of whether they indeed comprise new decisions and whether these decisions are really joint ones? This study identifies three essential components in arriving at joint decisions, and discusses two other possible (...) outcomes of decision-making processes – non-decisions and unilateral decisions – as being a direct result of the deployment of the same components. These observations help explain the exact mechanisms involved in approving and rejecting proposals in joint decision-making settings, as well as the ways in which people may negotiate their rights and obligations to participate in decision-making processes. (shrink)

L'insouciance et l'écrasement de la dignité humaine, maintes fois reprochés aux Haïtiens, ont fini par abattre la déontologie des médias et des journalistes. Les propriétaires de médias, les directeurs d'opinions et les journalistes censés être les détenteurs de la mission d'informer ont pu s'arracher à un minimum de conscience professionnelle pour hisser le métier d'informer au pinacle de la vénalité. Les symptômes pathologiques d'une presse vénale sont patents et la banalisation dont ils font l'objet confirme la thèse selon laquelle la (...) presse haïtienne s'englue dans des dérives qui mettent à mal l'éthique et la déontologie professionnelle. Partant de la thèse selon laquelle rien ne peut être fait, en matière d'autorégulation, sans la presse et contre elle, cet ouvrage offre des substrats pour panser les plaies de la sphère médiatique à l'aune de l'agir communicationnel"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

This article aims to draw a portrait of the influence of cybernetics on soft science. To this end, structuralism, post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy will be successively analyzed in a perspective based on importing concepts stemming from the cybernetic paradigm. By focusing more specifically on the American postwar context, we intend to remind the audience that many soft science specialists were involved in the elaboration of this ‘new science’. We will then retrace the influence of the cybernetic paradigm on structuralism. Starting (...) with the historic meeting between Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss, we will illustrate that structural phonology is directly inspired by discoveries stemming from the informational model. In the same perspective, the conceptual borrowings of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan from cybernetics will be identified and analyzed. Then, we will address the matter of the relationship between postmodern theories and the cybernetic paradigm. The philosophical movement towards deconstruction, as well as Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, will be analyzed based on how they relate to this paradigm. We will also insist on the fact that the philosophy of Jean- François Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne is fully in line with the epistemological revolution launched by cybernetics. (shrink)

Expertise is commonly viewed as a professionalized competence in a specific field. Expert professional identities are produced and reproduced through professional training and other socialization mechanisms, which work to generate for a specific group of individuals a specific set of expert skills and knowledge. In this paper, I examine participants’ orientations to their distinct expert professional identities from the perspective of deontic authority. Drawing on 15 video-recorded church workplace meetings between pastors and cantors as data, and conversation analysis as a (...) theoretical and methodological framework, I analyze situations where a non-expert participant makes a proposal that the expert participant orients to as reasonable to comply with. Specifically, I demonstrate how the expert participants respond to these proposals with displays of deontic authority, arguably in an attempt to maintain their expert identities in the face of their de facto compliance with the proposals. In these situations, the expert participants are shown to invoke a past decision of their own, a future decision of their own, or a pattern that is beyond both participants’ control. Each of these practices involves the expert participant balancing resistance and compliance by minimally acknowledging the content of the non-expert participant’s proposal, while excluding the non-expert from those who have deontic authority in the matter. In so doing, the expert speaker implies that the non-expert proposal speaker lacks procedural knowledge about the specific matters about which it is relevant to make proposals to experts and access to the distinct experiential perspective that characterizes expert perception of things. It is thus argued that, in this context, the mere claims of deontic authority, produced without any substantial displays of expert knowledge, can serve the maintenance of expert professional identities. (shrink)

This article analyzes how evolving pharmaceutical technology, chemical advances, and world politics created the need for an abundant and cheap supply of steroids, and how decisions made in faraway laboratories ultimately determined that a Mexican yam, barbasco, was the best possible raw material. Following this discovery, this article explores how barbasco’s exploitation impacted on the Mexican countryside and specifically the men and women hired to gather wild yams. In analyzing, for example, the peasant organizations that emerged, the use of chemical (...) terms by barely literate peasants, and the Mexican government’s political strategy to control rural unrest by controlling barbasco production one begins to understand the unexpected consequences of the global search for medicinal plants. In this particular case, the merging of science and peasant life reshuffled social hierarchies in the countryside, granted monetary value to an erstwhile ‘weed’, and gave a novel reinterpretation to laboratory knowledge and its uses. (shrink)

Se examinan las diversas modalidades de la nada como casos de pérdida del sentido y falta de consumación del conocimiento: la nada como noúmeno y su relación con el fenómeno, así como la conexión trascendental de ambos. Aunque la nada pone en jaque al concepto de sentido, este se encuentra supuesto antes de todo tipo de pregunta por el ser, y se constituye en el trasfondo de las condiciones trascendentales que posibilitan el conocimiento.

