Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

This article seeks to account for the Augustinian responses to the meaning of existence and salvation from his moral perspective. Philosophy, since remote antiquity, but especially since late antiquity, explicitly proposes the problem of existence, that is to resolve what is the hold of the human being. Therefore, in the first place, this article studies the role of philosophy (and reason) in the search for the meaning of existence; in a second moment, and visualizing that philosophy points to transcendence (to unity, in neoplatonic terms), the work seeks to account the moral path that man requires to reach salvation, that is, from a philosophical perspective that it does not detract from the theological position, which is not explicitly assumed in this document. Saint Augustine´s response, which has become classic, deserves to be recovered and taken up again, even when his debate takes place within the framework of the Neoplatonism of his time. Its echoes, however, continue to resonate.

The main objective of this research is to identify and analyze the themes of Mexican cinema awarded at nodal international festivals between 2000 and 2020. The study uses a mixed methodology that combines a longitudinal search for the creation of a historical database on award-winning Mexican films at international festivals. For two decades. The quantitative methodology is used to know the number of internationally awarded Mexican films, as well as their evolution over time and their themes during the decades from 2000 to 2020, through the construction of a database based on reports and databases, specialized data. The theoretical-methodological analysis of cinematographic discourses is carried out based on the concepts of violence developed by Galtung, Foucault, Arendt, Butler, Magnani, Han, as well as from Williams’s concept of structure of feeling. The study reveals that 81% of the awards received by Mexican cinematography at international festivals deal with a type of structural, direct or cultural violence, expressed through state violence, poverty and inequality, gender violence, domestic violence and the war on drugs. The Mexican cinema that has participated during the last two decades in nodal international festivals, has experienced a progressive tendency to deal with issues related to violence in Mexico and it is foreseeable that this trend will continue.

At the end of 1939, and the beginning of World War II, the French feminist activist and International Labor Office (BIT) officer, Marguerite Thibert (1886-1982), undertook a first research trip to Mexico, taking advantage of her participation in the American Labor Conference in Havana (November 1939). Two years later she would return, hired by the Mexican government to carry out research focused on the informal work of minors and their living conditions. Thibert’s highly specialized and little-known work would allow this high-ranking official and referent in the ILO for the rights of women and minors to gain a more thorough knowledge of the process of social institutionalization that was taking place in the country through the new Secretariat of Labor and Social Welfare created by Ignacio García Téllez, the main architect of the Mexican Social Security Institute (1943). Thibert would have the opportunity to propose important modifications to this project before leaving Mexico in 1942.

People with mental illness have traditionally been considered vulnerable populations. They are frequently subjected to discrimination, stigma, marginalization from social projects, mistreatment and physical, psychological and sexual abuse. The dominant biological medical model of medicine states that this vulnerability is biological, excluding social elements from both medical practice and training. In this article, we propose vulnerability as the effect of epistemic injustice, rather than biological disadvantage. To this end, we will first critique the characterization of mental illnesses only as biological diseases, on the one hand, and the application of under-inclusive and over-medicalized care measures, on the other. Secondly, we will take the concept of “epistemic injustice” as central to the generation of such vulnerability in these populations. This concept proposes a situation in which a subject is structurally excluded from the generation and interpretation of knowledge by his or her society, as is the case of people with mental illnesses, condemned precisely to be excluded from the generation and interpretation of valuable knowledge for the development of a social project in which they can participate. Finally, we will explore some possible solutions to such epistemic injustices, as well as their effects on the vulnerability of those who suffer from such conditions.

The use of metaphors is common when talking about health and illness. Being sick does not refer only to a dysfunctional state of the human body, but also to a set of individual and collective experiences that transcend biomedical aspects, in which language acquires particular importance. Susan Sontag pointed out that metaphors applied to diseases such as cancer ended up affecting the health of the patient, so she insisted on eliminating metaphorical elements from the language of disease. The article intends to examine from Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutics key aspects of the metaphor that would allow a sick person to face the challenge of a serious illness. The experience of the disease causes the continuity and internal coherence of the individual to be questioned, causing a disruption of the person's identity. The resort to the construction of narratives about the disease offers the person suffering from a serious illness a new context that encompasses both the event of the disease and the other events of life, giving them meaning and offering the possibility of configuring (or reconfiguring) the subverted identity. The transfiguring action of the fiction is achieved with the use of metaphors that allow the redescription of a world in which the sick person projects their most authentic possibilities. Finally, through two literary testimonies from women's literature, the positive role that metaphors can play in the discourse on the disease is exemplified.

