Este texto es la traducción del capítulo cuarto de The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, editado por Ian James Kidd, José Medina y Gaile Pohlhaus Jr. En él, Miranda Fricker aclara y delimita los conceptos de injusticia hermenéutica y testimonial, proporcionando ejemplos, narrando su genealogía, respondiendo a algunas de las críticas que recibieron estos conceptos, así como estableciendo relaciones de semejanza y contraste con otras concepciones de la justicia y otras ramas de la filosofía.

Expanding Miranda Fricker's (2007) concept of epistemic injustice, recent accounts of agential epistemic injustice (Lackey, 2020; Medina, 2021; Pohlhaus, 2020) have focused on cases in which the epistemic agency of individuals or groups is unfairly blocked, constrained, or subverted. In this article I argue that agential epistemic injustice is perpetrated against marginalized groups not only when their group epistemic agency is excluded, but also when it is included but receives defective uptake that neutralizes their capacity to resist epistemic (...) oppression. I identify two harms that such injustice inflicts on marginalized groups: epistemic disempowerment and critical defanging of resistant epistemic group agency. My analysis shows how the harms of agential epistemic injustice can occur through unfair epistemic exclusions in group dynamics, but also through forms of inclusion in group dynamics that distort or coopt the epistemic agency of the group. Following Emmalon Davis (2018) and her analysis of epistemic appropriation, I argue that the harms of agential epistemic injustice can occur when the resistant epistemic resources of a marginalized group are appropriated in a way that disempowers them and critically defangs their resistant epistemic agency. I use Taylor Rogers’ (2021) analysis of the epistemic appropriation of “#MeToo” and “intersectionality” to show how epistemic disempowerment and critical defanging work in unjust epistemic group dynamics. The article offers a diagnosis of the failures of epistemic responsibility involved in agential epistemic injustice, and some suggestions for resisting those failures and working toward more responsible and just epistemic group dynamics. (shrink)

While in agreement with Miranda Fricker’s context-sensitive approach to hermeneutical injustice, this paper argues that this contextualist approach has to be pluralized and rendered relational in more complex ways. In the first place, I argue that the normative assessment of social silences and the epistemic harms they generate cannot be properly carried out without a pluralistic analysis of the different interpretative communities and expressive practices that coexist in the social context in question. Social silences and hermeneutical gaps are misrepresented (...) if they are uniformly predicated of an entire social context, instead of being predicated of particular ways of inhabiting that context by particular people in relation to particular others. I contend that a more nuanced—polyphonic—contextualization offers a more adequate picture of what it means to break social silences and to repair the hermeneutical injustices associated with them. In the second place, I argue that the particular obligations with respect to hermeneutical justice that differently situated subjects and groups have are interactive and need to be determined relationally. That is, whether individuals and groups live up to their hermeneutical responsibilities has to be assessed by taking into account the forms of mutual positionality, relationality, and responsivity (or lack thereof) that these subjects and groups display with respect to one another. The central argument is developed through an examination of what in race theory and in contemporary epistemologies of ignorance has been termed “white ignorance”; that is, the kind of hermeneutical inability of privileged white subjects to recognize and make sense of their racial identities, experiences, and social positionality. (shrink)

This paper defends a contextualist approach to epistemic injustice according to which instances of such injustice should be looked at as temporally extended phenomena (having developmental and historical trajectories) and socially extended phenomena (being rooted in patterns of social relations). Within this contextualist framework, credibility excesses appear as a form of undeserved epistemic privilege that is crucially relevant for matters of testimonial justice. While drawing on Miranda Fricker's proportional view of epistemic justice, I take issue with its lack of (...) attention to the role that credibility excesses play in testimonial injustices. I depart from Fricker's view of the relation between credibility excesses and credibility deficits, and I offer an alternative account of the contributions that undeserved epistemic privileges make to epistemic injustices. Then, through the detailed analysis of To kill a mockingbird, I elucidate the crucial role played by the social imaginary in creating and sustaining epistemic injustices, developing an analysis of the kind of social blindness produced by an oppressive social imaginary that establishes unjust patterns of credibility excesses and deficits. (shrink)

