RNA polymerase II is recruited to DNA double‐strand breaks (DSBs), transcribes the sequences that flank the break and produces a novel RNA type that has been termed damage‐induced long non‐coding RNA (dilncRNA). DilncRNAs can be processed into short, miRNA‐like molecules or degraded by different ribonucleases. They can also form double‐stranded RNAs or DNA:RNA hybrids. The DNA:RNA hybrids formed at DSBs contribute to the recruitment of repair factors during the early steps of homologous recombination (HR) and, in this way, contribute to (...) the accuracy of the DNA repair. However, if not resolved, the DNA:RNA hybrids are highly mutagenic and prevent the recruitment of later HR factors. Here recent discoveries about the synthesis, processing, and degradation of dilncRNAs are revised. The focus is on RNA clearance, a necessary step for the successful repair of DSBs and the aim is to reconcile contradictory findings on the effects of dilncRNAs and DNA:RNA hybrids in HR. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Freedom of Information Acts (FOIA) are valuable legal tools to access information held by public authorities but during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic time frames to reply to requests were de jure or de facto suspended in many countries. However, the lack of effective legal tools to achieve transparency was not automatically paired with governmental secrecy. This research paper analyses which are the factors that prompted some governments to move from secrecy to transparency while the essential legal tool (...) to achieve disclosure of information was not available. It focuses on the role of ‘ecologies of transparency’, a concept developed by Seth Kreimer to describe how FOIA needs to be understood as functioning within a collection of factors and actors. Yet, can transparency ecologies still force disclosure of information when FOIA is suspended? Research focuses on a comparative case study about transparency of scientific committees advising governments on Covid-19 in the UK and in Spain. In both countries, members and minutes were initially secret, but the British government published information before being forced by FOIA, while the Spanish executive only released partial information when FOIA was reactivated. The paper argues that information disclosure processes can be understood as supply and demand models. On the demand side, it highlights the role of adversarial press, scientific community, whistle-blowers, the opposition and critics within the governing party as decisive factors within the transparency ecology. On the supply side, it focuses on legitimation needs from the government to explain different outcomes. (shrink)

En este artículo se ha estudiado la realidad del relevo generacional en la agricultura. Los resultados demuestran cómo las prácticas y actitudes de los jóvenes varían en función de su origen familiar: los que han nacido en un entorno agrario (agricultores tradicionales) son más propensos a seguir las prácticas agrícolas dentro de un paradigma convencional, mientras que los jóvenes que provienen de familias no agrarias (agricultores nuevos) muestran características distintas más cercanas a un nuevo paradigma. La muestra de jóvenes confirma (...) la existencia de un grupo que pone en práctica un Nuevo paradigma agrosocial donde los temas agrícolas y sociales toman un peso significativo. Este grupo de personas arraigadas a la tierra, que busca su propia autonomía y que se mantienen optimistas sobre el futuro es El Nuevo campesinado. (shrink)

This work offers a new theory of what it means to be a legal person and suggests that it is best understood as a cluster property. The book explores the origins of legal personhood, the issues afflicting a traditional understanding of the concept, and the numerous debates surrounding the topic.

This article introduces a new formulation of the interest theory of rights. The focus is on ‘Bentham’s test’, which was devised by Matthew Kramer to limit the expansiveness of the interest theory. According to the test, a party holds a right correlative to a duty only if that party stands to undergo a development that is typically detrimental if the duty is breached. The article shows how the entire interest theory can be reformulated in terms of the test. The article (...) then focuses on a further strength of the interest theory, brought to the fore by the new formulation. In any Western legal system, the tortious maltreatment of a child or a mentally disabled individual results in a compensatory duty. The interest theory can account for such duties in a simple and elegant way. The will theory, on the other hand, struggles to explain such compensatory duties unless it abandons some of its main tenets. (shrink)

Freethinking seems to be desirable because the human being is seen as an independently thinking being. However, as is well known, freethinking should not be taken for granted: ideological indoctrination, manipulation and propaganda, inter alia, are versatile tools for rulers and, in consequence, regularly repeated phenomena. One of the most drastic intellectual turning points in history occurred in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the incontestable religious world view of European civilization changed along with early modern science and the Age (...) of Enlightenment. Although freethinking and religion do not have to be thought of as opposed, the period in question includes instances of complex and delicate phenomena, which in this article are termed intellectual purism and socio-intellectual control. The discussion includes how five thinkers operated in a restrictive politico-religio-theological framework and how they manifest religious deviance. (shrink)

