This book is a multi-faceted attempt to understand the psychological mysteries of land, space, native cultures, changing eras, and geographical dislocation. It shows us that many remote and seemingly peaceful areas of the world have their own dark and silent pasts in which their original inhabitants were often brutally wiped out. Weaving history, geography, myth, philosophy, and psychoanalysis together, this book tries to understand why such atrocities were committed, how those subjected to these 'crimes' might have perceived them, and what (...) are the long-term, trans-generational consequences of these historical events. (shrink)

Mario Savio is widely known as the first spokesman for the Free Speech Movement. Having spent the summer of 1964 as a civil rights worker in segregationist Mississippi, Savio returned to the University of California at a time when students throughout the country were beginning to mobilize in support of racial justice and against the deepening American involvement in Vietnam. His moral clairty, his eloquence, and his democratic style of leadership inspired thousands of fellow Berkeley students to protest (...) university regulations that had severely limited political speech and activity on campus. The nonviolent campaign culminated in the largest mass arrest in American history, drew widespread faculty support, and resulted in a revision of university rules to permit political speech and organizing. This significant advance for student freedom rapidly spread to countless other colleges and universities across the country. Mario Savio went on to become a college teacher of physics, logic, and philosophy, to speak and organize in favor of immigrant rights and affirmative action and against U.S. intervention in Central America. He died on November 6, 1996, in the middle of a struggle against California State University fee hikes that hurt working-class students. Savio had submitted this article to the Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic before he died. Final revisions were made by Philip Clayton with the assistance of Mario's colleagues at Sonoma State University. As reader for the Journal, George Englebretsen not only provided an extensive commentary on the article--much of which has been incorporated here--but also assisted in the difficult task of making revisions without changing the substance of Mario's style or thought. It is fitting that this, Savio's final publication, would be pedagogical in orientation. For him, moral considerations were no less pertinent in logic than in philosophy's less abstract fields. The usual student confusion with Venn diagrams led him to develop the new pictorial device presented in the following pages, which he believed was more sensitive to user psychology. It is hard to miss the political overtones in Savio's closing worry that in Venn diagrams "information of real significance may occasionally appear hidden and distorted." The decision by the Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic to publish this piece posthumously is a testimony that logic, no less than other fields of philosophy, can be a tool of free speech and political change--as powerful in its way as the rhetorical brilliance of that young man standing on top of a police car who launched a worldwide movement with the words, "There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, you can't take part.". (shrink)

Recent evidence of intergenerational epigenetic programming of disease risk broadens the scope of public health preventive interventions to future generations, i.e. non existing people. Due to the transmission of epigenetic predispositions, lifestyles such as smoking or unhealthy diet might affect the health of populations across several generations. While public policy for the health of future generations can be justified through impersonal considerations, such as maximizing aggregate well-being, in this article we explore whether there are rights-based obligations supervening on intergenerational epigenetic (...) programming despite the non-identity argument, which challenges this rationale in case of policies that affect the number and identity of future people. We propose that rights based obligations grounded in the interests of non-existing people might fall upon existing people when generations overlap. In particular, if environmental exposure in F0 will affect the health of F2 through epigenetic programming, then F1 might face increased costs to address F2's condition in the future: this might generate obligations upon F0 from various distributive principles, such as the principle of equal opportunity for well being. (shrink)

Crowdfunding is increasingly common in medical research. Some critics are concerned that by adopting crowdfunding, some researchers may sidestep the established systems of review of the social and scientific value of studies, especially mechanisms of expert-based review. I argue firstly that such concerns are based on a misleading picture of how research value is assessed and secondly that crowdfunding may turn out to be an useful complement of extant funding systems. I start with the idea that medical knowledge is a (...) structured and intermediate public good and explain from this perspective that funding systems as a whole, rather than any of their parts ought to be considered devices for the discovery of the social and scientific value of research. If so, we should not be concerned with whether crowdfunding bypasses expert reviews, but with whether it may constitute an improvement of extant funding systems. In the second part, I speculate that crowdfunding may ameliorate, albeit limitedly, some recalcitrant failures of funding systems, such as the sponsorship of research on neglected diseases, and smooth funding adaptations for scientific transitions. If, after trial, such hypotheses turn out to be true, crowdfunding ought to be promoted. (shrink)