Although number sentences are ostensibly simple, familiar, and applicable, the justification for our arithmetical beliefs has been considered mysterious by the philosophical tradition. In this paper, I argue that such a mystery is due to a preconception of two realities, one mathematical and one nonmathematical, which are alien to each other. My proposal shows that the theory of numbers as properties entails a homogeneous domain in which arithmetical and nonmathematical truth occur. As a result, the possibility of arithmetical knowledge is (...) simply a consequence of the possibility of ordinary knowledge. (shrink)

Se examinan las diversas modalidades de la nada como casos de pérdida del sentido y falta de consumación del conocimiento: la nada como noúmeno y su relación con el fenómeno, así como la conexión trascendental de ambos. Aunque la nada pone en jaque al concepto de sentido, este se encuentra supuesto antes de todo tipo de pregunta por el ser, y se constituye en el trasfondo de las condiciones trascendentales que posibilitan el conocimiento. Various modes of non-being are examined as (...) cases of loss of sense and as a lack of consummation of knowledge: non-being as noumena and its relationship with the phenomena, as well as the transcendental connection between them. Although non-being makes the concept of sense doubtful, it is presupposed before any kind of question regarding being and it is constituted in the background which belongs to the transcendental conditions which make knowledge possible. (shrink)

The somatic mutation theory (SMT) of cancer has been and remains the prevalent theory attempting to explain how neoplasms arise and progress. This theory proposes that cancer is a clonal, cell‐based disease, and implicitly assumes that quiescence is the default state of cells in multicellular organisms. The SMT has not been rigorously tested, and several lines of evidence raise questions that are not addressed by this theory. Herein, we propose experimental strategies that may validate the SMT. We also call attention (...) to an alternative theory of carcinogenesis, the tissue organization field theory (TOFT), which posits that cancer is a tissue‐based disease and that proliferation is the default state of all cells. Based on epistemological and experimental evidence, we argue that the TOFT compellingly explains carcinogenesis, while placing it within an evolutionarily relevant context.magnified imagemagnified imageAna Soto and Carlos Sonnenschein are at Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, MA, USA. (shrink)

Mobility has become a central topic of contemporary social research with the mobility turn initiated in the 2000s. In order to grasp the complexity of the global order, its authors have attempted to decenter the importance of human subjectivity and to envisage a “sociology beyond societies”. The present paper considers this interpretive context to demonstrate the contemporary relevance of Alfred Schutz’s theory of action, and to propose a notion of mobility intrinsically linked to the performance of subjectivity. By revisiting the (...) distinction between action as a thing produced and as an ongoing process, the notion of mobility is detailed in relation to movement in space and to the subjective flow of time. The specific type of action Schutz calls “locomotion” in his later work enables us to understand how action involves bodily operations in configuring a common space of sociality and communication. I conclude by going beyond the explanation of action in terms of its starting point and end point, and by assessing how action unfolds through the experiential life of the subject, with its new meanings and unexpected changes. (shrink)

Sexual consent is advocated around the world to reduce sexual assault. The widespread affirmative consent model emphasizes a need for unambiguous consent. In this paper, we contribute to a deeper understanding of how ambiguities in the initiations of sexual activities are routinely solved to achieve consent. Drawing on conversation analytic research on joint decision-making, and a dataset of 80 cases of sexual initiation in contemporary TV-series and movies, we investigate the interactional practices by which sexual activities are presented as consensual (...) and how consent is achieved across sequences of interaction. We found there to be social advantages of synchronous initiation, compared to sequential verbal initiations, which were associated with various social vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities could however be circumvented by two practices, each of which made use of a distinct combination of verbal and embodied resources. While ambiguities exist, our results oppose the idea of sexual consent as a practically hopeless and awkward endeavor. Instead, consent consists of joint action that is achieved through recognizable and systematic ways. (shrink)