This edited work collates novel contributions on contemporary topics that are related to human rights. The essays address analytic-descriptive questions, such as what legal personality actually means, and normative questions, such as who or what should be recognised as a legal person. As is well-known among jurists, the law has a special conception of personhood: corporations are persons, whereas slaves have traditionally been considered property rather than persons. This odd state of affairs has not garnered the interest of legal theorists (...) for a while and the theory of legal personhood has been a relatively peripheral topic in jurisprudence for at least 50 years. As readers will see, there have recently been many developments and debates that justify a theoretical investigation of this topic. Animal rights activists have been demanding that some animals be recognized as legal persons. The field of robotics has prompted questions about driverless cars: should they be granted a limited legal personality, so that the car itself would be responsible for damages? This book explores such concepts and touches on matters of bioethics, animal law and medical law. It includes matters of legal history and appeals to both legal scholars and philosophers, especially those with an interest in theories of law and the philosophy of law. (shrink)

This article examines the embeddedness of corporate social responsibility (CSR) communications in strategic planning. By drawing on the idea that talk and texts about CSR are an essential part of responsibility practices, I study how CSR aspirations—responsibility-related organizational self-descriptions, goals, and ideals that the organization cannot yet live up to or that the organizational constituents deem necessary to maintain—are intertwined with strategy texts and strategic episodes. Conducting a qualitative case study on a series of biennial strategy processes over a 20-year (...) period, I show how CSR aspirations are established in authoritative strategy documents during stakeholder interactions, elaborated in consecutive strategic episodes, extended to new business areas, and evaluated in subsequent communications. These findings contribute to the CSR and strategy literature by showing how (a) aspirational talk can be established and perpetuated through recurrent communicative processes, (b) stakeholder engagement in CSR issues can influence strategy texts and how strategy texts become a part of intertextual organizational communications, and (c) strategic context can be conducive to progressive performativity. (shrink)

The chapter argues that the traditional theories of legal personhood, which associate legal personhood with the holding of rights, are outdated and should be reassessed. Many modern theories of rights come into conflict with our convictions regarding who or what is a legal person. For instance, most jurists would agree that foetuses are not natural persons but new-born children are. However, if we apply the so-called interest theory of rights, we will note that foetuses hold various rights, such as rights (...) against certain forms of abortion. If right-holding entails legal personality, then foetuses are already legal persons. On the other hand, if we apply the will theory, which associates right-holding with the power to control others’ duties, then infants do not hold any rights at all – and are consequently not legal persons. This is why the chapter outlines an alternative theory of legal personhood. The main tenets of the theory are: (1) legal personality is not binary but rather a matter of degree, and (2) X’s legal personality involves primarily the endowment of X with incidents of legal personhood, much like ownership can be understood as consisting of separate but interconnected incidents. Rather than being a “solved” theoretical issue, the definition of legal personhood should occupy theorists more in the future. (shrink)

A relatively recent form of animal activism is lawsuits intended to declare some animals as legal persons. A pioneer of this approach is the U.S.-based Nonhuman Rights Project. This organization’s primary strategy has been to invoke the writ of habeas corpus, which protects the right to personal freedom of “persons.” The article criticizes the notion of legal personhood that the NhRP is employing and explains how an alternative understanding of legal personhood could perhaps make nonhuman rights more palatable for courts.