In this paper, I carry out a philosophical analysis of the structural power that Miranda Fricker proposes in Epistemic Injustice starting from the idea of the “interpretative frame” that Judith Butler elaborates in Frames of war. The relationship between the two concepts aims to explore how structural power generates, through the frame, certain epistemic blindnesses to hinder the identification of epistemic harms. To do so, first, I analyze the functioning of the interpretive frame and highlight how it operates by (...) establishing an inside (what is recognized) and an outside (what is rejected) of it. Secondly, I examine the possibilities of freeing perception from the norms of the interpretative frame. Finally, based on the work of José Medina, I propose a praxis of the gaze that consists in apprehending and recognizing what the frame rejects and tries to hide from the gaze. (shrink)

As audiences demand better and more diverse representation in the fictions they consume, there is a question of how that demand should be placed on fiction creators. In this article, I answer this question by arguing creators of fiction have a hermeneutical responsibility to include diverse characters in their creations, and to do so without relying on harmful stereotypes. I cast this responsibility as the epistemic virtue of due diligence, offset by epistemic laziness and epistemic paralysis as the corresponding vices (...) of absence and excess, respectively. Practicing either vice can constitute a type of hermeneutical gap described by Katharine Jenkins, in which harmful stereotypes (conceptions) become more accessible to epistemic agents than the more accurate concept. By blocking the agent's access to the accurate conception, such stereotypes create a hermeneutical gap and can contribute to hermeneutical injustices, as described by Miranda Fricker and José Medina. (shrink)

En este artículo voy a profundizar en una interpretación aplicada de la obra del segundo Wittgenstein, propuesta por José Medina, Miranda Fricker y Peg O’Connor, entre otros. Estos autores equiparan juegos de lenguaje y formas de vida, entienden las reglas de los juegos como normas sociales y trasladan la argumentación del filósofo vienés a un ámbito sociopolítico. Concretamente, José Medina propone un argumento en oposición a los juegos de lenguaje sociales, que es la versión social al argumento (...) de Wittgenstein en oposición a los juegos de lenguaje privados. En segundo lugar, analizaré dos casos: las distintas denominaciones de los indios huicholes y el uso del plural inclusivo por parte de algunos feminismos. Lo más interesante de estos dos casos es que estos grupos proponen significados privados o usos del lenguaje que sólo parecen ser válidos para ellos. Preguntaré si estos usos se pueden entender como juegos de lenguaje sociales y ser criticados desde los argumentos de Medina. Este estudio de casos servirá para evaluar la adecuación, validez y límites de esta interpretación de la obra de Wittgenstein. (shrink)

This paper explores how University as social entity has great potential to confront epistemic injustices by expanding epistemic capabilities. To do this, we primarily follow the contributions of scholars such as Miranda Fricker and José Medina. The epistemic capabilities and epistemic injustice nexus will be explored via two empirical cases: the first one is an experience developed in Lagos using participatory video; the second is a service learning pedagogical strategy for final year undergraduate students conducted at Universidad de (...) Ibagué. The Lagos experience shows how participatory action-research methodologies could promote epistemic capabilities and functioning, making it possible for the participants to generate interpretive materials to speak of their own realities. However, this experience is too limited to address testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. The Colombian experience is a remarkable experience that is building epistemic capabilities among students and other local participants. However, there is a hermeneutical and structural injustice that tends to give more value to disciplinary and codified knowledge at the expense of experiential and tacit knowledge. (shrink)

For almost two decades, the concept of epistemic injustice has been a point of reference to discuss the extent to which persons can be disadvantaged in their role as knowers and what morally relevant consequences might follow from such violations. This volume brings together contributions that have significantly shaped debates about the concept of epistemic injustice and its meaning, as well as recent contributions on its implications and possible consequences of situations of epistemic injustice. With contributions by David Coady | (...) Katharina Eisenhut | Miranda Fricker | Orsolya Friedrich | Agomoni Ganguli-Mitra | Axel Gelfert | Hilkje C. Hänel | Julia A. Harzheim | Lars Leeten | José Medina | Ruben Sakowsky | Ela Sauerborn | Sebastian Schleidgen | Katharina Trettenbach | Verina Wild | Andreas Wolkenstein. (shrink)

