In The Performance of Reading, Peter Kivy introduces, on a purely phenomenological basis, an interesting and potentially fruitful analogy between the experience of silently reading literary texts and the experience of silently reading musical scores. In Kivy’s view, both mental experiences involve a critical element of auditory mental imagery, consisting in having a performance “in the head” or the mind’s ear. This analogy might have significant implications for the ontological status of literary works, as well as for the theoretical relations (...) between music and language. Nevertheless, Kivy’s hypothesis has never been investigated and discussed in its empirical merits. In the present paper, we shall claim that neuroscience data support, at least in part, Kivy’s phenomenological observations about the relation between reading musical scores and reading texts. Despite being functionally and anatomically dissociated at the cognitive level, the two reading experiences both involve an auditory simulation of the content, which seems to be functionally critical for a deep and rich experience of literary texts and musical scores. (shrink)

This essay is a critical discussion of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s book Provincializing Europe as well as a first sketch of a History on Equal Terms. After giving a short summary of Provincializing Europe, I first argue, against Chakrabarty, that there is no necessary connection between the discipline of history and the metanarratives of modernity. To the contrary: the founding idea of the discipline of history was a turn against such grand narratives. With his attempt to deconstruct the narratives of the European (...) Enlightenment and of modernity, Chakrabarty therefore has to be regarded as a thinker of radical historicism rather than as a critic of the discipline of history. Second, I criticize the use of the term “modernity” in Provincializing Europe and the concept of modernity in general. Instead of a deconstruction of the discipline of history, I propose a deconstruction of the concept of modernity. This could open up the way for a History on Equal Terms situated within the discipline of history, that is, a historiography that would—just as Chakrabarty rightly demands—in principle pay the same attention to and expect relevant results from any region in the world, depending only on the focus of research. (shrink)

ABSTRACTHow accurate are insights compared to analytical solutions? In four experiments, we investigated how participants' solving strategies influenced their solution accuracies across different types of problems, including one that was linguistic, one that was visual and two that were mixed visual-linguistic. In each experiment, participants' self-judged insight solutions were, on average, more accurate than their analytic ones. We hypothesised that insight solutions have superior accuracy because they emerge into consciousness in an all-or-nothing fashion when the unconscious solving process is complete, (...) whereas analytic solutions can be guesses based on conscious, prematurely terminated, processing. This hypothesis is supported by the finding that participants' analytic solutions included relatively more incorrect responses than timeouts compared to their insight responses. (shrink)

1 What is literature? One could naïvely answer: any kind of written work could be considered literature, just think about its Latin origin, “littera” (letter). Nonetheless nowadays we tend to adopt a more restrictive use of the term literature as referring to those written accounts somehow showing literary, aesthetic merit. According to this more restrictive use, we say that Crime and Punishment written by Fëdor Dostoevskij and In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust are good examples of lite...

L’estetica, intesa come scienza della conoscenza sensibile e del bello naturale e artistico, ha indubbiamente a che fare con il giudizio di gusto. In base a che cosa infatti diciamo che un quadro è bello o che una rappresentazione teatrale ci ha colpito? In base al gusto, appunto: al richiamarsi a quel je ne sais quoi che fa sì che apprezziamo le opere d’arte, per esempio. Sarebbe tuttavia legittimo domandarsi che cosa siamo disposti a includere sotto la categoria di “opera (...) d’arte”. Sicuramen... (shrink)

According to Paolo D’Angelo my Philosophy of Literature actually is an Analytical Philosophy of Literature. His main worry does not concern simply the title, but the fact of my having consciously excluded some authors just because, he maintains, they are not analytic philosophers. In this note I try to explain my reasons together with a defense of philosophy of literature in its own peculiarity distinguishing it from literary criticism, literature in philosophy and philosophy as literature.

It is the aim of this piece of research to provide a conceptualisation of Corporate Responsibility from a stakeholder perspective and to investigate if and how Corporate Responsibility can be expressed in terms of beliefs of stakeholders. The paper reports on a qualitative research study into customer and employee understanding of Corporate Responsibility in the context of a financial service organisation.

