IntroductionDuring the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare workers in Italy have been exposed to an unprecedented pressure and traumatic events. However, no direct comparison with the general population is available so far. The aim of this study is to detail mental health outcomes in healthcare workers compared to the general population.Methods24050 respondents completed an on-line questionnaire during the contagion peak, 21342 general population, 1295 second-line healthcare workers, and 1411 front-line healthcare workers. Depressive, anxious, post-traumatic symptoms and insomnia were assessed. Specific COVID-19 related (...) potential risk factors were also considered in healthcare workers.ResultsDepressive symptoms were more frequent in the general population and front-line healthcare workers compared to the second-line healthcare workers groups. Anxiety symptoms showed a prevalence of 21.25% in the general population, 18.05% for second-line healthcare workers, and 20.55% for front-line healthcare workers. Insomnia showed a prevalence of 7.82, 6.58, and 9.92% for the general population, second-line healthcare workers, and front-line healthcare workers, respectively. Compared to the general population, front-line healthcare workers had higher odds of endorsing total trauma-related symptoms. Both second-line healthcare workers and front-line healthcare workers had higher odds of endorsing core post-traumatic symptoms compared to the general population, while second-line healthcare workers had lower odds of endorsing negative affect and dissociative symptoms. Higher total traumatic symptom score was associated with being a front-line healthcare worker, having a colleague infected, hospitalized, or deceased, being a nurse, female gender, and younger age.ConclusionThis study suggests a significant psychological impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Italian general population and healthcare workers. Front-line healthcare workers represent a specific at-risk population for post-traumatic symptoms. These findings underline the importance of monitoring and intervention strategies. (shrink)

We defend, from a contractarian perspective, that the fair price of an insurance policy is the amount that the contracting parties agree when they are both equally uncertain about the insured event. Drawing on the approach developed by R. Sugden in _The Community of Advantage_, we answer two standard objections raised against contractarianism in the actuarial sciences: (1) people are not wise enough to assess their actuarial risks; (2) they are not rational enough to decide which insurance policy suits them (...) better. We show under which circumstances people can make fair actuarial agreements, without presupposing any objective risk or rationality benchmarks. (shrink)

Summary Robert Boyle did not subordinate chemistry to mechanical philosophy. He was in fact reluctant to explain chemical phenomena by having recourse to the mechanical properties of particles. For him chemistry provided a primary way of penetrating into nature. In his chemical works he employed corpuscles endowed with chemical properties as his explanans. Boyle's chemistry was corpuscular, rather than mechanical. As Boyle's views of seminal principles show, his corpuscular philosophy cannot be described as a purely mechanical theory of matter. Boyle's (...) classification of corpuscles allowed him to connect his corpuscular views of matter with chemistry. Boyle did not rule out the possibility of a classification of chemical substances based on their properties: his aim was to reform the received classification. (shrink)

The paper discusses the possible implications of the relational framework of Pure Shape Dynamics for the metaphysics of time. The starting point of the analysis is an interpretation of shapes in ontic structural realist terms, which gives rise to the notion of self-subsisting structure. The relational version of a Newtonian-particle toy model is introduced and discussed as a concrete example.

Although virtues have gained a firm presence in the theory and practice of corporate management, humility is not ranked as one the chief virtues in the business world. In spite of this, it is an important virtue, contributing to the manager’s moral and professional quality and the development of the company’s human team. This paper explains the basic traits of humility in general and how they manifest in the manager’s life and profession, and shows, within the ethics of virtues, that (...) it is not just a personal desideratum but a fundamental quality of a good manager and good management. (shrink)

All of the attempts to date to find a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for life, in order to provide an essential definition of life, have failed. We only have at our disposal series of lists that contain diverse characteristics usually found in living beings. Some authors have drawn from this fact the conclusion that life is not a natural kind. It will be argued here that this conclusion is too hasty and that if life is understood as a (...) natural kind in the non-essentialist sense of a homeostatic property cluster, it is easy to see why the attempts to find a unique and essentialist definition of life have failed. Understanding life in this way would imply that the pretension to find such a type of definition should be abandoned. (shrink)

