May, 2021 | FiloLab UGR

12May 2021 by FiloLab No Comments

KICK OFF – TTV GUIDE (TORQUE TENO VIRUS BASED IMMUNE MONITORING)

Activities

David Rodríguez-Arias, researcher at FiloLab, is taking part in the TTV GUIDE project (Torque Teno Virus Immune Monitoring), an initiative aimed at creating an innovative tool to quantify the immune system activity in kidney transplant recipients: the Torque Teno Virus (TTV). The research group consists of a consortium of kidney transplant practitioners, clinical virologists, clinical trial and project managers, ethicists and health industry professionals financed by the European Union. This project aims to improve kidney transplant effectiveness, individually adjusting medication that transplanted individuals receive to avoid two severe problems: infection (caused by over-immunosuppression) and transplant rejection (caused by a lack of immunosuppressive medication). It is a five-year-long project which has been funded by Horizon 2020. It is estimated that it has the potential to reduce the risk of transplant rejection…

11May 2021 by FiloLab No Comments

Enhancing Virtue without Becoming Ned Flanders?

Publications

Jon Rueda, researcher at FiloLab, has recently published an Open Peer Commentary entitled ‘Enhancing Virtue without Becoming Ned Flanders?’, in the journal AJOB Neuroscience. This comment criticises the target article “Virtue Theory for Moral Enhancement” by Joao Fabiano. According to the author, focusing moral enhancement on moral traits such as altruism can lead to long-term problematic consequences. In particular, individuals whose altruistic capacities have been enhanced could be more easily exploited by non-cooperative individuals. To overcome this problem, Fabiano stated that a balanced moral enhancement would be necessary to enable individuals to have the capabilities to carry out punitive behaviours that penalise free-riders’ behaviour. However, Jon Rueda argues that seeing morally enhanced people as easy to deceive is problematic and that free-riders’ behaviour should be limited by institutional design rather…

07May 2021 by FiloLab No Comments

“Colloque Jean-Claude Passeron en Perspective: José Luis Moreno Pestaña’s intervention”

Talks

José Luis Moreno Pestaña, researcher at FiloLab, spoke at the Colloque Jean Claude Passeron en Perspective, organised by the Collège International de Philosophie (CIPh) of Paris on 12 and 13 February 2021. ‘Jean-Claude Passeron’s work seems to have been received ambivalently: he is admired for his work in sociology of education, associated with Bourdieu, but less known for his later studies on art or popular culture; known as a defender of the epistemological specificity of social sciences, but little read and discussed on this conceptual ground, particularly by philosophers; and finally well-known in France and the Latin world, but not necessarily well identified in the English-speaking world. Is this division the classic fate of a long work? The aim of this conference is precisely to reopen this work within its…

07May 2021 by FiloLab No Comments

«Vulnerabilidad humana, pandemia y Antropoceno: una mirada interseccional»

COVID-19, Conferences

Ester Massó Guijarro, researcher at Filolab, gave the opening speech ‘Vulnerabilidad humana, pandemia y Antropoceno: una mirada interseccional’ (Human vulnerability, pandemic and Anthropocene: an intersectional perspective), as part of the “COVID y Antropología” (COVID and Anthropology) blended conference that took place on 6 May 2021 at the Complutense University of Madrid. In her speech, Ester Massó addressed some holistic ethical and political reflections following Coronavirus, a broad and complex topic, from an intersectional perspective of the comprehension of human vulnerability as an existential human issue. She addressed several topics: from the ‘decolonisation2 of COVID-19 to the debates on the eco-sociological implications of quarantine (especially on the most vulnerable groups: minors, pregnant women, low-income people...) or the diversity of socio-political models of pandemic management, which are opposed to each other in…

05May 2021 by FiloLab No Comments

The political foundations of knowledge (II) Lukács revisited

Publications

José Luis Moreno Pestaña (FiloLab) continues the discussion on Fernando Broncano's work ‘Conocimiento expropiado. Espistemología política en una democracia radical” (“Expropriated knowledge. Political epistemology in a radical democracy”) and highlights its importance to understand how our points of view shape our own analyses of reality. I addresses how knowledge in dependent on political relations. The text was originally published in El Rumor de las Multitudes, a blog on Political Philosophy belonging to the Spanish newspaper “El Salto Diario”. Following on from the dialogue I have established with Fernando Broncano and his latest work, ‘Conocimiento expropiado. Espistemología política en una democracia radical’, I now address an issue of interest to both philosophy and political practice. Fernando Broncano embraces a tradition that allows us to link epistemology with social experience, which leads…

03May 2021 by FiloLab No Comments

THE POLITICAL FOUNDATIONS OF KNOWLEDGE (I) ABOUT DISCIPLINES AND TRADITIONS

Publications

José Luis Moreno Pestaña (FiloLab) discusses Fernando Broncano's work “Conocimiento expropiado. Espistemología política en una democracia radical” (“Expropriated knowledge. Political epistemology in a radical democracy”) and highlights its importance to understand how our points of view shape our own analyses of reality. I addresses how knowledge in dependent on political relations. The text was originally published in El Rumor de las Multitudes, a blog on Political Philosophy belonging to the Spanish newspaper “El Salto Diario”. Fernando Broncano’s latest work, Conocimiento expropiado. Epistemología política en una democracia radical (Akal, 2020), was created within a work program that goes beyond the frontiers of the field of philosophy. It is a book of encyclopaedic scope, whose discussion will require different approaches and competences. Here, I will focus on two main aspects. Firstly, I…

03May 2021 by FiloLab No Comments

“ABSOLUTELY RIGHT AND RELATIVELY GOOD: Consequentialists See Bioethical Disagreement in a Relativist Light”

Publications

Hugo Viciana, David Rodríguez-Arias (FiloLab) and Ivar Hannikainen (FiloLab) have recently published the article Absolutely Right and Relatively Good: in the magazine AJOB Empirical Bioethics.CONSEQUENTIALISTS SEE BIOETHICAL DISAGREEMENT IN A RELATIVIST LIGHT(DOI: 10.1080/ 23294515.2021. 23294515.2021). Here is the abstract, which addresses disagreements in bioethics: The full article and study materials can be accessed below: “Bioethical disagreements are very common. We see this daily in debates on euthanasia, abortion, surrogacy or vaccine reluctance, where seemingly reasonable people -who may even enjoy a certain reputation and credibility- disagree with each other. How can we understand those disagreements? When chemistry experts disagree on the composition of a substance, or when two mathematicians obtain different results for an equation, we generally assume that at least one of them must be wrong. Do we feel…