Winners and Losers of the Greek Crisis as a Result of a Double Fragmentation and Exclusion: A Discourse Analysis of Greek Civil Society

This article aims to explore, through the civil society’s opinion, the polarisation between ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ and the group of the ‘new excluded’, or ‘new poor’, that has emerged as a result of the European economic crisis and the social transformations that followed in the Greek society. Based on the Theory of Justice introduced by John Rawls (1971), and using the approach of Critical Discourse Analysis, this study focuses on the discourse analysis of the perception of 97 representatives of local and national NGOs, both formal and informal. The main results focus on different self and others’ presentations, especially during the economic crisis, and on the creation of an unbalanced, fragmented and exclusion-cantered society. However, the definition of rich and poor appears ambiguous through the analysis of various linguistic strategies of Greek NGOs revealing a hidden face of the societ

Cartesian Dualism and the Intermediate State: A Reply to Turner Jr

In this paper, I propose to analyse two objections raised by Turner Jr in his paper “On Two Reasons Christian Theologians Should Reject The Intermediate State” in order to show that the intermediate state is an incoherent theory. As we shall see, the two untoward consequences that he mentions do not imply a metaphysical or logical contradiction. Consequently, I shall defend an Intermediate State and I shall propose briefly one metaphysical conception of the human being able to reply to Turner Jr’s objections

Negation, expressivism, and intentionality

Many think that expressivists have a special problem with negation. I disagree. For if there is a problem with negation, I argue, it is a problem shared by those who accept some plausible claims about the nature of intentionality. Whether there is any special problem for expressivists turns, I will argue, on whether facts about what truth-conditions beliefs have can explain facts about basic inferential relations among those beliefs. And I will suggest that the answer to this last question is, on most plausible attempts at solving the problem of intentionality, ‘no’

Conceptual evaluation: epistemic

On a view implicitly endorsed by many, a concept is epistemically better than another if and because it does a better job at ‘carving at the joints', or if the property corresponding to it is ‘more natural' than the one corresponding to another. This chapter offers an argument against this seemingly plausible thought, starting from three key observations about the way we use and evaluate concepts from en epistemic perspective: that we look for concepts that play a role in explanations of things that cry out for explanation; that we evaluate not only ‘empirical' concepts, but also mathematical and perhaps moral concepts from an epistemic perspective; and that there is much more complexity to the concept/property relation than the natural thought seems to presuppose. These observations, it is argued, rule out giving a theory of conceptual evaluation that is a corollary of a metaphysical ranking of the relevant properties. conceptual ethics, explanation, naturalness, epistemic value, concept/property, semantic internalis

God's Nature and Attributes

In Western theism, different attributes have classically been ascribed to God, such as omnipotence, omniscience, wisdom, goodness, freedom and so on. But these ascriptions have also raised many conceptual difficulties: are these attributes internally coherent? Are they really compossible? Are they compatible with what we know about the world (e.g. the existence of evil, human freedom, the laws of nature etc.). These traditional questions are part of the inquiry on God’s nature as it is carried out in contemporary philosophy of religion. Another part of this inquiry is constituted by theological and philosophical questions raised by more precise or particular religious conceptions of God – e.g. the doctrine of Trinity in Christianity, or other specific credentials about the right way to understand God’s perfection and absolute transcendence in Judaism, Christianity or Islam. In this issue, we propose to follow these two directions of the inquiry about God’s nature and attributes through historical and systematic studies, in the perspective of contemporary philosophy of religion and analytical theology. While the three papers specifically dedicated to the problem of the Trinity pertain mainly to the second part of the examination (the conceptual analysis of specific credentials and theological doctrines), the three others offer new perspectives and arguments on traditional questions about God, like the problem of evil, perfect goodness, or the problem of divine perfection and God’s freedom

Efectos de la condición física y la adiposidad sobre indicadores de salud cardiovascular en niños y adolescentes: estudio longitudinal up&down

Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) are the leading cause of global mortality. Normally, cardiovascular alterations become visible after the fifth decade of life, but increasing evidence suggest that their origin may occur in early ages. Thus, the identification of children and adolescents at higher risk is of vital importance for the prevention of CVD. In this sense, the definition of young people at risk of CVD is normally based on the levels of several factors, including waist circumference, triglycerides, highdensity lipoprotein-cholesterol, blood pressure (BP), and glucose levels, among others. Nonetheless, the identification of those at risk using these markers would entail a high economic cost, in addition to subjecting young people to invasive measures. Physical fitness, specifically cardiorespiratory (CRF) and muscular fitness (MF), and fatness are considered key elements for the cardiovascular risk identification, given their close association with the previously mentioned markers. Both, fitness and fatness provide a quicker and relatively simple way to identify those at risk of future CVD. However, although their association with CVD risk factors has been previously examined, their independent and combined effect on CVD risk factors remain to be fully determined. More information is needed since fitness and fatness may lay in the same causal chain leading to future CVD. Thus, the main aim of the present International Doctoral Thesis was to study the independent and combined effects of different components of physical fitness and fatness on CVD risk factors levels, cross-sectionally and longitudinally (two-year follow-up), in a sample of Spanish children and adolescents. The results of the eight studies included indicate that body mass index (BMI) is an independent predictor of CVD risk factors, and a mediator in the association of CRF (Study I) and MF (Study II) with clustered CVD risk factors. Different fitness cut-off points associated with reduced CVD risk two-years later have been identified for CRF in children (Study III) and for upper- and lowerbody MF in children and adolescents (Study IV). A bidirectional longitudinal association was observed between CRF and different fatness indicators in children and adolescents, but the associations between CRF as exposure and fatness weakened when fatness at baseline was considered (Study V). The bidirectional associations between CRF (Study VI) and MF (Study VII) with neck circumference (NC) were only observed cross-sectionally. Longitudinally, only NC showed an independent association with CRF and MF. Furthermore, BP measures seem to be longitudinally affected to a higher extent by NC than by CRF (Study VI) and MF (Study VII). Finally, waist circumference, but neither CRF nor MF, is independently associated with future BP and its changes over two years (Study VIII). The results from the present thesis enhance our knowledge on the combined and independent effects of fitness and fatness on CVD risk factors. In addition, it provides fitness cut-off points for the identification of those children and adolescents at a higher risk of future CVD

Study of the optimization of a miniaturized gas sensor for odor monitoring

Climate change and the crisis of non-renewable natural resources have fostered a change in people's mentality, pushing them towards a future of shared mobility. This study aims to offer a solution to one of the main drawbacks of this type of mobility, the discomfort generated by malodors and poor air quality in shared-use vehicles. To that end, the use of an odor monitoring module is proposed which, through gas sensors, allows to improve the air quality inside vehicles after its use. In this thesis we find a study of the technology for odor tracking, the design and manufacture of a prototype for the module and its subsequent implementation in vehicles. The study concludes with pilot tests on different vehicles which contribute to the parameterization of the system, laying the foundations for projects with real application

Age-related variability in buccal dental microwear in Middle and Upper Pleistocene human populations.

Infants are thought to present a different buccal microwear pattern than adults and these, therefore, are generally analyzed separately. However, El-Zaatari & Hublin [2009] showed that occlusal texture in Neandertal and modern human juvenile populations did not differ from their elders. The microwear patterns of a sample of 193 teeth, corresponding to 61 individuals of Homo heidelbergensis, H. neanderthalensis and anatomically modern humans (AMH), were analyzed revealing that AMH infants up to 14 years old differ from older individuals in having fewer scratch densities, whereas the Neandertals have a much more variable microwear pattern. Age-at-death and dental age since emergence showed similar though somewhat diverging results, especially in the infant and subadult samples. Differences observed between the Neandertals and modern humans could be reflecting differential wearing patterns or distinct enamel structure and resistance to hard food items consumption. Interpopulation differences in striation densities were not apparent in either subadult or adult individuals, only adult Neandertals (26-45 yrs. old) showed fewer striations than the younger age groups. The AMH sample revealed a gradual cumulative pattern of striation density with age, suggestive of a non-abrupt change in diet