The paper shows how the Bohmian approach to quantum physics can be applied to develop a clear and coherent ontology of non-perturbative quantum gravity. We suggest retaining discrete objects as the primitive ontology also when it comes to a quantum theory of space-time and therefore focus on loop quantum gravity. We conceive atoms of space, represented in terms of nodes linked by edges in a graph, as the primitive ontology of the theory and show how a non-local law in which (...) a universal and stationary wave-function figures can provide an order of configurations of such atoms of space such that the classical space-time of general relativity is approximated. Although there is as yet no fully worked out physical theory of quantum gravity, we regard the Bohmian approach as setting up a standard that proposals for a serious ontology in this field should meet and as opening up a route for fruitful physical and mathematical investigations. (shrink)

Often presented as a new form of materialism, theories of media have been repeatedly fascinated by the idea of dematerialization—more precisely, by a vision of the history of technical media as a process teleologically oriented toward a future characterized by the overcoming of the weight, the opaqueness, and the resistance of materiality and by the advent of new, pervasive forms of instantaneous communication. Light, be it natural or artificial, has often played a key role in this historical narrative. With its (...) diffused presence, limitless plasticity, ultimate speed, ambiguous status between infinitely small particles and electromagnetic waves, and crucial role in the transmission of images and signals, light has often raised the question of the materiality of media itself, pointing to the possibility of immediacy—of an immediate, instantaneous, immaterial transmission. In this article I analyze the presence of this idea of dematerialization as the end point of media history in the writings of László Moholy-Nagy and Marshall McLuhan, whose thinking about media is centered on the assumption that light is the most fundamental medium, one that leads the entire range of technical media to gradually dematerialize and merge within the environment or even dissolve into the atmosphere. (shrink)

In this article we aim to distinguish between the transhuman and posthuman condition, according to their anthropological, ontological, and ethical natures. We will show that the current historical moment can be considered the beginning of a transhuman civilisation, given that the characteristics of the transhuman are already present in today’s human being. We will show that a series of decisive limitations for belonging to the human condition are in the process of being transcended due to acquisition of attributes of divinity (...) that human beings do not currently possess: omnipotence, omnipresence , ex nihilo creation – starting from the divine creative ideation – and immortality. Humans are increasingly taking on the attributes of divinity in the process of human enhancements. We will discuss the ways in which technology allows the human to overcome these limitations, elevating humans past their current condition, in a process in which they gain technological transcendence. Excepting immortality, all other limitations, once exceeded, generate a transhuman condition. Immortality generates a posthuman condition, since it can only be obtained by modifying the human ontological status from that of a biological being to that of a resident being in informatics networks. In order to clarify this process, we will discuss the concepts of everlastingness and artificial life prolongation. (shrink)

Machine consciousness is not only a technological challenge, but a new way to approach scientific and theoretical issues which have not yet received a satisfactory solution from AI and robotics. We outline the foundations and the objectives of machine consciousness from the standpoint of building a conscious robot.

The focus of the following article is on the use of new robotic systems in the manufacturing industry with respect to the social dimension. Since “intuitive” human–machine interaction (HMI) in robotic systems becomes a significant objective of technical progress, new models of work organization are needed. This hypothesis will be investigated through the following two aims: The first aim is to identify relevant research questions related to the potential use of robotic systems in different systems of work organization at the (...) manufacturing shop-floor level. The second aim is to discuss the conceptualization of (old) organizational problems of human–robot interaction (HRI). In this context, the article reflects on the limits of cognitive and perceptual workload for robot operators in complex working systems. This will be particularly relevant whenever more robots with different “roles” are to be increasingly used in the manufacturing industry. The integration of such complex socio-technical systems needs further empirical and conceptual research with regard to “social” aspects of the technical dimension. Future research should, therefore, also integrate economic and societal issues to understand the full dimensions of new human–robot interaction in industry today. (shrink)

We introduce a generalization of MV algebras motivated by the investigations into the structure of quantum logical gates. After laying down the foundations of the structure theory for such quasi-MV algebras, we show that every quasi-MV algebra is embeddable into the direct product of an MV algebra and a “flat” quasi-MV algebra, and prove a completeness result w.r.t. a standard quasi-MV algebra over the complex numbers.