The Article analyzes the notion of legal “thinghood” in the context of the person–thing bifurcation. In legal scholarship, there are numerous assumptions pertaining to this definition that are often not spelled out. In addition, one’s chosen definition of “thing” is often simply taken to be the correct one. The Article scrutinizes these assumptions and definitions. First, a brief history of the bifurcation is offered. Second, three possible definitions of “legal thing” are examined: Things as nonpersons, things as rights and duties, (...) and things as property. The first two definitions are rejected as not being very interesting or serving any heuristic function. Conversely, understanding legal things as property is meaningful, useful, and helps to understand what it means to say that animals are legally things. Defining things as property has certain rather important implications, which are analyzed at the end of the Article. For instance, not everything needs to be either a person or a thing: The historical institution of outlawry involved treating individuals neither as legal persons nor as legal things. One must conclude that the person–thing bifurcation is less fundamental than is often assumed. (shrink)

While the very existence of global literary studies as an institutionalised field is not yet fully established, the global turn in various disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences has been gaining traction in recent years. This book aims to contribute to the field of global literary studies with a more inclusive and decentralising approach. Specifically, it responds to a double demand: the need for expanding openness to other ways of seeing the global literary space by including multiple literary (...) and cultural traditions and other interdisciplinary perspectives in the discussion, and the need for conceptual models and different case studies that will help develop a global approach in four key avenues of research: global translation flows and translation policies, the post-1989 novel as a global form, global literary environments, and a global perspective on film and cinema history. Gathering contributions from international scholars with expertise in various areas of research, the volume is structured around five target concepts: space, scale, time, connectivity, and agency. We also take gender and LGBTQ+ perspectives, as well as a digital approach. (shrink)

Originally, the idea of interviewing Iris Marion Young in Barcelona came about after she accepted an invitation to give a public lecture at the Law School of Pompeu Fabra University in May 2002. I had first met Iris back in 1999, at a conference in Bristol, England, and I was impressed deeply by her personality and ideas. We kept in touch since then and exchanged papers and ideas. She was very keen to come to Spain (it seems that her mother (...) had lived some years in Mallorca) and she finally travelled to Barcelona with her husband and daughter in spring 2002. The lecture, which she entitled "Women, War, and Peace," was meant to be the closing session of a course on Gender and the Law, and was also part of a series of seminars annually organized by the legal philosophy department (the Albert Calsamiglia Seminar). Her work was quite well-known among several Catalan philosophers and political scientists and professor Angel Castiñeira-who, at the time, was the director of Idees (Ideas), a Catalan journal published by the Centre d'Estudis de Temes Contemporanis (Center for the Study of Contemporary Issues)-suggested that she could give a second lecture, which they would publish together with an interview I could prepare. She accepted both proposals, and I started to think of a questionnaire for the interview while I was at Queen's University in Canada earlier that year. Idil Boran, a philosopher and good friend who did her doctorate at Queen's, offered to help me with this endeavour, since she also admired Iris as both a scholar and a person. Together we prepared the questions and sent them to her once she was back in Chicago, as there was not time to conduct the interview in person while she was in Barcelona. In fall 2002, she sent some answers to our questions, but the document was unfortunately incomplete. She was busy at the time, so we didn't want to pressure her to finish the interview. Eventually, the editors of Idees decided to publish the manifest about the war in Iraq subscribed by a large number of American Intellectuals together with fragments of Iris's (antiwar) lectures and an article that she wrote together with Daniel Archibugi, "Envisioning a Global Rule of Law." The interview was thus left unpublished. Both Idil and I thought it would be worthwhile to publish it somewhere else, but, for one reason or another, Iris didn't have the time to complete it and we kept postponing the project. At some point, she said that the questions she left unanswered were too complex or challenging to give a short or quick answer, and that she would need to reflect on them to provide detailed responses. Later, we learned she was ill and we didn't feel it was right to insist on those questions being answered. The issue came up again when she accepted to participate as a keynote speaker at the World Congress of Legal Philosophy held in Granada in June 2005. She then said she would come first to Barcelona (where she and Nancy Fraser had been invited to a workshop by the Catalan Women Institute) and suggested we could sit in a cafe and talk about the issues left out in those unanswered questions. Unfortunately, she had to cancel this trip because of her medical treatment, and I did not have the privilege of sharing time with her again. The following series of questions and responses are the product of this rather extended interview process. (shrink)

Isaiah Berlin és un dels pensadors més originals i importants del segle XX. Especialista en història de les idees, la seua interpretació del nacionalisme trenca tòpics i idees preconcebudes.