The present book verses on the current discussion, between authors writing within the Thomistic tradition, on the issue of human rights, and pretends to adjudicate that discussion. The positions of authors who are critical of the notion of human rights, like Michel Villey and Alasdair MacIntyre, as well as that of those who try to justify their existence and explain their nature, like Jacques Maritain, John Finnis, and others, are carefully explained and evaluated. This book is the first to deal (...) in detail with this contemporary discussion and therefore represents an important contribution to the bibliography on the philosophy of human rights, as well as to the bibliography on the Thomistic tradition. (shrink)

Resumen Este trabajo intenta esbozar ciertas reflexiones en torno al papel de los afectos en la práctica de la autotraducción en la poesía mapuches. Vemos en el “giro afectivo” una posibilidad de comprender la producción literaria bilingüe de autores mapuches como un proyecto ético de reapropiación lingüística y de transgresión de límites culturales originado en afectos de “pulsión genealógica” que ponen en cuestión la autoridad de la lengua del colonizador, a la vez que resultan en la generación de los llamados (...) “afectos activos”, propios de un aumento del grado de potencia expresiva y de agenciamiento de los sujetos. Para ello trazaremos una cartografía de conceptos de distintos pensadores que han reflexionado acerca de los afectos y la lengua, desde Jacques Derrida a Gloria Anzaldúa, pasando por el ineludible Gilles Deleuze en su estudio de los afectos en la Ética de Baruch Spinoza. Asimismo, pondremos estos conceptos en diálogo con las propias reflexiones de varios de autores mapuches: Liliana Ancalao, Adriana Paredes Pinda, María Teresa Panchillo, Leonel Lienlaf y Elicura Chihuailaf.In this work we wish to analyze the role of affects in self-translation in Mapuche poetry. We see in the “affective turn” a possibility to understand the bilingual literary production of Mapuche authors as an ethical project of linguistic reappropriation and transgression of cultural limits originated in affects of “genealogical drive” that question the authority of the language of the colonizer, as well as resulting in the generation of “active affects”, inherent to the increase of the degree of expressive potency of the subjects. For this purpose, we set out to trace a cartography of concepts by different thinkers who have reflected upon the relationship between affects and language, from Jacques Derrida to Gloria Anzaldúa, as well as the inescapable contributions of Gilles Deleuze on the study of affects in Spinoza’s Ethics. Also, we will link such concepts with the reflections of five Mapuche poets, Liliana Ancalao, Adriana Paredes Pinda, María Teresa Panchillo, Leonel Lienlaf and Elicura Chihuailaf. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine two conceptions of the application of logic and assess their comparative merits. The first is a platonist monist conception that characterizes the logical consequence relation as an abstract relation among propositions. We argue that this proposal, which insists on logic’s topic neutrality, accommodates very well the objectivity of logic. From this perspective, there are no constraints on particular topics. As a result, we have the universality that allows us to go through a wide scope of (...) contexts where logic is applied. In contrast, a non-platonist pluralist conception is examined, and it characterizes the variety of logical consequence relations as concrete, context-dependent in particular cases, and topic-dependent. As will become clear, this conception is particularly well suited to make room for the applications of logic. We conclude that, in order to solve the ontological debate about logic, we need to go beyond its applications. (shrink)

José Ferreirós y Abel Lasalle Casanave, El árbol de los números: cognición, lógica y práctica matemática, Editorial Universidad de Sevilla, Sevilla, 2015, 256 pp.

The so-called ‘Right to Be Forgotten’ cases have been provoked by people’s desires to make their own determinations about what personal information is accessible online to others (and when, and how) in a world of data permanence. Legally at stake is how personhood is defined and defended. Thus far, European law has primarily concerned itself with the delisting of ‘data subjects’ from search results and the deletion or anonymization of personal information from and by search engine operators. As a result, (...) personhood has fallen into a kind of legislative void [ 43 ] I argue that this void is engendered by an old friction between the traditional Western secularist cognitive models that have formed the skeleton of Western law and the pulsing flesh of living human subject creation that pushes back against it. At the very least, the digital immortality of our images, voices, words and more, are bringing forth a variety of aspects of our ‘person.’ Meanwhile, religious worldviews have long understood and made use of phenomenological ideas of human becoming and transcendence that are far more congruous with how—even modern secular—people make meaning of their lives and self-creation, and how they think of posthumous existence. Moving through and with some of the most recent thinking in philosophy, anthropology, and cognitive science, I will develop the argument that human subjectivity is not only impossible to limit to the body, but that a radicalized ecological view is the only one that can ‘save’ us. (shrink)