This paper analyzes the specific shift in the meaning of “civilization” that took place in texts and documents of early American philosophical naturalism. Particularly, it will focus on the specific role that naturalization plays in the edification of a newly secularized, science-oriented, and democratic society, as well as of a naturalized conception of culture and civilization. Indeed, as the work of many philosophers and intellectuals of the Forties highlights, naturalism represents not only the banner of a new idea of civilization, (...) but at the same time becomes the symbol of a powerful postwar ideology. (shrink)

This paper develops the very basic notions of analysis in a weak second-order theory of arithmetic BTFA whose provably total functions are the polynomial time computable functions. We formalize within BTFA the real number system and the notion of a continuous real function of a real variable. The theory BTFA is able to prove the intermediate value theorem, wherefore it follows that the system of real numbers is a real closed ordered field. In the last section of the paper, we (...) show how to interpret the theory BTFA in Robinson's theory of arithmetic Q. This fact entails that the elementary theory of the real closed ordered fields is interpretable in Q. (shrink)

Edith Stein and Gerda Walther explain how community comes to be and how it is structured, but they do not develop significant accounts of how communities disintegrate or die, albeit they make passing allusions to how this may happen. I argue that what makes communities vulnerable to their possible demise, following both Stein’s and Walther’s social ontology, is the breakdown of the sense of the communal bond, that is, the failure of the community members’ ability to make sense of their (...) relationship to one another. Just as sense-making and sense-building can help give birth and meaning to communities, sense disintegration and the dying of the sense of a community bespeak a vulnerability that lies at the very core of all communities. In addition to the vulnerability of sense-making, I argue that the lived-body and habit also pose important challenges to the very possibility of community. (shrink)

A constructive interpretation of the Confucian conception of shame is offered here. Xunzi's discussion is considered the locus classicus of the Confucian conception of shame as contrasted with honor. In order to show his conception as an articulation and development of the more inchoate attitudes of Confucius and Mencius, and excursion is made into the Lunyu and the Mengzi. Aristotle's conception of shame is used as a sort of catalyst, an opening for appreciating Xunzi's complementary insights.

Approaching the topic of robotics-work relation in a general and international context enables the possibility to know more about the impacts in different sectors. In this book the main discussion themes are followed in order to understand which the main dimensions are included in such debate. In that way, it becomes possible to understand the possible answers and available alternatives. The book follows the themes of relation between employment and technology, the automation as rationalization process and robotics as a technology (...) reference. The other topics are the emergence of ethical, legal and social aspects of this technology, the development that can be perceived in the case of Portugal, and the conclusions about the limits and perspectives of new robotic developments. This edition has empirical information on the Portuguese case and also includes data from the main resources of the global debate on this issue: the new developments of automation and its relation with the work content and employment. The author underlined the importance of the contribute that he got from the discussions at the ITAS Working Group on Robotics Technology Assessment, and at the ITAS Research Group on Technology and Work, in Germany, and at the Observatory of Technology Assessment at CICSNOVA in Portugal. The book is include in a series supported by the Portuguese-American Foundation for Development (FLAD) and was published by Glaciar. (shrink)

In this chapter, the focus is on robotics development and its ethical implications, especially on some particular applications or interaction principles. In recent years, such developments have happened very quickly, based on the advances achieved in the last few decades in industrial robotics. The technological developments in manufacturing, with the implementation of Industry 4.0 strategies in most industrialized countries, and the dissemination of production strategies into services and health sectors, enabled robotics to develop in a variety of new directions. Policy (...) making and ethical awareness addressed these issues using socio-economic knowledge and also in an effort to solve some of the application problems raised in a range of different circumstances and sectoral environments. (shrink)