Both scientific evidence and folklore have suggested that madness is associated with creativity, especially in the arts. Recently, more rigorous studies have confirmed to some extent these previous observations. The current view is that it is not severe and acute insanity that is related to heightened creativity, but the personality roots and soft manifestations of both schizophrenic and bipolar psychoses. The affective and cognitive peculiarities associated with schizotypic and hypomanic personalities may be preferentially related to different kinds of creative endeavours, (...) such as the sciences and arts, respectively. The connection between personality traits and creativity is produced because they share some biological-cognitive-personality features, such as cognitive disinhibition. Additionally, it has been shown that the genetic liability for both bipolar and schizophrenic psychoses is related to creativity. A prevailing hypothesis is that creativity may be one type of 'compensatory advantage' for those carrying the genes for psychosis. (shrink)

Journal Name: The Law & Ethics of Human Rights Issue: Ahead of print.

Hillel Steiner has recently attacked the notion of inalienable rights, basing some of his arguments on the Hohfeldian analysis to show that infinite arrays of legal positions would not be associated with any inalienable rights. This essay addresses the nature of the Hohfeldian infinity: the main argument is that what Steiner claims to be an infinite regress is actually a wholly unproblematic form of infinite recursion. First, the nature of the Hohfeldian recursion is demonstrated. It is shown that infinite recursions (...) of legal positions ensue regardless of whether inalienable rights exist or not. Second, the alleged problems that this might pose for the analysis are discussed. The conclusion is that one should not worry about the recursion as long as one understands correctly the role of the Hohfeldian analysis in normative reasoning. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, Volume 52, Issue 4, Page 491-515, Winter 2021.

It has been debated whether the so-called attention economy, in which the attention of agents is measured and sold, jeopardizes something of value. One strand of this discussion has focused on so-called attention rights, asking: should attention be legally protected, either by introducing novel rights or by extending the scope of pre-existing rights? In this paper, however, in order to further this discussion, we ask: How is attention already protected legally? In what situations does a person have the right to (...) attention under current law? -/- Unlike (Chomanski, Neuroethics 16:1–11, 2023), who discusses an overall right to attention, or (Puri, Rutgers Law Record 48:206–221, 2021), who discusses an overall right to attentional privacy, in this paper we focus on two types of situations in which a person’s attention is already protected by legal regulation. Sustained attention-requiring tasks can be jeopardized by distractions whereas attentiveness to certain kind of stimuli can be jeopardized by immersive stimuli. That is why distractions are regulated in situations where an agent has what we call a concentration right and immersive stimuli are regulated in situations where an agent has what we call a duty to be attentive. The further analysis of these situations provides an understanding of the legal means by which attention is already regulated, which can be helpful when thinking about how it should be regulated in the future. (shrink)

Professor Matthew Kramer is one of the most important legal philosophers of our time - even if the label 'legal philosopher' does not do justice to the breadth of his work. This collection of essays brings together esteemed philosophers, as well as junior scholars, to critically assess Kramer's philosophy. The contributions focus on Kramer's work on legal philosophy, metaethics, normative ethics, and political philosophy. The volume is divided into six parts, each focusing on different aspect of Kramer's work. The first (...) part, Rights and Right-holding, contains five essays addressing Kramer's work on rights and right-holding, including the Hohfeldian analysis and the interest theory of right-holding. The four essays in the second part, General Jurisprudence, focus on Kramer's work in general jurisprudence, from the compatibility of legal positivism with universal legal error, to his robust defense of inclusive legal positivism, concluding with reflections on his writings on the rule of law. The third part, General Matters of Ethics, contains two essays addressing Kramer's metaethical work on moral realism as a moral doctrine. The fourth and fifth parts, Freedom and Liberalism, have four essays falling within political philosophy, probing Kramer's work on negative freedom and political liberalism, respectively. The sixth part, Applied Ethics, contains two essays on Kramer's work on capital punishment and freedom of expression. The collection is rounded off by reflections on, and replies to, the contributions by Kramer himself. (shrink)