In recent times, in Asia and more specifically in South Asia the discourse on ethnic and religious nationalisms that attempt to redefine the identity of locals in an exclusive and adversarial manner has dominated political and mainstream exchanges. This emphasis on stringent and radical nationalism has serious ramifications for inclusive development. This article critically examines the findings of the Inclusive Development Index 2018 and link it with other reports and surveys like the Oxfam survey 2017 to find out the connections (...) between stringent forms of nationalism and development. Besides analyzing briefly the notions of nationalism as played out concretely in the South Asian nations, this article makes an in-depth analysis of the specific case of the right wing ‘Hindutva’ ideology in India. The processes, institutions and structures that lead to various forms of systemic bias and discrimination against the minorities will be identified, and the role of stringent nationalism in reinforcing these biases and thus impeding the project of inclusive development will be scrutinised. Keywords : inclusive development, radical nationalism, Hindutva, minorities, South Asia, inequality, post-colonial. (shrink)

It is well known that in the first edition of Logical Investigations , Husserl defines the research field of phenomenology as a psychological immanence. However, if we closely examine the criteria used for defining the psychological immanence, we find that they imply certain conception of transcendence of the intentional object. This conception of transcendence leads to epistemological problems concerning the relationship between the physical object and the object of perception. After all, it would be correct to say that the physical (...) object is transcendent in the same sense which it is stated that the perceived object is transcendent to the experience of perceiving? This article seeks to show how the transcendental turn of 1906/1907 and the consequent distinction between three concepts of immanence and transcendence in his work Idea of Phenomenology contributed to solving such problems. (shrink)

O objetivo deste trabalho é examinar a crítica ao psicologismo de Edmund Husserl paraavaliar sua posição no que diz respeito à psicologia empírica. Procurarei mostrar, em primeirolugar, que Husserl, em Investigações lógicas, tem como alvo o psicologismo lógico e umadeterminada forma de psicologismo epistemológico. Em segundo lugar, buscarei mostrar quea fundamentação epistemológica da lógica pura, como ciência teórica, implica em uma teoriada subjetividade. Um dos objetivos de Husserl em Investigações lógicas é empregar afenomenologia, entendida como forma peculiar de psicologia descritiva, (...) para elaborar umanova teoria da subjetividade, por meio de uma análise descritiva das vivências envolvidas naobtenção do conhecimento teórico. Depois irei discutir o lugar que a psicologia empírica passaa ocupar depois da crítica ao psicologismo em Investigações lógicas. (shrink)

uBiome offers a gut bacteria sequencing service to consumers to entice data donation. It aims to establish a genomic repository for microbiomics. In 2013, some bloggers worried that uBiome operations had not received any Institutional Review Board ethics approval. uBiome co-founders Richman and Apte replied by effectively arguing that crony research agencies hamper innovation by requiring cumbersome for-fee IRBs to so-called “citizen science” projects. The debate soon ascended from ethics to appropriate institutional design for research and innovation. I reconstruct the (...) ethical issues underpinning the uBiome-IRB debate and situate them in the emerging context of entrepreneurial science relying on crowdsourcing. This paper contributes to the dialogue between social scientists and bioethicists promoted in this volume by offering an analysis of a case study that requires attention to the organizational and economic context and lends itself to collaboration across disciplines. (shrink)

Recent epidemiological reports of associations between socioeconomic status and epigenetic markers that predict vulnerability to diseases are bringing to light substantial biological effects of social inequalities. Here, we start the discussion of the moral consequences of these findings. We firstly highlight their explanatory importance in the context of the research program on the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) and the social determinants of health. In the second section, we review some theories of the moral status of health inequalities. (...) Rather than a complete outline of the debate, we single out those theories that rest on the principle of equality of opportunity and analyze the consequences of DOHaD and epigenetics for these particular conceptions of justice. We argue that DOHaD and epigenetics reshape the conceptual distinction between natural and acquired traits on which these theories rely and might provide important policy tools to tackle unjust distributions of health. (shrink)

A proper understanding of the moral and political significance of migration requires a focus on global inequalities. More specifically, it requires a focus on those global inequalities that affect people’s ability to participate in the production of economic goods and non-economic goods. We call cooperative infrastructures the complex material and immaterial technologies that allow human beings to cooperate in order to generate human goods. By enabling migrants to access high-quality cooperative infrastructures, migration contributes to the diffusion of technical and socio-political (...) innovations. In this way, it positively affects the ability of individuals from poorer countries to participate in the production of human goods, to benefit from such production, and to contribute to human development. Migration can also damage the material and immateri al components of the cooperative infrastructures accessible in both the host and sending countries; these potential downsides of migration should not be ignored, although arguably they can often be neutralized, alleviated, or compensated. (shrink)