In the last decade Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) has started to focus attention on forms of persuasive interaction where computer technologies have the goal of changing users behavior and attitudes according to a predefined direction. In this work, we hypothesize a strong connection between logical fallacies (forms of reasoning which are logically invalid but cognitively effective) and some common persuasion strategies adopted within web technologies. With the aim of empirically evaluating our hypothesis, we carried out a pilot study on a sample (...) of 150 e-commerce websites. (shrink)

Ethical dilemmas raised by the use of nanotechnology in medical practice can be viewed from several perspectives: religious spiritualist perspective, the perspective of human dignity (nanotechnologies can be thought of as an affront to human dignity), the issue of controversial choice. The article aims to expose some bioethical dilemmas in using synthetic biology and nanotechnologies. Nowadays is often brought into discussion the fact it is possible to appear in the future new human species resulted not via natural selection and evolution, (...) but through the demiurgic effect of technology development in areas such as: synthetic biology, genetics, neurobiology and neurosciences, prosthesis technology and not least of artificial intelligence research. We will also refer into this paper at the possible raised challenges to ethicists who are oriented towards an ethics of species. Those challenges are raised right from the dawn of a consciousness of species, a social construction generated by changes of the meaning of belonging to humanity. During our article we argue that medical technology, especially genetics, medical assisted human reproduction and not least synthetic biology, require a rethinking ethical meanings of applying those technologies in everyday practices. (shrink)

Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} The constructionist approach of philosophy includes an epistemic dimension and a pragmatic emphasis on the interdependence between knowledge and action in the social areas. Appreciative approach to philosophy is based on the work of David Cooperrider on “Appreciative Inquiry”, which is a form of pragmatic discourse that substitutes the focus (...) on the problem with the focus on successful elements of previous experience of individuals, groups, organizations or communities. This experience can be integrated in the philosophical discourse starting from Plato's dialogues and maieutic method promoted by Socrates. Hermeneutic of the real seen as a philosophical reflection on the daily positive experiences falls into tradition of philosophical search of the ultimate meaning of reality. The appreciative speech starts from a postmodern view by a constructivist and constructionist approach, through which reality itself is a social construction generated by successive negotiations on accepted interpretations. Appreciative philosophy is centered on a semiotics grid that seeks positive qualities of existence and its strengths. Appreciative theology reveals a collaborative process between humanity and divine that catalyzes transformations in human being giving them life including eternal life. The communion human-Divinity is seen as a divine-human co-creation. (shrink)

ArgumentThis article argues that during the seventeenth century chemistry achieved intellectual and institutional recognition, starting its transition from a practical art – subordinated to medicine – into an independent discipline. This process was by no means a smooth one, as it took place amidst polemics and conflicts lasting more than a century. It began when Andreas Libavius endeavored to turn chemistry into a teaching discipline, imposing method and order. Chemistry underwent harsh criticism from Descartes and the Cartesians, who reduced natural (...) phenomena to the mechanical affections of matter, leaving little room for chemistry as an independent discipline. Boyle rejected the chemical principles and promoted the fusion of chemistry with corpuscularianism. He did not reduce chemical phenomena to the mechanical affections of matter, but strived to promote chemistry as part of natural philosophy. Lemery gave strong impulse to the recognition of chemistry as a discipline in its own right by fostering a compromise of chemistry and mechanism. Lemery adopted the chemical principles, but did not see them as the ultimate ingredients of bodies. In order to promote chemistry, he distanced it from alchemy and pursued the reform of chemical terminology. (shrink)