Here we study polysemy as a potential learning bias in vocabulary learning in children. Words of low polysemy could be preferred as they reduce the disambiguation effort for the listener. However, such preference could be a side-effect of another bias: the preference of children for nouns in combination with the lower polysemy of nouns with respect to other part-of-speech categories. Our results show that mean polysemy in children increases over time in two phases, i.e. a fast growth till the 31st (...) month followed by a slower tendency towards adult speech. In contrast, this evolution is not found in adults interacting with children. This suggests that children have a preference for non-polysemous words in their early stages of vocabulary acquisition. Interestingly, the evolutionary pattern described above weakens when controlling for syntactic category (noun, verb, adjective or adverb) but it does not disappear completely, suggesting that it could result from a combination of a standalone bias for low polysemy and a preference for nouns. (shrink)

Research suggests that the ability to understand one’s own and others’ minds, or mentalizing, is a key factor for mental health. Most studies have focused the attention on the association between global measures of mentalizing and specific disorders. In contrast, very few studies have analyzed the association between specific mentalizing polarities and global measures of mental health. This study aimed to evaluate whether self and other polarities of mentalizing are associated with a multidimensional notion of mental health, which considers symptoms, (...) functioning, and well-being. Additionally, the level or depth of mentalizing within each polarity was also analyzed. A sample of 214 adolescents was evaluated on measures of self- and other- mentalizing, multi-informed measures of psychopathology and functioning based on Achenbach’s system, and measures of psychological well-being. Results revealed no association between mentalizing polarities and higher-order symptom factors. Self-mentalizing was associated with self-esteem and motivation to life goals, and other-mentalizing was associated to general, social and role functioning. This association between aspects of self-other mentalizing and self-other function has important implications for treatment and prevention. Deeper mentalizing within each polarity revealed stronger associations with functioning and well-being. Because mentalizing polarities are associated with functioning and well-being but not with symptoms, a new hypothesis is developed: mentalizing does not contribute to resiliency by preventing symptoms, but by helping to deal with them, thus improving functioning and well-being independently of psychopathology. These findings support that promoting mentalizing across development may improve mental health, even in non-clinical population. (shrink)

Ante la falta o disminución de la motivación de los alumnos universitarios la enseñanza, y con ello la Universidad se ve en la tesitura de poner en práctica nuevas metodologías más activas y motivantes que permitan a los alumnos tener un rol más protagonista en el proceso de enseñanza y aprendizaje que el que han tenido hasta ahora.En el este artículo se expone una experiencia que consiste en el diseño de un escape room on line enmarcado en el Máster en (...) Educación Especial. Se plantea como objetivo motivar a los alumnos y facilitar el aprendizaje de la asignatura. (shrink)

Oswaldo Porchat (1933-2017) foi um dos filósofos brasileiros mais importantes. Professor da Universidade de São Paulo (USP) e da Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp) e fundador do Centro de Lógica e Epistemologia (CLE-Unicamp), foi um pensador profundo e irrequieto: adaptou o estruturalismo francês a nosso contexto, mergulhou no silêncio da não filosofia, aderiu à filosofia da visão comum do mundo e, finalmente, rendeu-se ao ceticismo, pelo qual se sentira atraído e ao qual tinha resistido por longo tempo. Explica essa fecundidade (...) o fato de que, a seu ver, filosofia e espírito crítico não se dissociam, não havendo verdadeiro espírito crítico se este não for aplicado às próprias ideias. Quando se pensam dessa maneira os temas da verdade, do conhecimento e da razão, difícil é não terminar como cético. Quais ideias resistem ao poder corrosivo da razão crítica? O ceticismo de Porchat, entretanto, está muito distante da imagem desoladora que usualmente se tem dessa corrente filosófica. É antes uma original e refinada atualização do pirronismo antigo à luz da filosofia contemporânea, ousadamente propondo a elaboração de uma visão cética do mundo. Organizado em duas partes, este livro retoma todas essas mudanças pelas quais passou o pensamento de Porchat, ao traçar um quadro detalhado das suas diferentes fases e examinar suas opiniões sobre temas centrais da filosofia. Uma das originalidades desta obra é interpretar o pensamento de Oswaldo Porchat com a mesma atenção e o mesmo cuidado com que outros livros se dedicam a filósofos de outros países, contribuindo para aprofundar o debate filosófico no Brasil, sem perder de vista o estudante que se inicia na leitura da obra desse notável pensador. (shrink)