We argue that the physics of complex materials and self-organizing processes should be made central to the biology of form. Rather than being encoded in genes, form emerges when cells and certain of their molecules mobilize physical forces, effects, and processes in a multicellular context. What is inherited from one generation to the next are not genetic programs for constructing organisms, but generative mechanisms of morphogenesis and pattern formation and the initial and boundary conditions for reproducing the specific traits of (...) a taxon. There is no inherent antagonism between this “physicalist” perspective and genetics, since physics acts on matter, and gene products are essential material components of living systems whose variability affects the systems’ parameters. We make this notion concrete by summarizing the concept of “dynamical patterning modules” (DPMs; Newman and Bhat, Phys Biol 5:1–14, 2008; Int J Dev Biol 53:693–705, 2009), an explicit physico-genetic framework for the origin and evolution of multicellular form in animals, as well as (when differences in interaction toolkit genes and applicable physical processes are taken into account) in multicellular plants (Hernández-Hernández et al., Int J Dev Biol 56:661–674, 2012). DPMs provide the missing link between development and evolution by revealing how genes acting in concert with physics can generate and transform morphology in a heritable fashion. (shrink)

With the advance of biomedicine, certain individuals and groups are vulnerable because of their incapacities to defend themselves. The International Bioethics Committee as a UNESCO working group has for the last several years dedicated to deepen this principle of human vulnerability and personal integrity. This book serves to supplement this effort with a religious perspective given a great number of the world's population is affiliated with some religious traditions. While there is diversity within each of these traditions, all of them (...) carry in them the mission to protect the weak, the underprivileged, and the poor. Thus, here presented is a collection of papers written by bioethics experts from six major world religions-Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism-who were gathered to discuss the meaning and implications of the principle of vulnerability in their respective traditions. (shrink)

Histamine is a multifunctional biogenic amine with relevant roles in intercellular communication, inflammatory processes and highly prevalent pathologies. Histamine biosynthesis depends on a single decarboxylation step, carried out by a PLP-dependent histidine decarboxylase activity (EC 4.1.1.22), an enzyme that still remains to be fully characterized. Nevertheless, during the last few years, important advances have been made in this field, including the generation and validation of the first three-dimensional model of the enzyme, which allows us to revisit previous results and conclusions. (...) This essay provides a comprehensive review of the current knowledge of the structural and functional characteristics of mammalian histidine decarboxylase. BioEssays 27:57–63, 2005. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

La experiencia de la Grecia antigua creó el concepto de política y sistematizó alrededor de él una concepción profunda de su significado. Los tres pensadores clásicos de la filosofía política (Sócrates aunque no produjo escritos propios; Platón quien solamente enfatizó la política ideal, y Aristótel..

Reasons are of the wrong kind if, despite appearing of the right kind, are not able to justify nor to motivate the formation of a mental attitude. Initially, this problem was thought to apply only within the theoretical realm of reason, but Kavka's Toxin Puzzle showed that reasons of the wrong kind are also found in the practical realm. The aim of this paper is to analyze the scope of this problem, in order to determine the kind of reasons it (...) affects. I will examine two possible solutions to this problem, and I will argue that the most promising solution, proposed by Hieronymi, is based on a conception of reasons and attitudes that is too narrow. (shrink)

Genocide denialism is an understudied topic in the epistemic injustice scholarship; so are epistemic relations outside of the Euro-American context. This article proposes to bring the literature into contact with an underexplored topic in a ‘distant’ setting: Turkey. Here, I explore the ethical and epistemological implications of the Turkish denial of the Armenian genocide as a pervasive and systematic epistemic harm. Using an interdisciplinary methodology, I argue that a philosophical exploration of genocide denialism requires examining the role of institutions and (...) ideology in relation to the epistemic harm done by individual perpetrators. More specifically, I suggest that the individual, ideological, and institutional roots of genocide denialism constitute a regime of epistemic injustice in Turkey. (shrink)

