The purpose of this article is to start a dialogue between the so-called autopoietic enactivism and the semiotic pragmatism of C. S. Peirce, in order to re-examine both action and representation under a Peircean light. The focus lays on autopoietic enactivism because this approach offers a wider theoretical scope to cognition based on the continuity of life and mind, embodiment, dynamic and non-linear interaction between a system and its environment which are compatible ideas with Peirce’s semiotic pragmatism. The term ‘pragmatic’ (...) has been introduced in cognitive science to reinforce the idea that cognition is a form of practice and to help action-oriented viewpoints to escape representationalism. In this paper, I shall try to demonstrate that Peirce’s semiotic pragmatism can be a meaningful methodological path to guide a reconciliation between not only anti-Cartesianism and representation but also representation and action. In order to accomplish this purpose, Peirce’s account to action, habit, thought and mind will be addressed through some of the guiding principles of his semiotic—sign and sign action. What follows is the re-examining of the problem of representation—as refuted by autopoietic enactivism—under the light of Peirce’s semiotic pragmatism. (shrink)

O objeto deste trabalho é a crítica de Jacobi tanto ao Aufklärung, quanto ao conceito kantiano de coisa-em-si. Essas críticas foram inicialmente elaboradas durante a querela do panteísmo - discussão encadeada por Jacobi e Mendelssohn acerca do racionalismo e suas possíveis consequências - e continuou até a contribuição e resposta de Kant a essas questões com a publicação do texto “O que significa orientar-se no pensamento”. Nesse texto, Kant desenvolve o conceito de fé racional, o qual sustenta que não se (...) pode abrir mão da razão quando se trata de objetos suprassensíveis, uma vez que eles são dela uma exigência. De certa forma, Jacobi se viu frustrado com o posicionamento Kant e, em resposta, identificou em sua filosofia um conceito que teria, para ele, um caráter intrinsecamente contraditório: a coisa-em-si. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to understand the perceptions of highly skilled and less skilled volleyball players about the influences that parents, coaches, and peers had on their sport development and performance achievement. Highly skilled (n= 30) and less skilled (n= 30) volleyball players participated in semi-structured retrospective interviews to explain how parents, coaches and peers may have influenced their sport participation. Data was analyzed through a process of content analysis. Results indicated that parents, coaches, and peers had an (...) important influence in player's sport development but differing according to players' expertise level. Concerning to parental influences, tangible support during the early years of development was mentioned by all players. However, parents' level of involvement and parenting styles revealed interesting differences between highly skilled and less skilled players. Highly skilled players perceived a moderate parental involvement and an autonomy-supportive parenting style, while less skilled players referred a excessive parental involvement in players' sport participation. Coaches influences showed to have some similarities in the early years with all players mentioning coaches as caring and recognizing their value as an athlete. However, highly skilled players described a different training environment characterized by a demanding coach, individualized instruction, and specific goal setting. Regarding peers' influence, all players recognized that friends were not only one of the main reasons to start playing volleyball, but also an important source of support to remain engaged and staying motivated to do sport. Highly skilled players, however, mentioned the importance of teammates' positive push and critiques during practice for enhancing their motivation, team cohesion and friendship. They also highlighted the importance of friends outside of sport in the later years of their career by acting as an escape from all the pressure that emerged from volleyball training and competition demands. Overall, these findings highlight different social influences according to the players' expertise level suggesting the need to examine more extensively the nature of significant others' support on athlete and talent development. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss John Bickle’s attempt to provide a formal procedure to locate a certain reduction relation in the Hooker’s and Churchland’s New wave reductionist spectrum. Bickle’s main motivation is to react against the ‘Khunnian flavored,’ internal-to-scientific-practice pragmatist solution endorsed by Patricia Churchland when faced with the lack of a formal and external way to identify a reduction in the spectrum. Bickle tries to solve this problem by reformulating Hooker’s insights within a structuralist framework so establishing an external-toscientific- (...) practice formal solution. I show that Bickle fails on his attempt and, as a consequence, we should adopt Patricia Churchland pragmatic stance regarding reductionist and ontological decisions. (shrink)