This paper is the result of the research I undertook at Lancaster University with a Marie Curie Fellowship during the academic years 2000‐2002. The objective of this research was to study the limits and the challenges of the analogy between molecular geneticists’ work and hackers’ activities. By focusing on this analogy I aim to explore the different ethical and philosophical issues surrounding new genetics and its IPR regulations. The paper firstly will show the philosophical background lying behind the proposed analogy (...) and analyses the sense in which we can talk of geneticists as “hackers.” It will provide grounds for the analogy by exploring some of the techniques used by geneticists; in particular it will focus on the so‐called Shotgun method for genomic sequencing. After having provided reasons for the proposed analogy I will claim that the open source philosophy used in the computer field would be a good way to regulate research in the genetics and in pharmaceutical field too. The open source philosophy would provide fair distribution of research opportunities around the globe with the shift from patenting to copyright in sensitive fields such as genetics. (shrink)

The synthesis between death and vocation that has in the structure ‘being toward vocation’ its conclusion is the key to human finitude according to Ortega y Gasset. This means, against Heidegger’s ‘being toward death’, that in Ortega death, far from being understood as a priori horizon of meaning of existence and sign of human finitude, is an essential ingredient -and a posteriori- of human life which, together with the human vocation, essentially defines existence. The development of that synthesis obliges us (...) to explain two fundamental problems that form part of the essence of death. The first is the mystery of death, which is basically due to two questions: the enigmatic ceasing to be that describes death, and the particular fact that death is simultaneously exterior and interior to life, strange and familiar. The second problem is the question of why human beings do not want to die and want to live, a question substantially linked to the question of the meaning of human life. (shrink)

The paper investigates the type of realism that best suits the framework of decoherence taken at face value without postulating a plurality of worlds, or additional hidden variables, or non-unitary dynamical mechanisms. It is argued that this reading of decoherence leads to an extremely radical type of perspectival realism, especially when cosmological decoherence is considered.

In this work we present NERVOUS, an intelligent recommender system exploiting a probabilistic extension of a Description Logic of typicality to dynamically generate novel contents in AllMusic, a comprehensive and in-depth resource about music, providing data about albums, bands, musicians and songs. The tool can be used for both the generation of novel music genres and styles, described by a set of typical properties characterizing them, and the reclassification of the available songs within such new genres.

This article examines the influence of a teacher education program designed to promote aspects of critical multicultural citizenship on the views of preservice teachers’ concerning citizenship education for culturally diverse contexts. The findings are based on a case study of four minority preservice teachers who attended a large research university in the Southwest and who expressed beliefs related to critical multicultural citizenship. Two questions guided this study: Where did participants acquire their views on citizenship and citizenship education? What role did (...) their teacher education program play in fostering their views of citizenship education? Findings from this study illuminated nuances in the interaction between participants’ prior beliefs about teaching for citizenship education and those ideas expressed in the teacher education program. While participants clung soundly to prior experiences, they often borrowed terminology and tools that were explicitly conveyed in the teacher education program to both express their ideas and to frame their classroom practices. Implications for teacher educators are discussed. (shrink)

The mirror is the metaphor of what produces, together with the unity of our image, also its doubling, openingnt hereby the possibility of moving toward the state of reflection. What role can philosophy have to educate for reflection? Philosophy must "return to the mids of men" and, as J. Dewey suggests, in order to reflexive thinking to be carried out as a particular form of thought, it is necessary to dwell a state of doubt, discomfort, disorientation.