Situados en un progresivo traspaso de responsabilidades en la ejecución de los servicios sociales desde el Estado hacia actores no gubernamentales, aparece una demanda hacia el mismo Estado, el cual en lugar de simplemente declinar su labor, debiera de hecho expandir su regulación de modo de asegurar que la oferta social sea eficiente en satisfacer al ciudadano usuario en aquellos servicios prometidos por las políticas y programas sociales. Así mismo, la institucionalidad pública debiera reconocer las demandas del mundo privado para (...) actuar articuladamente hacia fines comunes, que finalmente conduzcan a un horizonte de desarrollo de una sociedad más igualitaria. Este estudio da cuenta de las tensiones, reveladas por autoridades de servicios públicos que atienden personas vulnerables, en su relación de colaboración con OSFL (Organizaciones Sin Fines de Lucro), para alcanzar tal horizonte. (shrink)

A educação em Kierkegaard e Paulo Freire : por uma educação ético-existencial -- Kierkegaard como educador -- Ética e política no pensamento de Kierkegaard e Paulo Freire -- O amor como fundamento da educação ético-existencial em Kierkegaard.

Background Changes in health needs led to an increase in virtual care practices such as telemedicine. Nursing plays an essential role in this practice as it is the key to accessing the healthcare system. It is important that this branch of nursing is developed considering all the ethical aspects of nursing care, and not just the legal concepts of the practice. However, this question has not been widely explored in the literature and it is of crucial relevance in the new (...) concept of care. Objective The purpose of this scoping review is to identify the ethical aspects of the development of telemedicine from a nursing practice perspective. Methods A scoping review of the literature based on Arksey and O’Malley’s framework. The search was conducted in Scopus, PubMed/MEDLINE and CINAHL databases, from 2012 to 2022. A total of 1322 articles were retrieved, of which 12 met the inclusion criteria. Ethical considerations The research was conducted in accordance with the best scientific practices. Findings The most relevant aspects were the safety of the patient, the benefits for the user and the digital competence of the professionals. Informed consent and patient’s willingness to use new technologies were relevant to the practice, as was person-centered care and how telemedicine can influence the quality of the therapeutic relationship. Another relevant issue was the concern about professional competence for optimal outcomes. Conclusion It is necessary to further explore and develop the ethical aspects of the new practices, disassociating them from the legal aspects only. Professionals demand more training providing them with more competence and confidence. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty utiliza com freqüência em seus textos a figura da metáfora. À primeira vista, esse recurso teria papel funcional, ou seja, serviria para dizer de outra maneira, por meio de imagens, o mesmo referente. No entanto, estando ausente o ideal de representação e, portanto, ausente a referência objetiva, a figura da metáfora deverá ser compreendida, em Merleau-Ponty, não como ilustração acessória, mas como um uso da linguagem que modifica seu estatuto referencial. Ao conceber metaforicamente a linguagem da filosofia, Merleau-Ponty incorpora (...) um procedimento próprio à narrativa literária, o que faz ver de que maneira estão relacionadas em sua obra filosofia e literatura, tanto no que diz respeito ao seu arranjo textual, quanto no diz respeito ao tema filosófico da linguagem. (shrink)

RESUMO Tendo em vista a importância que o conceito de modelização, advindo da Cibernética, possui para o pensamento de Iuri Lotman, este artigo visa discutir a maneira pela qual o raciocínio inerente ao procedimento modelizador se encontra presente numa das suas principais formulações, relativa à “invariante intelectual”, que elucida a ação exercida pelo mecanismo inteligente da cultura, capaz de assegurar a sua perenidade e, ao mesmo tempo, incitar a criação de novos textos. Para proceder a essa discussão, primeiramente serão retomados (...) os fundamentos do processo de modelização e sua relação com o fazer científico, com o intuito de indicar o que vem a ser o “modelo” e o tipo de inteligibilidade que ele é capaz de produzir. Ao explorar a centralidade que o procedimento modelizador possui nas formulações de Lotman, espera-se igualmente elucidar de que modo, para o autor, é possível construir uma compreensão semiótica muito singular acerca da linguagem e da cultura. ABSTRACT Considering the importance of the modelling concept from Cybernetics to Yuri Lotman’s thinking, this article aims to discuss how the inherent reasoning for the modeling procedure is found in one of its main formulations, related to “intellectual invariant,” which elucidates the action on the intelligent mechanism of the culture, capable of ensuring its perenniality while inciting the creation of new texts. In order to continue this discussion, the fundamentals of the modelling process and its relationship with the scientific doing will be firstly resumed to indicate the “model” and the type of intelligibility they are capable of producing. When exploring the centrality that the modeler procedure has in Lotman’s formulation, the author is equally expected to elucidate how it is possible to build a very singular semiotic understanding of language and culture. (shrink)