This paper takes a critical look at the rise of the practice of philosophy in the market place in late modernity. Two main forms of such practice are identified: the practice of Socratic Dialogue in small groups in organisations and one-to-one philosophical counselling of individual 'clients'. The relevance of professionalism for commercialised applied practical philosophy is discussed. Philosophical counsellors in particular may be at risk of engaging with vulnerable individuals who are in need of protection from practitioners who are not (...) trained to deal with their problems. Psychology is the discipline which is most related to practical philosophy and it is growing in ethical awareness. This paper emphasises the importance of ethics for philosophy in practice. There is a pressing need for eternal vigilance by practitioners from such disciplines, whether professionalised or not, in the complex modern'runaway world'. (shrink)

This paper takes a critical look at the rise of the practice of philosophy in the market place in late modernity. Two main forms of such practice are identified: the practice of Socratic Dialogue in small groups in organisations and one-to-one philosophical counselling of individual 'clients'. The relevance of professionalism for commercialised applied practical philosophy is discussed. Philosophical counsellors in particular may be at risk of engaging with vulnerable individuals who are in need of protection from practitioners who are not (...) trained to deal with their problems. Psychology is the discipline which is most related to practical philosophy and it is growing in ethical awareness. This paper emphasises the importance of ethics for philosophy in practice. There is a pressing need for eternal vigilance by practitioners from such disciplines, whether professionalised or not, in the complex modern'runaway world'. (shrink)

Whether and how music is involved in evoking emotions is a matter of considerable debate. In the target article, Juslin & Vll (J&V) argue that music induces a wide range of both basic and complex emotions that are shared with other stimuli. If such a link exists, it would provide a common basis for considering the interactions among music, emotion, timing, and time perception.

We describe and analyze 13 cases handled by our ethics consultation service (ECS) in which families requested continuation of physiological support for loved ones after death by neurological criteria (DNC) had been declared. These ethics consultations took place between 2005 and 2013. Patients’ ages ranged from 14 to 85. Continued mechanical ventilation was the focal intervention sought by all families. The ECS’s advice and recommendations generally promoted “reasonable accommodation” of the requests, balancing compassion for grieving families with other ethical and (...) moral concerns such as stewardship of resources, professional integrity, and moral distress. In cases we characterized as finitegoal accommodation, a “reasonable accommodation” strategy proved effective in balancing stakeholders’ interests and goals, enabling steady progress toward resolution. When a family objected outright to a declaration of DNC and asked for an indefinite accommodation, the “reasonable accommodation” approach offered clinicians little practical direction, and resolution required definitive action by either the family or the clinical team. Based on our analysis and reflections on these 13 cases, we propose ethically justified and practical guidelines to assist healthcare professionals, administrators, and ECSs faced with similar cases. (shrink)

In general, stimuli that are familiar and recognizable have an advantage of predominance during binocular rivalry. Recent research has demonstrated that familiar and recognizable stimuli such as upright faces and words in a native language could break interocular suppression faster than their matched controls. In this study, a visible word prime was presented binocularly then replaced by a high-contrast dynamic noise pattern presented to one eye and either a semantically related or unrelated word was introduced to the other eye. We (...) measured how long it took for target words to break from suppression. To investigate word-parts priming, a second experiment also included word pairs that had overlapping subword fragments. Results from both experiments consistently show that semantically related words and words that shared subword fragments were faster to gain dominance compared to unrelated words, suggesting that words, even when interocularly suppressed and invisible, can benefit from semantic and subword priming. (shrink)

One’s philosophical points of view, which form the bases for assumptions that we bring to management theory and practice matter, and matter deeply, to management thinking and corporate behavior. In this paper I outline three related threads of philosophical conversations and explain how they are important in management theory and practice: the “linguistic turn” in philosophy, deriving from the later writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, a social constructionist perspective: a set of theories at least implicitly derived from the linguistic turn in (...) philosophy, and the notion of the impartial spectator. I then use these three theories to analyze the idea of the corporation, corporate cultures and corporate mission statements, stakeholder theories and their differences, and the limitations of the popular notion of “corporate social responsibility.” I conclude that how one frames these management ideas makes a difference, a difference in theory and in practice. (shrink)