Viruses have generally been thought of as infectious agents. New data on mimivirus, however, suggests a reinterpretation of this thought. Earth’s biosphere seems to contain many more viruses than previously thought and they are relevant in the maintenance of ecosystems and biodiversity. Viruses are not considered to be alive because they are not free-living entities and do not have cellular units. Current hypotheses indicate that some viruses may have been the result of genomic reduction of cellular life forms. However, new (...) studies relating to the origins of biological systems suggest that viruses could also have originated during the transition from First to the Last Universal Common Ancestor. Within this setting, life has been established as chemical informational system and could be interpreted as a macrocode of multiple layers. The first entity to acquire these features was the First Universal Common Ancestor that evolved to an intermediate ancestral that could be named T-LUCA and be equated to Woese’s concept of progenotes. T-LUCA may have remained as undifferentiated subsystems with viruses-like structures. The net result is that both cellular life forms and viruses shared protein synthesis apparatuses. In short, virus is a strategy of life reached by two paths: T-LUCAs like entities and the reduction of cellular life forms. (shrink)

Viruses have generally been thought of as infectious agents. New data on mimivirus, however, suggests a reinterpretation of this thought. Earth’s biosphere seems to contain many more viruses than previously thought and they are relevant in the maintenance of ecosystems and biodiversity. Viruses are not considered to be alive because they are not free-living entities and do not have cellular units. Current hypotheses indicate that some viruses may have been the result of genomic reduction of cellular life forms. However, new (...) studies relating to the origins of biological systems suggest that viruses could also have originated during the transition from First to the Last Universal Common Ancestor. Within this setting, life has been established as chemical informational system and could be interpreted as a macrocode of multiple layers. The first entity to acquire these features was the First Universal Common Ancestor that evolved to an intermediate ancestral that could be named T-LUCA and be equated to Woese’s concept of progenotes. T-LUCA may have remained as undifferentiated subsystems with viruses-like structures. The net result is that both cellular life forms and viruses shared protein synthesis apparatuses. In short, virus is a strategy of life reached by two paths: T-LUCAs like entities and the reduction of cellular life forms. (shrink)

Twilight Zone and Philosophy attempts to bring the insights and paradoxes of Rod Serling's project to contemporary audiences through a variety of philosophical perspectives"--Publisher.

O referente trabalho tem por objetivo descrever parte das experiências obtidas mediante a participação na extensão em “Educação e Cultura Afro” desenvolvida pelo Órgão de Educação e Relações Étnicas – ODEERE. Na oportunidade, refletimos sobre as discussões obtidas nos dez módulos do curso e como essas pautas influíram diretamente nas concepções pressupostas acera da cultura afro. Em vista de se perceber o legado africano assumindo metodologias de resistência na contemporaneidade, a formação docente e discente deve procurar reaver e fortalecer de (...) forma diversificada sua identidade e seu território para combater a discriminação racial. Dessa forma, o presente trabalho discorre sobre a importância do curso para alunos, professores e a comunidade em busca de melhor formação e rompimento do status quo étnico. Entretanto, aprendendo a respeitar e valorizar a cultura, o legado africano, a educação étnico-racial, por meio de práxis realmente efetivas em seus respectivos territórios de identidade. Palavras-chave: Educação; Cultura; Afro; Saberes. (shrink)

Migration often causes what I refer to in this paper as ‘anti-immigration backlashes’ in receiving countries. Such reactions have substantial costs in terms of the undermining of national solidarity and the diffusion of political distrust. In short, anti-immigration backlashes can threaten the social and political stability of receiving countries. Do such risks constitute a reason against permissive immigration policies which are otherwise desirable? I argue that a positive answer may depend on a skeptical view based on the alleged constraints that (...) certain political facts - especially facts about human nature - pose on political intervention. This view does not stand conceptual and empirical scrutiny in the case of anti-immigration backlashes, where feasibility comes in degree. Yet focusing on the recalcitrance to change of these facts is practically important when devising action plans. This pragmatic core of the skeptical view yields a gradualist and naturalistic way of thinking about constraints in political theorising about migration, and elsewhere. (shrink)

Este artículo estudia los números de la Revista de Psicoanálisis publicados entre 1946 y 1955 en Argentina. En particular, analiza los artículos escritos por los psicoanalistas argentinos que allí aparecen y las notas e informaciones que se incluyen en las últimas páginas de la revista. Se propone, por un lado, rastrear qué es el psicoanálisis en esos años, pensando este saber como un objeto discursivo, y, por el otro, indagar sobre el modo en que se construye la comunidad discursiva psicoanalítica (...) de la APA. Este recorrido ha evidenciado, por un lado, que el psicoanálisis es entendido, en ese entonces, como una teoría científica y una práctica contigua a la práctica médica, limitado al tratamiento individual. Por el otro, ha identificado que la revista, además de constituir un medio de comunicación privilegiado para la institución, contribuye a la consolidación de la comunidad discursiva psicoanalítica. (shrink)