Due to the innovative possibilities of digital technologies, the issue of increasing automation is once again on the agenda – and not only in the industry, but also in other branches and sectors of contemporary societies. Although public and scientific discussions about automation seem to raise relevant questions of the “old” debate, such as the replacement of human labor by introducing new technologies, the authors focus here on the new contextual quality of these questions. The debate should rethink the relationship (...) between technology and work with regard to quantitative and qualitative changes in work. In this article, our example will be the introduction of automation in industry, which has been reflected in the widely recognized study by Frey and Osborne in 2013. They estimated the expected impacts of future computerization on US labor market outcomes as very high, specifically regarding the number of jobs at risk. Surprisingly, this study was the starting point of an intensive international debate on the impact of technologies on the future of work and the role of technological change in working environments. Thus, according to the authors, “old” questions remain important, but they should be reinterpreted for “new” societal demands and expectations of future models of work. (shrink)

Tolerance was and still is a key notion in Neo-Hindu discourse. Its systematic articulation is to be found in the speeches and writings of Swami Vivekānanda. Inspired by his master Rāmakṛṣṇa, he proclaimed non-dual Vedānta as the metaphysical basis of universal tolerance and brotherhood as well as of India’s national identity. Conceptually, his notion of tolerance is to be understood as a hierarchical inclusivism, given that all religions are said to be ultimately included in Vedāntic Hinduism. The claim is that (...) Advaita Vedānta is not a religion but Religion itself. Thus Vivekānanda promoted his understanding of Vedāntic Hinduism as the world religion based upon what he perceived to be universally valid ethical and metaphysical principles. Neo-Hinduism has had a profound, lasting influence among the educated middle classes of India and Vivekānanda was among those who paved the way for the independence movement of the early 20th century. The popular Western view of Hinduism as being synonymous wi... (shrink)

Nine letters on art, written to friends from exile in France in the 1980s. Starting from earlier materialist approaches to art, Negri relates artistic production to the structures of social production characteristic of each historical era. This enables him to define the nature of both material and artistic production in the era of post-modernity and post-Fordism - the era Negri characterizes as that of immaterial labour. Negri then seeks to define artistic beauty in this new era, and this he does (...) in terms of concepts that have become fundamental to his thinking - singularity, multitude, abstraction, collective work, event, the biopolitical, the common. Art is living labour, and therefore invention of singularity, of singular figures and objects. But this expressive act only achieves beauty when the signs and language through which it expresses itself turn themselves into community, when they are contained within a common project. The beautiful is not the act of imagining, but an imagination that has become action. Art, in this sense, is multitude. (shrink)

This book explores the philosophical writings of Gerda Walther (1897-1977). It features essays that recover large parts of Walther's oeuvre in order to show her contribution to phenomenology and philosophy. In addition, the volume contains an English translation of part of her major work on mysticism. The essays consider the interdisciplinary implications of Gerda Walther's ideas. A student of Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein, and Alexander Pfänder, she wrote foundational studies on the ego, community, mysticism and religion, and consciousness. Her discussions (...) of empathy, identification, the ego and ego-consciousness, alterity, God, mysticism, sensation, intentionality, sociality, politics, and woman are relevant not only to phenomenology and philosophy but also to scholars of religion, women's and gender studies, sociology, political science, and psychology. Gerda Walther was one of the important figures of the early phenomenological movement. However, as a woman, she could not habilitate at a German university and was, therefore, denied a position. Her complete works have yet to be published. This ground-breaking volume not only helps readers discover a vital voice but it also demonstrates the significant contributions of women to early phenomenological thinking. (shrink)

In this work we present an explainable system for emotion attribution and recommendation (called DEGARI (Dynamic Emotion Generator And ReclassIfier) relying on a recently introduced probabilistic commonsense reasoning framework (i.e. the TCL logic, see Lieto & Pozzato 2020) which is based on a human-like procedure for the automatic generation of novel concepts in a Description Logics knowledge base (see also Lieto et al. 2019, Chiodino et al. 2020 for other applications). In particular, in order to model human-like forms of concept (...) combinations, the TCL logic combines a probabilistic description logics of typicality with the HEAD-MODIFIER heuristics coming from cognitive semantics. In the context of our application of such framework, our system exploits the logic TCL to automatically generate novel commonsense semantic representations of compound emotions (e.g. Love as derived from the combination of Joy and Trust according to Plutchik’s theory of emotions, see Plutchik 2001). The generated emotions corresponds to prototypes, i.e. commonsense representations of given concepts, and have been used to reclassify emotion-related contents in a variety of artistic domains. We have tested our system in the context of the H2020 EU project SPICE for providing artistic recommendations of museum items in the Galleria di Arte Moderna (GAM) of Turin. The obtained results (reported in Lieto et al, 2021 and Lieto at al., to appear) show promising results for what concerns both the acceptance of the provided affective recommendation and the explainability associated to each suggestion made by the users. Here we discuss, the open problems and the lessons learned. -/- . (shrink)