Currently, Nursing Education draws on a commonly taken‐for‐granted folk psychology of a representational view of how the mind works and how human beings learn. Descartes' representational view of the mind strongly influences pedagogies, theories of learning, curricula, and approaches to testing nursing knowledge and more broadly in academia. A representational view of the mind holds that perception occurs in the mind only through representations in the mind through ideas, concepts, templates and schema. Situated, embodied, and socially embedded cognition is presented (...) as a counter view to a representational view of the mind. (shrink)

This book explores Gilles Deleuze's contribution to film theory. According to Deleuze, we have come to live in a universe that could be described as metacinematic. His conception of images implies a new kind of camera consciousness, one that determines our perceptions and sense of selves: aspects of our subjectivities are formed in, for instance, action-images, affection-images and time-images. We live in a matrix of visual culture that is always moving and changing. Each image is always connected to an assemblage (...) of affects and forces. This book presents a model, as well as many concrete examples, of how to work with Deleuze in film theory. It asks questions about the universe as metacinema, subjectivity, violence, feminism, monstrosity, and music. Among the contemporary films it discusses within a Deleuzian framework are Strange Days, Fight Club, and Dancer in the Dark. (shrink)

Concerned with the idea of the self, this text challenges what it perceives to be the bleak deconstructionist views of ceaseless change with a discussion and depiction of the self in new vocabulary - an action-oriented self defined by the ways in which it communicates.

Moral distress is a phenomenon that has been receiving increasing attention in nursing and other health care disciplines. Moral distress is a concept that entered the nursing literature – and subsequently the health care ethics lexicon – in 1984 as a result of the work done by American philosopher and bioethicist Andrew Jameton. Over the past decade, research into moral distress has extended beyond the profession of nursing as other health care disciplines have come to question the impact of moral (...) constraint on individual practitioners, professional practice, and patient outcomes. Along with increased interest in the phenomenon of moral distress have come increasing critiques – critiques that in their essence point to a serious lack of conceptual clarity in the definition, study, and application of the concept. Foundational to gaining conceptual clarity in moral distress in order to develop strategies to prevent and ameliorate the experience is a careful revisiting of the epistemological assumptions underpinning our knowledge and use of the concept of moral distress. It is our contention that the conceptual challenges reveal flaws in the original understanding of moral distress that are based on an epistemological stance that holds a linear conception of cause and effect coupled with a simplistic perspective of ‘constraint’ and ‘agency’. We need a more nuanced approach to our study of moral distress such that our ontological and epistemological stances help us to better appreciate the complexity of moral agents acting in organizational contexts. We believe that critical realism offers such a nuanced approach. (shrink)

There are two prominent viewpoints regarding the nature of rationality and how it should be evaluated in situations of interest: the traditional axiomatic approach and the newer ecological rationality. An obstacle to comparing and evaluating these seemingly opposite approaches is that they employ different language and formalisms, ask different questions, and are at different stages of development. I adapt a formal framework known as SCOP to address this problem by providing a comprehensive common framework in which both approaches may be (...) defined and compared. The main result is that the axiomatic and ecological approaches are in far greater agreement on fundamental issues than has been appreciated; this is supported by a pair of theorems to the effect that they will make accordant rationality judgements when forced to evaluate the same situation. I conclude that ecological rationality has some subtle advantages, but that we should move past the issues currently dominating the discussion of rationality. (shrink)

With the demise of Marxism and socialism, the United States is becoming a model not merely for free enterprise, but also for employment practices worldwide. I believe that free enterprise is the least worst economic system, given the alternatives, a position I shall assume, but not defend, here. However, I shall argue, a successful free enterprise political economy does not entail mimicking US employment practices. I find even today in 1998, as I shall outline in more detail, these practices, when (...) consistently carried out, by and large erode trust in the workplace, they are, on balance unfair to workers and managers, and, if Jeffrey Pfeffer is correct, they do not maximize long-term corporate earnings or growth. Getting clear on US employment practices and their weaknesses may help to shape other models for employment that neither contravene free enterprise nor are degrading to workers. (shrink)