Are humans a domesticated species? How is this issue related to debates on the roles of human agency in human evolution? This article discusses four views on human domestication: Darwin’s view; the view of those who link human domestication to anthropogenic niche construction and, more specifically, to sedentism; the view of those who link human domestication to selection against aggression and the domestication syndrome; and a novel view according to which human domestication can be conceived of in terms of a (...) process of political selection. The article examines and compares these views to illustrate how discussions of human domestication can contribute to debates about how, and to what extent, human agency has affected human evolution. (shrink)

Resumo Apresentaremos neste artigo uma breve discussão acerca das influências do comunitarismo cristão na vida social e política brasileira. Trata-se de um ensaio exploratório. O objetivo é uma revisão bibliográfica sobre o tema. A partir daquilo que foi possível selecionar, tentamos elaborar algumas ideias, no sentido de apresentar, mesmo que sucintamente, tópicos que podem indicar a importância do comunitarismo cristão, tradição forte e influente não somente nas décadas de 1960 e 1970, mas que, sobretudo no atual contexto político, ainda desempenha (...) um papel central na sociedade brasileira. Recorte especial é a análise sobre as influências do comunitarismo nas ações da Igreja Católica, no Brasil. Assim, a Teologia da Libertação e as Comunidades Eclesiais de Base (CEBs) derivariam do pensamento comunitarista. Por fim, o comunitarismo cristão é apresentado como uma reação ao neoliberalismo, por priorizar "o valor inelutável da dignidade e da transcendência humana e uma resistência insuperável a deixar engolfar o destino humano em uma lógica mercantil, de individualismo possessivo. Essa tradição, em grande medida identificada com as posições hoje encarnadas pela CNBB, é responsável por vastas experiências de solidariedade entre os pobres e oprimidos brasileiros". Palavras-chave: Comunitarismo cristão; Igreja Católica; Ação social; Política; Movimentos sociais.This article discusses briefly the influences of Christian Communitarianism on Brazilian social and political life. It is an exploratory essay aimed at a bibliographical review of the subject. Based on what was possible to select, we tried to elaborate some ideas to present topics that may indicate the importance of Christian Communitarianism, a strong and influent tradition, not only in the 1960s and 1970s, but especially in the current political context, still playing a central role in Brazilian society. A special point is the analysis of the influences of Communitarianism on actions of the Catholic Church in Brazil. Thus, the Theology of Liberation and the Base Ecclesial Communities (BECs) could have derived from the communitarian thought. Finally, Christian Communitarianism is presented as a reaction against neoliberalism, as it gives priority to "the inestimable value of human dignity and transcendence and an insuperable resistance to let human destiny be engulfed by a mercantile logic of possessive individualism. This tradition, largely identified with the positions assumed by CNBB, is responsible for vast experiences of solidarity between the Brazilian poor and oppressed". Key words: Christian Communitarianism; Catholic Church; Social action; Politics; Social movements. (shrink)

Um dos principais problemas sociais da atualidade é o assustador crescimento de várias modalidades de crimes violentos em várias cidades brasileiras. O retrato atual da violência no Brasil pode ser assim exposto: crescimento da delinqüência urbana, com espantoso aumento dos homicídios em torno do tráfico de drogas nas grandes cidades; consolidação da criminalidade organizada, através de redes de tráfico internacional, tráfico de órgãos e seres humanos, máfias internacionais de contrabando e pirataria; aumento das violações de direitos humanos, comprometendo a ordem (...) social e política e, no campo, a explosão de conflitos motivados pela estrutura agrária concentradora e historicamente violenta. Como a religião, enquanto instrumento de coesão social, pode contribuir para a reversão dessa perversa onda de criminalidade e violência? É o que pretendemos apresentar. Palavras-chave: Religião; Violência urbana; Criminalidade; Coesão social; Doutrina Social da Igreja; Cultura da paz. ABSTRACT One of the main current social problems is the appalling growth of various kinds of violent crime in many Brazilian cities. The current portrait of violence in Brazil can be thus designed: the growth of urban delinquency, with a remarkable increase in the number of murders connected to drug traffic in big cities; the consolidation of organised crime, through nets of international traffic, organs and human beings’ traffic, international smuggling and piracy mafias; an increase in the violation of human rights, jeopardising social and political order; and, in the rural area, the explosion of conflicts motivated by an agrarian structure of concentration and historical violence. How can religion, as an instrument of social cohesion, contribute to revert that hideous wave of criminality and violence? This is our scope. Key words: Religion; Urban violence; Criminality; Social cohesion; Social doctrine of the Church; Culture of peace. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that there is a duty to inform consumers about the environmental impact of foods, and discuss what this duty entails and to whom it falls. We analyze previous proposals that justify ethical traceability with arguments from sustainability and the respect for the autonomy of consumers, showing that they cannot ground a duty to inform. We argue instead that the duty rests on the right of consumers not to be harmed, insofar as consumers have an interest (...) in the morality of their own agency that is frustrated if they are not informed about the environmental impact of the production and transport of what they consume. Our argument detaches the regulation of labeling from substantive theories of environmental ethics or perfectionist conceptions of citizens’ responsibility, thus defending a case for labeling that is compelling also for those who take the role of the state to be limited to the prevention of harm. (shrink)