What does it mean to spatialize food? Why combine such an analysis with law, or with signs and spaces? Leveraging Peircean-inspired legal semiotic theory, the spatialized nature of food will serve as a porthole through which a semiotic view of the spatial dimensions of legal experience can be discerned and elaborated. Specifically, case studies of the simultaneously material and immaterial aspects of food will support an analysis that seeks to open avenues of conceptualization regarding categories. The semiotic nature of both (...) food and law will drive a discussion of the “dis-composition” of categories. Though such an effort may appear overly scholarly and far from pragmatic, exactly the opposite claim will be made. Case studies such as that of the “Meatball Wars” will illustrate in plain terms how subject position struggles for space cannot be adequately addressed within traditional disciplinary boundaries. The essay will conclude with a demonstration of how a “discomposing” semiotic approach has the potential to serve as a means of enabling conflict resolution on a broader scale. The overall investigation is motivated by the struggle within academia – seen across the humanities – to rethink traditional foundational assumptions and dichotomies. The argument seeks to ground itself in the interconnectedness increasingly advanced, joining scholars who insist on the importance of anthro-historical context, local particulars, and the impossibility of assuming an objective position that can coolly observe phenomena from “outside.”. (shrink)

This book serves as a comprehensive guide for students across various disciplines, aiming to bridge the gap between science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM), and liberal arts. It has a dual purpose: firstly, to provide STEM students with essential philosophical knowledge to navigate ethical and social dilemmas related to technology, and secondly, to introduce liberal arts students to the formal structures underpinning technological advancement. Divided into three parts, the book offers a structured approach to understanding the intersection of technology, ethics, and (...) society. (shrink)

Este es un libro que nace de nuestro compromiso por señalar las contribuciones de las filósofas a partir de la pregunta vital: ¿Quiénes nos formaron? Como resultado, se presenta este diálogo a doce voces; reunidas para dialogar, desde distintos lugares en América Latina, sobre nuestra formación teórica, profesional y humana desde una plataforma equitativa y franca. Concebido, en medio de la pandemia por SARS-CoV-2, queremos construir un espacio abierto a nuevas ideas, propuestas e identidades en la Filosofía. Más aún, queremos (...) invitar a nuestros alumnxs a vislumbrar las posibilidades de un cambio radical en la forma en que concebimos y hacemos filosofía. (shrink)

Reseña de ‘Pólemos y Stásis. Vestigios y bordes trágicos de lo bélico y lo político’, realizada por Raúl Villarroel Soto, Dr. en Filosofía, Decano de la Facultad de Filosofía, Universidad de Chile. Juan Pablo Arancibia Pólemos y Stásis. Vestigios y bordes trágicos de lo bélico y lo político La Cebra y Palinodia 2023 Santiago 394 páginas ISBN: 9789878956176.

Color-motion asynchrony (CMA) refers to an apparent lag of direction of motion when a dynamic stimulus changes both color and direction at the same time. The subjective order of simultaneous events, however, is not only perceptual but also subject to illusions during voluntary actions. Self-initiated actions, for example, seem to precede their sensory outcomes following an adaptation to a delay between the action and the sensory feedback. Here, we demonstrate that the extent of the apparent asynchrony can be substantially reduced (...) when direction change is induced by a voluntary key press following a delay adaptation regime. We also show that the reduced color-motion asynchrony effect size following a motor-sensory recalibration is not a result of a change in the onset of perceived direction change relative to that of the color. This is particularly important as it implies, for the first time in the literature, that voluntary action is not only important in forming action-sensory outcome associations but may also act as a binding factor between the two perceptual features of a sensory event. (shrink)