We propose Edgar Morin’s notion of transdisciplinarity as a complementary educational perspective for preparing business school students in addressing the complex global socio-economic and environmental challenges that our planet has been facing for some time. Morin’s notion of transdisciplinarity spans various disciplines, both within disciplines and beyond individual disciplines. Morin’s transdisciplinary approach is inquiry driven and presents a systemic/humanistic vision and form of awareness that challenges habitually dualistic and simplistic thinking. Morin’s transdisciplinarity is based on a dialogical and translogical principle (...) that extends classical and rigid logic and that helps students to explore and unify concepts of a simultaneous complementary and contradictory nature. Confronting students with different modes of thinking, imagining and feeling can help them to develop greater self-awareness, critical reflection, and creativity; with various frames of reference; and with an openness toward and confidence in engaging in changes needed to address global challenges in a sustainable and responsible way. (shrink)

In this paper, I analyze the extent to which classical phase transitions, especially continuous phase transitions, impose a challenge for reduction- ism. My main contention is that classical phase transitions are compatible with reduction, at least with the notion of limiting reduction, which re- lates the behavior of physical quantities in different theories under certain limiting conditions. I argue that this conclusion follows even after rec- ognizing the existence of two infinite limits involved in the treatment of continuous phase transitions.

This essay presents some thoughts on schizoanalysis and visual culture around the proposition that cinema survives in the digital age as a type of image that, after the movement-image and the time-image, could be called the neuro-image. By considering clinical schizophrenia as ‘degree zero’ of schizoanalysis in a more critical sense, a reading of The Butterfly Effect unfolds the temporal dimensions of schizoanalysis as typical for a definition of ‘the neuro-image’. The argument is that the neuro-image speaks from the (always (...) speculative) future. (shrink)

Until recently, business issues in healthcare organizations were relatively insulated from clinical issues, for several reasons. The hospital at earlier stages of its development operated on a combination of charitable and equitable premises, allowing for providing care to be separated from financial support. Physicians, who were primarily responsible for clinical care, constituted an independent power nexus within the hospital and were governed by their own professional codes of ethics. In exchange for a great deal of control over their conditions of (...) practice, they took almost complete responsibility for patient care. Thus clinical and professional ethics could to some extent be compartmentalized from the business issues—a much easier feat when, as in much of the last few decades, virtually all care was reimbursed from some source or other. In addition, many HCOs were not categorized or treated as businesses, although of course they were presumed to be governed by the same expectation for good management as any other organization. (shrink)

In his speech at the University of Dakar in July 2007, the French president Nicolas Sarkozy referred to Africa as the continent that has not yet fully entered history. This article takes this obvious reference to Hegel as its starting point and examines the current significance of ‘Hegel’s Africa’. Through a close reading of The Philosophy of History and The Phenomenology of Spirit, it shows that Hegel’s remarks on Africa are by no means incidental. They constitute rem(a)inders of a modernity (...) that is based on the construction of Africa as its own limit. The return of Hegel’s Africa, the article concludes, can thus not be restricted to a problem of the new European right. It is part of an understanding of modernity that remains haunted by the specters of racism. (shrink)

The development of the Functional Genomics Investigation Ontology (FuGO) is a collaborative, international effort that will provide a resource for annotating functional genomics investigations, including the study design, protocols and instrumentation used, the data generated and the types of analysis performed on the data. FuGO will contain both terms that are universal to all functional genomics investigations and those that are domain specific. In this way, the ontology will serve as the “semantic glue” to provide a common understanding of data (...) from across these disparate data sources. In addition, FuGO will reference out to existing mature ontologies to avoid the need to duplicate these resources, and will do so in such a way as to enable their ease of use in annotation. This project is in the early stages of development; the paper will describe efforts to initiate the project, the scope and organization of the project, the work accomplished to date, and the challenges encountered, as well as future plans. (shrink)

Providing balanced coverage of abortion, sexual harassment, censorship and pornography, and other timely and controversial subjects, this pathbreaking anthology is the first to offer a comprehensive introduction to feminist legal philosophy. An important resource for courses in women's studies, philosophy, law, sociology, and political science, it provides many stimulating insights into essential topics in jurisprudence, such as the nature and justification of law, judicial reasoning and the process of adjudication, the connection between law and equality, and freedom and justice.