This article examines the contention, frequently defended by contemporary African philosophers, that philosophy is universal. Examples of the thesis are cited; various interpretations of its meaning are analyzed; and arguments against it by other African philosophers are presented. The article argues that the universalist thesis, however interpreted, contributes nothing to African philosophy and should be abandoned.

According to some evolutionary theorists human prosocial dispositions emerged in a context of inter-group competition and violence that made our psychology parochially prosocial, ie. cooperative towards in-groups and competitive towards strangers. This evolutionary hypothesis is sometimes employed in bioethical debates to argue that human nature and contemporary environments, and especially large-scale societies, are mismatched. In this article we caution against the use of mismatch theories in moral philosophy in general and discuss empirical evidence that puts into question mismatch theories based (...) on parochial prosociality. Evolutionary mismatch theories play at best a rhetorical role in these moral debates and may misrepresent the status of relevant evolutionary research. We finally recommend that moral philosophers interested in the evolutionary literature also engage with dispositions such as xenophilia and social tolerance to counterbalance the focus on psychological mismatches adopted so far. (shrink)

This edited volume draws upon Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to examine the conscious and unconscious forces underlying race as a social formation, conceptualizing race, racial identity, and racism in ways that go beyond traditional modes of psychoanalytic thought Featuring contributions from Lacanian scholars from diverse geographical and disciplinary contexts, chapters span a wide breadth of topics including white nationalism and contemporary debates over confederate monuments; emergent theories of race rooted in Afropessimism and postcolonialism; Latinx and other racialized groups; apartheid and American (...) slavery; and applications of Lacan's concepts of the lamella, drive and sexuation to processes of racialization. The collection both reorients readers' understandings of race through its deployment of Lacanian theory and redefines the Lacanian subject through its theorizing of subjectivity in relation to race, racism and racial identification. Lacan and Race will be a definitive text for psychoanalytic theorists and contemporary scholars of race and appeal to readers across the fields of psychology, cultural studies, humanities, politics, and sociology. (shrink)

Esse artigo, instigado sobretudo pelas interpretações de Merleau-Ponty sobre Sócrates e Montaigne e pelo artigo Biografia e autobiografia: tangências e secâncias de Antonio Valverde, discute a relação entre vida e obra, considerando duas perspectivas: a importância da obra para a permanência – memória – de uma existência individual; o alcance e a validade filosófica da estratégia metodológica de recorrer ao exame de biografias e autobiografias para interpretar uma determinada obra.

The reflections on the paint across the whole itinerary of the work of Merleau-Ponty and seem to indicate the reasons for the movement and the unity of his thought, especially when we seek to understand the scope of perception as a significant pre-reflective event. The experience of perception is radicalized on painting that express a "primordial level" - "leads to their last power is a delusion that same vision" - with all the characters that phenomenology sought to achieve in describing (...) the different forms of perceptive experience, is through the description of pre-reflective experience of the body itself or, finally, the conception of perceptual faith as a "donation in flesh." The painting holds the most genuine intention of a philosophy dedicated to the description of the pre-reflective, and asks the witness to be. The painter, as indicated by the analysis of Cezanne, the original remains in the soil, without the need for justification or foundation, free of the obligation to announce a thesis or a convention on the world, expressed the significance of the crudest sense: what makes the visible visible. (shrink)

Esse trabalho discute a noção de desejo a partir da obra de Merleau-Ponty. Sustenta a ideia de que para a fenomenologia merleau-pontyana o desejo remonta a três pontos fundamentais: a sua expressão inicial se dá na forma da intencionalidade operante, vivida na experiência do corpo próprio, como está descrita no prefácio da Fenomenologia da Percepção; o desejo, nesse caso, não pode ser compreendido como falta, ou carência de mundo, mas como transbordamento; finalmente, o desejo tem uma significação ontológica na medida (...) em que remonta à condição intramundana, intercorpórea. (shrink)