Resumen: El estatuto teórico del concepto de la violencia escolar se ha resuelto parcialmente mediante el uso de definiciones. En el caso del campo científico chileno las definiciones de violencia escolar se formulan desde una episteme dualista, que establece la distinción entre lo escolar y lo no escolar, priorizan a un individuo abstracto, donde el espacio prima sobre el tiempo, las relaciones son causales y, en menor medida, de tipo covariación, constructiva de realidades y especular. El componente performativo es doble: (...) i) un modo de codificación y clasificaciones que estabilizan a un objeto que irrumpe en el campo científico y escolar; ii) producen una ausencia y exclusión de las relaciones y categorías posibles. No obstante, se observa que al interior de las propias definiciones se encuentran las semillas para un trabajo de transformación hacia epistemes no dualistas y complejas mediante las dimensiones de producción, reproducción y cruce de las violencias en la institución escolar según un enfoque tríadico. Esta reconstrucción se basa en un corpus de artículos indexados del campo de la educación sobre Chile entre los años 2001 a 2013.: The theoretical statute of the concept of school violence has been partly solved using definitions. In the case of the Chilean scientific field, the definitions of school violence are defined from a dualistic episteme that establishes the distinction between what is part of the school and what is not, that prioritizes an abstract subject, where space is more important than time, the relationships are of causal type and, to a lesser extent, of covariation type, that builds realities and that is speculative. The performative component has two aspects: i) a coding mode and classifications that stabilize an object that disrupts the scientific and school fields, and ii) produce a lack and exclusion of the relationships and potential categories. Nevertheless, it has been observed that there are some elements within the own definitions that could work for the transformation of dualistic and complex epistemes, through a dimension of production, reproduction, and the cross of different types of violence at school, following a triadic approach. This reconstruction is based on a corpus of articles from indexed journals about the Chilean educational field between 2001 and 2013. (shrink)

El autor del libro ocupa actualmente el cargo de Director de la carrera de Antropología y Arqueología de la Universidad Bolivariana, sede Iquique. Llegó a la primera región el año 2002, luego de residir y desarrollar una brillante carrera en Estados Unidos, donde se desempeñó como profesor e investigador en las Universidades de Chicago y Binghamton, y del Field Museum of Natural History de Chicago. No obstante encontrarse lejos de su país, se mantuvo realizando estudios arqueológicos en la zo..

El objetivo de este artículo es aclarar la crítica que el psicoanalista Jacques Lacan dirige al concepto marxista de plus-valía tal y como es formulado en el Capital de Marx. Tras el concepto de una plus-valía contable Lacan quiere desvelar la necesidad de atender a la noción más fundamental de un plus-de-gozar [plus-de-jouir] incontable. Atenderemos para ello a diferentes pasajes de sus seminarios XVI (1968-69), XVII (1969-70) y de su texto Radiofonía (1970).

Este artículo discute y analiza la formación del carácter crítico e intelectual en Rafael Gutiérrez Girardot. A partir de fuentes diversas y, en parte, inexploradas, se reconstruye el proceso de formación y ejercicio de su actividad crítica entre 1950 y 1965. Se tienen en cuenta tanto las relaciones con otros intelectuales como la influencia de los diversos contextos en los cuales se dieron dichas relaciones. Así, su participación en Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, su correspondencia con Alfonso Reyes y con Nils Hedberg, su (...) actividad diplomática, su trabajo editorial y de traducción y, finalmente, su práctica docente, se estudian con objeto de tener un marco comprensivo. La obra crítica de Gutiérrez Girardot dista de estar comprendida y, de hecho, se precisa todavía de un exhaustivo trabajo de reconstrucción y análisis. This paper discusses and analyses the critical and intellectual nature of the work of Rafael Gutiérrez Girardot. It reproduces the process of construction and exercise of his critical activity (1950-1965), based on different sources some of them not yet very studied. The paper takes into account his relationships with other intellectuals and the influence of its different contexts. Thus, in order to get a comprehensive framework, it studies his participation in Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, his correspondence with Alfonso Reyes and Nils Hedberg, his diplomatic activity, his work as editor and translator and finally his teaching experience. The critical work of Gutiérrez Girardot is far from being completely interpreted and this makes necessary an exhaustive work of reconstruction and analysis. (shrink)

El artículo elabora el concepto de campo filosófico desde la Historia social de la filosofía y en resonancia con Bourdieu, tratando la noción de opinión pública y mostrando, en perspectiva histórica, el papel del intelectual en la constitución de esta. Seguidamente ofrece un estudio de caso a partir de la obra de la filósofa colombiana Laura Quintana y sus constantes intervenciones en la esfera pública evidenciando, en este apartado, que el papel del intelectual no puede ser el del paternalismo crítico, (...) que subvalora a los sujetos y sus capacidades, sino que debe ofrecer y crear maneras nuevas de comprender el mundo, lo cual, a la larga, contribuye a su transformación. (shrink)