: The author seeks an explanation for Merleau-Ponty's expression "the body understands", to which a real value is applied: the objects of the world have a signification that the body grasps by way of perception. The analysis focuses on Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of perception and on notes from two of his courses, Le monde sensible et le monde de l'expression and La nature. In these works, there is a constant allusion to the I can as an underlying and grounding mode with (...) regard to the I think. The French philosopher thus grants a central role to movement that demonstrates the interweaving of the body with the world. Resumo: O autor busca uma explicação para a expressão "o corpo conhece", de Merleau-Ponty, à qual atribui um valor real: os objetos do mundo têm uma significação que o corpo apreende por meio da percepção. A análise se concentra na Fenomenologia da percepção e nas notas de dois cursos: O mundo sensível e o mundo da expressão e A natureza. Há uma constante alusão ao eu posso como um modo subjacente e fundamental em relação ao eu penso. Daí, o filósofo francês conferir um papel central ao movimento que demonstra o entrelaçamento do corpo com o mundo. (shrink)

As tensões geradas pela confluência das culturas grega e semita encontram no século XIII um solo fecundo. O necessitarismo grego que faz do mundo uma emanação divina confronta com a amorosa vontade criadora do Deus semita. Essa questão é raiz fundante do pensamento e do agir modernos e tem em Raimundo Lúlio uma importante reflexão que culmina com a emergência de um ethos amoroso. Esse resgate ajuda a fundamentar o lugar do homem e sua responsabilidade na atual sociedade tecnológica.

BioPortal is a Web portal that provides access to a library of biomedical ontologies and terminologies developed in OWL, RDF(S), OBO format, Protégé frames, and Rich Release Format. BioPortal functionality, driven by a service-oriented architecture, includes the ability to browse, search and visualize ontologies (Figure 1). The Web interface also facilitates community-based participation in the evaluation and evolution of ontology content.

No presente ensaio, discute-se o impacto do negacionismo na Educação escolar. Essa ideologia é baseada em falsos argumentos, cujos protagonistas negam evidências cientificamente comprovadas, como forma de fortalecer seus anseios pelo poder. A narrativa negacionista atinge pessoas que aceitam acriticamente e replicam esses argumentos como se fossem verdades absolutas. Um dos resultados da disseminação e aceitação dessa ideologia é o estímulo a ações extremistas, como vimos acontecer recentemente no Brasil. A negação fomenta intencionalmente os analfabetismos histórico, social e científico. As (...) pessoas "contaminadas" por essa ideologia extremista ignoram os argumentos lógicos e permanecem alheias ao avanço da Ciência. Acreditam em disparates, como o chamado “terraplanismo”; são disseminadores de informações falsas; promovem “cruzadas” antivacinação; defendem o uso de medicamentos ineficazes; e fomentam o descrédito da democracia. As ideias de Paulo Freire, que estimulam o cultivo do pensamento crítico e emancipatório, é o aporte teóricometodológico que norteia este ensaio, contextualizado na prática docente dos autores, que consideram a Educação como uma prática de liberdade. (shrink)

The era of high colonialism in South Asia coincided with the period when eugenics came to dominate much of the scientific discourse in Europe and America. Such attitudes were naturally transplanted into the colonial world where medical researchers helped to establish a pathological “difference” between Europeans in India and the colonial “Other,” thus creating a medical discourse dominated by racial segregated treatment regimes. With the growth of trans-national transfer of scientific knowledge, this colonial “research” began to underpin racially constructed medical (...) practices wherever they occurred. (shrink)