Bernard Williams is a sceptic about the objectivity of moral value, embracing instead a qualified moral relativism—the ‘relativism of distance’. His attitude to blame too is in part sceptical. I will argue that the relativism of distance is unconvincing, even incoherent; but also that it is detachable from the rest of Williams's moral philosophy. I will then go on to propose an entirely localized thesis I call the relativism of blame, which says that when an agent's moral shortcomings by our (...) lights are a matter of their living according to the moral thinking of their day, judgements of blame are out of order. Finally, I will propose a form of moral judgement we may sometimes quite properly direct towards historically distant agents when blame is inappropriate—moral-epistemic disappointment. Together these two proposals may help release us from the grip of the idea that moral appraisal always involves the potential applicability of blame, and so from a key source of the relativist idea that moral appraisal is inappropriate over distance. (shrink)

When we hope to explain and perhaps vindicate a practice that is internally diverse, philosophy faces a methodological challenge. Such subject matters are likely to have explanatorily basic features that are not necessary conditions. This prompts a move away from analysis to some other kind of philosophical explanation. This paper proposes a paradigm based explanation of one such subject matter: blame. First, a paradigm form of blame is identified—‘Communicative Blame’—where this is understood as a candidate for an explanatorily basic form (...) of blame. Second, its point and purpose in our lives is investigated and found to reside in its power to increase the alignment of the blamer and the wrongdoer's moral understandings. Third, the hypothesis that Communicative Blame is an explanatorily basic form of blame is tested out by seeing how far other kinds of blame can reasonably be understood as derivative, especially in respect of blame's point and purpose. Finally, a new and quasi-political worry about blame is raised. (shrink)

This book explores the epistemic side of racial and sexual oppression. It elucidates how social insensitivities and imposed silences prevent members of different groups from listening to each other.

This book explores the epistemic side of oppression, focusing on racial and sexual oppression and their interconnections. It elucidates how social insensitivities and imposed silences prevent members of different groups from interacting epistemically in fruitful ways--from listening to each other, learning from each other, and mutually enriching each other's perspectives. Medina's epistemology of resistance offers a contextualist theory of our complicity with epistemic injustices and a social connection model of shared responsibility for improving epistemic conditions of participation in social (...) practices. Through the articulation of a new interactionism and polyphonic contextualism, the book develops a sustained argument about the role of the imagination in mediating social perceptions and interactions. It concludes that only through the cultivation of practices of resistance can we develop a social imagination that can help us become sensitive to the suffering of excluded and stigmatized subjects. Drawing on Feminist Standpoint Theory and Critical Race Theory, this book makes contributions to social epistemology and to recent discussions of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, epistemic responsibility, counter-performativity, and solidarity in the fight against racism and sexism. (shrink)

Fricker shows that virtue epistemology provides a general epistemological idiom in which these issues can be forcefully discussed.

In this paper I respond to three commentaries on Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. In response to Alcoff, I primarily defend my conception of how an individual hearer might develop virtues of epistemic justice. I do this partly by drawing on empirical social psychological evidence supporting the possibility of reflective self-regulation for prejudice in our judgements. I also emphasize the fact that individual virtue is only part of the solution – structural mechanisms also have an essential role (...) in combating epistemic injustice. My response to Goldberg principally concerns my perceptual account of the epistemology of testimony, which I defend as being both well-motivated and best categorized as a species of non-inferentialism. I also explain its relation to the reductionism/non-reductionism contrast, and defend my resistance to casting it as any kind of default view. In response to Hookway, I contrast discriminatory with distributive forms of epistemic injustice, and defend the basic taxonomy I present in the book, which casts testimonial and hermeneutical injustice as the two fundamental discriminatory forms of epistemic injustice. (shrink)

[Medina In the margin of a congress on the presence of Ortega’s legacy].