Este trabajo presenta los resultados preliminares obtenidos en la conformación del Atlas Iberoamericano en Bioética que ha desarrollado el Centro Anáhuac de Desarrollo Estratégico en Bioética (CADEBI) respecto a la identificación y análisis de las instituciones de Bioética existentes en la Región. Se realizó una revisión documental a través de motores de búsqueda, bases de datos, redes sociales y otras fuentes. La información obtenida se agrupó en seis diferentes categorías de acuerdo con la estructura, objetivos y actividades que desarrollan. De (...) esta manera, se realizó un diagnóstico inicial con base en las fuentes documentales disponibles en la Web. Como parte de los resultados, se identificaron 157 instituciones en 25 países; así como la variación en la densidad institucional, concentrándose principalmente en España (29 instituciones), México (26 instituciones), Argentina (17 instituciones), Brasil (13 instituciones), Chile (11 instituciones) y Colombia (8 instituciones). Además, se resalta la importancia de las comisiones nacionales de bioética en el desarrollo institucional, señalando la relación entre el avance científico y tecnológico de los países y el desarrollo de la bioética. El texto concluye con la propuesta de crear un Observatorio de la Red Iberoamericana de Bioética para documentar y promover el intercambio institucional y científico en la Región, así como algunas recomendaciones derivadas del desarrollo de este trabajo. (shrink)

This paper compares Kant’s and Leibniz’s views on the relation between knowing subjects and known objects. Kant discusses Leibniz’s philosophy in the ‘Amphiboly’ section of the first Critique. According to Kant, Leibniz’s main error is mistaking objects in space and time for mind-independent things in themselves, that is, for monads. The paper argues that, pace Kant, Leibniz regards objects in space and time as mind-dependent. A deeper divergence between the two philosophers concerns knowing subjects. For Leibniz, they are substances. For (...) Kant, we cannot know whether they are substances. Kant conceives of knowing subjects as complex systems of cognitive capacities. (shrink)

The United Nations ad hoc tribunals in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda had primacy over national judicial agents for crimes committed in these countries during the most notorious civil wars and genocide of the 1990s. The UN Charter granted the Security Council the right to establish a tribunal for Yugoslavia in the context of ongoing civil war and against the will of recalcitrant national agents. The Council used that same right to punish individuals responsible for a genocide that it failed (...) earlier to prevent in Rwanda. In both cases the Council delegated a portion of its coercive title to independent tribunal agents, thereby overriding the default locus of punishment in the world order: sovereign states. (shrink)