In this article, I intend to think about vulnerability through the lens of shame in the clinical encounter. I want to suggest that shame is a kind of vulnerability that is revealed through the body’s visibility and that this awareness entails the development of strategies diminishing the body’s visibility. To account for this form of vulnerability –of which I become aware through experience and that cannot be reduced to passivity–, I will first discuss the ontological and phenomenological perspectives on vulnerability. Thus, I will start with the remarks made by Judith Butler on bodily vulnerability and the descriptions that have been made from Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology on the limits of the body’s capacity. I will do this to retake each perspective’s strong points, namely, Butler’s remarks raise the question of how we assume vulnerability, whereas phenomenology gives a face to these descriptions by insisting upon its character of a lived experience. Based on this, I will second argue that a phenomenology of shame (particularly when focused on the clinical encounter) makes it plain that vulnerability is an experience I live, and that it makes me behave in some ways as to avoid the exposure to which my own body’s visibility subjects me.

The so-called social model of disability has triggered a paradigm shift regarding our understanding of what a body is and how we attribute capacities to it. However, its conception of disability as a relationship between subject and environment has not been properly clarified, remaining ambiguous and lacking in content. Drawing on the work of Judith Butler and her reappropriation of derridean citationality, I argue that the idea of capacity expressed as the subject’s relationship to the environment discloses a citational structure, that is, it reveals that capacity is sustained by recourse to a pre-existing environment that enables it. The article begins by outlining the main features of both the social and medical models, pointing out their advantages and limitations. It then retrieves the relationship between subject and environment as a key element of capable action and elaborates on it through the concept of citationality, providing multiple examples. Finally, it explicitly dissociates itself from the social model by criticizing the idea that every disability is based on a personal limitation. This last section also allows the article to further explore the key concepts of 'norm' and 'citation' using the example of communication.

Giving birth encompasses a spectrum of potentialities: it can range from a deeply traumatic experience to an empowering experience that increases the birthing person's confidence in their abilities and in their environment. The element we analyze here to understand these potentialities is the specific vulnerability of childbirth. We argue that the vulnerability of the birthing process involves a radical openness and codependency that exposes us to harm, but also enables the creation of unique bonds with one's own body and with others. We explore pain and uncontrollability as central features of the childbirth experience and propose a re-signified notion of control as key to making childbirth a positive and even empowering experience. We understand this empowerment from the coordinates of relational autonomy, since it would only be possible to achieve it if, after opening ourselves to the world and to others, we find the necessary support, trust, and care.

This article presents an analysis of physicians’ and patients’ identities drawing on Lindemann’s theory about the socio-narrative construction of identities. The main thesis is that patients’ identity is constructed as a counterpart to doctorhood. This refers to the professional identity of physicians, constituted by master narratives that represent these professionals as outstanding individuals, capable of performing heroic or even supernatural actions, sometimes even comparing them to gods and superheroes, which ultimately dehumanizes them. I use the notion of symbolic couple that Serret has proposed to analyze gender identities to argue that, in the doctor-patient binomial, the identity of the former is the masculinized central category and that of the latter is the feminized limit category, which is defined as the negation of doctorhood. The argument is illustrated with empirical data collected through ethnographic research. The article concludes that dehumanization in medicine is not merely the result of the subhuman characterizations that doctors make of patients, but rather refers to a relational phenomenon that operates under a patriarchal logic in which the dehumanization of patients appears as a counterpart to the dehumanization of doctors.

The paper outlines a phenomenological description of the meaning and moral significance of vulnerability. Such a description begins with a negative characterization in accordance with the contributions to the phenomenology of the body found in the works of Edmund Husserl and Ludwig Landgrebe, to advance at a later stage to the phenomenological characterization of the notion of the individuation of harm in relation to what Heidegger calls “the harmful” in his description of the affective disposition of fear. The exposure to harm that reveals the anticipatory understanding of fear in relation to the harmful, not explicitly thematized by Heidegger, is what we refer to here, in a broad sense as vulnerability. In the second moment I will present a positive characterization of vulnerability in relation to two levels of the formation of axiological meaningfulness. As we shall see, vulnerability, including bodily vulnerability, points to an understanding of exposure to being wounded as a guideline to follow in the reconstruction of axiological meaning revealed through affective life, in accordance with Husserl's programmatic indications. In this sense, it is necessary to refer more specifically to the place of trust, and its essential relationship with vulnerability, in the formation of the meaning of values, in particular, of moral value.