There are two kinds of forgiveness that appear as radically different from one another: one presents forgiveness as essentially earned through remorseful apology; the other presents it as fundamentally non-earned—a gift. The first, which I label Moral Justice Forgiveness, adopts a stance of moral demand and conditionality; the second, which I label Gifted Forgiveness, adopts a stance of non-demand and un-conditionality. Each is real; yet how can two such different responses to wrongdoing be of one and the same kind? This (...) paper explains how, by showing that the basic role each plays in moral-social life is the same; and that one is conceptually and therefore historically prior to the other. The result is pluralism, with each kind of forgiveness represented as distinctive in both its psychology and its normativity; and yet an ordered pluralism—with Moral Justice Forgiveness revealed as the root kind, and Gifted Forgiveness a culturally contingent iteration. (shrink)

Two of the most influential arguments for Bayesian updating ("Conditionalization") -- Hilary Greaves' and David Wallace's Accuracy Argument and David Lewis' Diachronic Dutch Book Argument-- turn out to impose a strong and surprising limitation on rational uncertainty: that one can never be rationally uncertain of what one's evidence is. Many philosophers ("externalists") reject that claim, and now seem to face a difficult choice: either to endorse the arguments and give up Externalism, or to reject the arguments and lose some of (...) the best justifications of Bayesianism. The author argues that the key to resolving this conflict lies in recognizing that both arguments are plan-based, in that they argue for Conditionalization by first arguing that one should planto conditionalize. With this in view, we can identify the culprit common to both arguments: for an externalist, they misconceive the requirement to carry out a plan made at an earlier time. They should therefore not persuade us to reject Externalism. Furthermore, rethinking the nature of this requirement allows us to give two new arguments for Conditionalization that do not rule out rational uncertainty about one's evidence and that can thus serve as common ground in the debate between externalists and their opponents. (shrink)

A fundamental tension exists between Rawls's ideal Kantian conception of justice as fairness (JAF), which requires respecting people as ends, and his realistic non-Kantian consequentialist conception of a supreme emergency in a just war. By justifying the targeting of objectively innocent noncombatants during a supreme emergency exception, Rawls allows for treating them as means only. Hence, his appeal to a supreme emergency is insufficient to avoid this tension. First, since for him JAF is ideal but also practical, one might argue (...) that his fictional people in the original position must reflect on the justification for using force on behalf of JAF. And second, since Rawls justifies targeting objectively innocent people during a supreme emergency exemption, he justifies what one might conceive of as emergency terrorism. Emergency terrorism, however, treats people as means only. Therefore, Rawls's Kantian conception of JAF is in tension with his consequentialist justification of a supreme emergency in a just war and hence with emergency terrorism. (shrink)

I shall first briefly revisit the broad idea of ‘epistemic injustice’, explaining how it can take either distributive or discriminatory form, in order to put the concepts of ‘testimonial injustice’ and ‘hermeneutical injustice’ in place. In previous work I have explored how the wrong of both kinds of epistemic injustice has both an ethical and an epistemic significance—someone is wronged in their capacity as a knower. But my present aim is to show that this wrong can also have a political (...) significance in relation to non-domination, and so to freedom. While it is only the republican conception of political freedom that presents nondomination as constitutive of freedom, I shall argue that non-domination is best understood as a thoroughly generic liberal ideal of freedom to which even negative libertarians are implicitly committed, for non-domination is negative liberty as of right—secured non-interference. Crucially on this conception, non-domination requires that the citizen can contest interferences. Pettit specifies three conditions of contestation, each of which protects against a salient risk of the would-be contester not getting a ‘proper hearing’. But I shall argue that missing from this list is anything to protect against a fourth salient threat: the threat that either kind of epistemic injustice might disable contestation by way of an unjust deflation of either credibility or intelligibility. Thus we see that both testimonial and hermeneutical injustice can render a would-be contester dominated. Epistemic justice is thereby revealed as a constitutive condition of non-domination, and thus of a central liberal political ideal of freedom. (shrink)