Endowing artificial systems with explanatory capacities about the reasons guiding their decisions, represents a crucial challenge and research objective in the current fields of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Computational Cognitive Science [Langley et al., 2017]. Current mainstream AI systems, in fact, despite the enormous progresses reached in specific tasks, mostly fail to provide a transparent account of the reasons determining their behavior (both in cases of a successful or unsuccessful output). This is due to the fact that the classical problem (...) of opacity in artificial neural networks (ANNs) explodes with the adoption of current Deep Learning techniques [LeCun, Bengio, Hinton, 2015]. In this paper we argue that the explanatory deficit of such techniques represents an important problem, that limits their adoption in the cognitive modelling and computational cognitive science arena. In particular we will show how the current attempts of providing explanations of the deep nets behaviour (see e.g. [Ritter et al. 2017] are not satisfactory. As a possibile way out to this problem, we present two different research strategies. The first strategy aims at dealing with the opacity problem by providing a more abstract interpretation of neural mechanisms and representations. This approach is adopted, for example, by the biologically inspired SPAUN architecture [Eliasmith et al., 2012] and by other proposals suggesting, for example, the interpretation of neural networks in terms of the Conceptual Spaces framework [Gärdenfors 2000, Lieto, Chella and Frixione, 2017]. All such proposals presuppose that the neural level of representation can be considered somehow irrelevant for attacking the problem of explanation [Lieto, Lebiere and Oltramari, 2017]. In our opinion, pursuing this research direction can still preserve the use of deep learning techniques in artificial cognitive models provided that novel and additional results in terms of “transparency” are obtained. The second strategy is somehow at odds with respect to the previous one and tries to address the explanatory issue by avoiding to directly solve the “opacity” problem. In this case, the idea is that one of resorting to pre-compiled plausible explanatory models of the word used in combination with deep-nets (see e.g. [Augello et al. 2017]). We argue that this research agenda, even if does not directly fits the explanatory needs of Computational Cognitive Science, can still be useful to provide results in the area of applied AI aiming at shedding light on the models of interaction between low level and high level tasks (e.g. between perceptual categorization and explanantion) in artificial systems. (shrink)

This paper presents a practical case study showing how, despite the nowadays limited collaboration between AI and Cognitive Science (CogSci), cognitive research can still have an important role in the development of novel AI technologies. After a brief historical introduction about the reasons of the divorce between AI and CogSci research agendas (happened in the mid’80s of the last century), we try to provide evidence of a renewed collaboration by showing a recent case study on a commonsense reasoning system, built (...) by using insights from cognitive semantics. (shrink)

Gerda Walther[aut] Walther, Gerda has no developed account of empathyEmpathy; rather, she draws from the writings of early phenomenologists and psychologists on empathy. Generally, for Walther[aut]Walther, Gerda, empathy is an act of mind that permits the understanding of another’s consciousnessConsciousness and experienceExperience. Edith Stein[aut]Edith Stein, in many respects, lays the ground for a phenomenological account of empathy. Stein[aut]Stein, Edith’s treatment of intersubjectivityIntersubjectivity and the nature of intersubjective acts such as empathy draws greatly from Husserl[aut]Husserl, Edmund. There exist three primary sources (...) for Stein[aut]Stein, Edith’s analysis of empathy, all of which were written while Stein[aut]Stein, Edith was still in direct contact with Husserl[aut]Husserl, Edmund either as his student, assistant or as a private researcher attempting to habilitate. The primary and better known source is Stein[aut]Stein, Edith’s doctoral dissertation published originally in 1917, titled On the Problem of Empathy\”On the Problem of Empathy”, by Stein, Edith. The text, which is the only extant portion of her doctoral dissertation, sets the stage for Stein[aut]Stein, Edith’s later work on the subject. Husserl[aut]Husserl, Edmund was pleased by Stein[aut]Stein, Edith’s selection of the topic, but he wanted her to give more of a historical overview, with special reference to Lipps[aut]Lipps, Hans’ work. Hence, the text is replete with discussions of notable philosophers like Scheler[aut]Scheler, Max, Dilthey[aut]Dilthey, Wilhelm, and Lipps[aut]Lipps, Hans. The second major work that addresses empathy is to be found in Stein[aut]Stein, Edith’s Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities\”Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities”, by Stein, Edith. This work was published in Volume V of Husserl[aut]Husserl, Edmund’s Jahrbuch and consists of two principal texts: PsychicCausalityCausalityPsychic and Individual and Community. This text comes from Stein[aut]Stein, Edith’s period during and after her assistantship with Husserl[aut]Husserl, Edmund. The text is largely, but not exclusively, based on her work on Husserl[aut]Husserl, Edmund’s Ideen II. The last source is Stein[aut]Stein, Edith’s research manuscript titled, Einführung in die Philosophie. (shrink)