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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Significant scientific and technological advances in intensive care have been made. However, patients in the intensive care unit may experience discomfort, loss of control, and surreal experiences. This has generated relevant debates about how to humanize the intensive care units and whether humanization is necessary at all. This paper aimed to explore how humanizing intensive care is described in the literature. A scoping review was performed. Studies published between 01.01.1999 and 02.03.2020 were identified in the CINAHL, Embase, PubMed, and Scopus (...) databases. After removing 185 duplicates, 363 papers were screened by title and abstract. Full-text screening of 116 papers led to the inclusion of 68 papers in the review based on the inclusion criteria; these papers mentioned humanizing or dehumanizing intensive care in the title or abstract. Humanizing care was defined as holistic care, as a general attitude of professionals toward patients and relatives and an organizational ideal encompassing all subjects of the healthcare system. Technology was considered an integral component of intensive care that must be balanced with caring for the patient as a whole and autonomous person. This holistic view of patients and relatives could ameliorate the negative effects of technology. There were geographical differences and the large number of studies from Spain and Brazil reflect the growing interest in humanizing intensive care in these particular countries. In conclusion, a more holistic approach with a greater emphasis on the individual patient, relatives, and social context is the foundation for humanizing intensive care, as reflected in the attitudes of nurses and other healthcare professionals. Demands for mastering technology may dominate nurses’ attention toward patients and relatives; therefore, humanized intensive care requires a holistic attitude from health professionals and organizations toward patients and relatives. Healthcare organizations, society, and regulatory frameworks demanding humanized intensive care may enforce humanized intensive care. (shrink)

El artículo tiene como finalidad puntualizar elementos que deben ser tomados en cuenta en la formación infantil para mejorar la calidad educativa. Logra que sus recuerdos perduren de forma positiva y que propician una adecuada calidad de vida. Se abordan conceptos de infancia, dimensiones de relación, principios metodológicos y experiencias de aprendizaje.

Orphan drug policy often gives ‘special treatment’ to rare diseases, by giving additional priority or making exceptions to specific drugs, based on the rarity of the conditions they aim to treat. This essay argues that the goal of orphan drug policy should be to make prevalence irrelevant to funding decisions. It aims to demonstrate that it is severity, not prevalence, which drives our judgments that important claims are being overlooked when treatments for severe rare diseases are not funded. It shows (...) that prioritising severity avoids problems caused by prioritising rarity, and that it is compatible with a range of normative frameworks. The implications of a severity-based view for drug development are then derived. The severity-based view also accounts for what is wrong with how the current system of drug development unfairly neglects common diseases that burden the developing world. Lastly, the implications of a severity-based view for current orphan drug policies are discussed. There are no data in this work. (shrink)

Georg Simmel’s final work, The View of Life, concludes his lifelong engagement with Immanuel Kant by ‘inverting’ Kant’s Categorical Imperative to produce an ethics of authentic individuality. While Kant’s moral imperative is universal to all individuals but particular to their discrete acts, Simmel’s Law of the Individual is particular to each individual but universal to all the individual’s acts. We assess the significance of Simmel’s formulation of the Law of the Individual in three steps: First, as an articulation of an (...) ethical moment consonant with his relational approach to formal sociology, hinted at earlier in Sociology but not developed as such. Second, as a completion of the framework for Simmel’s formal sociology: the Law of the Individual conceptualizes a decisive but under-theorized relationship in Simmel’s vision of ‘society’ that is a woven fabric of social relationships, namely one’s relationship with oneself. We follow with a third proposal about how Simmel might have continued the line of thought he opens in The View of Life, suggesting that we can take the Law of the Individual as an invitation to fold the self-relation back into analysis of social relations, and to theorize how forms of association are shaped by forms of self-relation. We thus narrow the theoretical gulf between Simmel’s vitalism and his sociology, which commentators usually hold apart. And in so doing, we sketch a distinctively Simmelian approach to an ethics of individuality in sociological inquiry. (shrink)

The results in this paper are in a context of abstract elementary classes identified by Shelah and Villaveces in which the amalgamation property is not assumed. The long-term goal is to solve Shelah’s Categoricity Conjecture in this context. Here we tackle a problem of Shelah and Villaveces by proving that in their context, the uniqueness of limit models follows from categoricity under the assumption that the subclass of amalgamation bases is closed under unions of bounded, -increasing chains.

Representation is integral to the functioning and legitimacy of modern government. Yet political theorists have often been reluctant to engage directly with questions of representation, and empirical political scientists have closed down such questions by making representation synonymous with congruence. Conceptually unproblematic and normatively inert for some, representation has been deemed impossible to pin down analytically and to defend normatively by others. But this is changing. Political theorists are now turning to political representation as a subject worthy of theoretical investigation (...) in its own right. In their effort to rework the theory of political representation, they are also hoping to impact how representation is assessed and studied empirically. This volume gathers together chapters by key contributors to what amounts to a "representative turn" in political theory. Their approaches and emphases are diverse, but taken together they represent a compelling and original attempt at re-conceptualizing political representation and critically assessing the main theoretical and political implications following from this, namely for how we conceive and assess representative democracy. Each contributor is invited to look back and ahead on the transformations to democratic self-government introduced by the theory and practice of political representation. Representation and democracy: outright conflict, uneasy cohabitation, or reciprocal constitutiveness? For those who think democracy would be better without representation, this volume is a must-read: it will question their assumptions, while also exploring some of the reasons for their discomfort. Reclaiming Representation is essential reading for scholars and graduate researchers committed to staying on top of new developments in the field. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 5, May 2019, Page 62-63.