The concept of vital force – the immanent energy that promotes the processes of life in the body and in nature – has proved a source of endless fascination and controversy. Indeed, the question of what vitalizes the body has haunted humanity since antiquity, and became even more pressing during the Scientific Revolution and beyond. Examining the complexities and theories about vital force in Spanish modernity, Nicolás Fernández-Medina's Life Embodied offers a novel and provocative assessment of the question of (...) bodily life in Spain. Starting with Juan de Cabriada's landmark Carta filosófica, médico-chymica of 1687 and ending with Ramón Gómez de la Serna's avant-gardism of the 1910s, Fernández-Medina incorporates discussions of anatomy, philosophy, science, critical theory, history of medicine, and literary studies to argue that concepts of vital force served as powerful vehicles to interrogate the possibilities and limits of corporeality. Paying close attention to how the body's capabilities were conceived and strategically woven into critiques of modernity, Fernández-Medina engages the work of Miguel Boix y Moliner, Martín Martínez, Diego de Torres Villarroel, Sebastián Guerrero Herreros, Ignacio María Ruiz de Luzuriaga, Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, Pedro Mata y Fontanet, Ángela Grassi, Julián Sanz del Río, Miguel de Unamuno, and Pío Baroja, among others. Drawing on extensive research and analysis, Life Embodied breaks new ground as the first book to address the question of vital force in Spanish modernity. (shrink)

Ya sea que uno favorezca o se oponga al expresidente Trump, es evidente que, contrario a lo que él ha argumentado, este juicio demostró que ningún ciudadano de los EE. UU. está por encima de la ley. Según el expresidente y sus simpatizantes, el sistema legal estadounidense está «amañado». Alegan que el presidente Biden y el liderazgo del partido demócrata han librado “una guerra legal” (lawfare) es decir, convertir la ley en un arma para obtener una ventaja política sobre el (...) expresidente en las próximas elecciones presidenciales del 5 de noviembre. Sin embargo, para las personas razonables e imparciales, este juicio representa el éxito del Estado de derecho en los Estados Unidos. (shrink)

Insight into animal biology and development provided by classical genetic analysis of the model organism Drosophila melanogaster was an incentive to develop advanced genetic tools for this insect. But genetic systems for the over one million other known insect species are largely undeveloped. With increasing information about insect genomes resulting from next generation sequencing, RNA interference is now the method of choice for reverse genetics, although it is constrained by the means of delivery of interfering RNA. A recent advance to (...) ensure sustained delivery with minimal experimental intervention or trauma to the insect is to exploit commensal bacteria for symbiont‐mediated RNA interference. This technology not only offers an efficient means for RNA interference in insects in laboratory conditions, but also has potential for use in the control of human disease vectors, agricultural pests and pathogens of beneficial insects. (shrink)

Interpreting Bernard Williams’s ethical philosophy is not easy. His style is deceptively conversational; apparently direct, yet argumentatively inexplicit and allusive. He is moreover committed to evading ready-made philosophical “-isms.” All this reinforces the already distinct impression that the structure of his philosophy is a web of interrelated commitments where none has unique priority. Against this impression, however, I will venture that the contours of his philosophy become clearest if one considers that there is a single, unchanging root conviction from which (...) his ethical philosophy grows. Despite the perpetual motion of his philosophical thought—its erudition, originality, range, and unceasing forward momentum—still, I contend, there is something unchanging at the heart of it. I will show this by reference to three signature theses: internal reasons, the relativism of distance, and the porous borders of philosophy and history. I will argue that the root conviction of which these are the fruits is the conviction that the constraints of universal rationality seriously underdetermine how one should live. This, I believe, is the vision of the human ethical condition that constitutes the largely inexplicit yet utterly fundamental presupposition beneath Williams’s ethical philosophy taken as a whole. I label the object of this root conviction ethical freedom, and thus portray Williams as a philosopher of ethical freedom. (shrink)

_Develops a contextualist view of identity, agency, and discursive practices._.