Carola Barbero | : Je m’intéresse dans cet article aux émotions que nous ressentons lorsque nous lisons une oeuvre de fiction. Certains philosophes pensent que notre implication émotionnelle dans la fiction constitue un paradoxe, et implique soit une forme d’irrationalité, soit la participation à un jeu de « faire semblant ». Ici, je soutiendrai qu’une Théorie de l’Objet à la Meinong, en défendant une approche réaliste des émotions liées la fiction, permet de résoudre adéquatement ce paradoxe de la fiction. (...) | : This essay concerns the emotions that we feel when reading a work of fiction. Some philosophers think that our emotional engagement with fiction gives rise to a paradox and involves either irrationality or participation in a game of make believe. The aim of this work is to show how the paradox of fiction can be dissolved by making use of an Object Theory in a Meinongian style. (shrink)

People with aphasia use gestures not only to communicate relevant content but also to compensate for their verbal limitations. The Sketch Model (De Ruiter, 2000) assumes a flexible relationship between gesture and speech with the possibility of a compensatory use of the two modalities. In the successor of the Sketch Model, the AR‐Sketch Model (De Ruiter, 2017), the relationship between iconic gestures and speech is no longer assumed to be flexible and compensatory, but instead iconic gestures are assumed to express (...) information that is redundant to speech. In this study, we evaluated the contradictory predictions of the Sketch Model and the AR‐Sketch Model using data collected from people with aphasia as well as a group of people without language impairment. We only found compensatory use of gesture in the people with aphasia, whereas the people without language impairments made very little compensatory use of gestures. Hence, the people with aphasia gestured according to the prediction of the Sketch Model, whereas the people without language impairment did not. We conclude that aphasia fundamentally changes the relationship of gesture and speech. (shrink)

According to some, there is a problem concerning the emotions we feel toward fictional entities such as Anna Karenina, Werther and the like. We feel pity, fear, and sadness toward them, but how is that possible? “We are saddened, but how can we be? What are we sad about? How can we feel genuinely and involuntarily sad, and weep, as we do know that no one has suffered or died?” (Radford, in: Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1975). This is the (...) paradox of fiction which is based on the assumption that emotions, to be genuine and rational, should be directed toward existent beings. But if beliefs about existence are necessary for us to be rationally moved by something, and such beliefs are lacking when we are moved by fiction (because we do not believe fictional characters and events to be real), then our capacity for an emotional response to fiction is irrational. Consequently, our emotional attitude toward future generations should be considered as irrational as well. But is this really the case? Are there good arguments to consider future and fictional entities as similar from this point of view? Or would it be better to distinguish the two? Is there such a thing as a paradox of the future? If so, how does it relate to the more famous paradox of fiction? (shrink)

Motivated by the ongoing controversy surrounding corporate tax, this article presents a study that explores stakeholder expectations of corporate tax in the context of UK business. We conduct a qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with representatives of community groups, as well as interviews with those representing business groups. We then identify eight themes that together describe “what” companies need to do, “how” they need to do it, and “why” they need to do it, if they wish to appeal to a (...) wide group of interested parties. We discuss our findings based on the corporate social responsibility literature and propose novel ways for community groups and business groups to connect on the topic of corporate tax, suggesting opportunities and themes for dialogue and potential steps to co-create solutions in a stakeholder society. (shrink)

According to Alexius Meinong, in order to give a philosophical explanation of the world we need to consider both existent and nonexistent objects, lest we fall into the "prejudice in favour of the real". The paper starts by examining some basic concepts of object theory seen as an existence-free science (modes of being, principle of independence of so-being from being, "Aussersein" and Meinong's paradox). There follows an exposition of Bertrand Russell's position, characterized by a "robust sense of reality", and afterwards (...) an analysis of differences and similarities between the two philosophers. The paper ends with a short account of Meinongian semantics and a comparison between object theory and metaphysics. (shrink)

A whiteboard has been used during a philosophy lesson and afterwards deserted in the classroom. On the whiteboard the teacher has sketched a sort of brief history of philosophy of art, trying to answer the classical questions “What is an artwork?” and “How to distinguish an artwork from an ordinary object?”. The artist Mimmo Paladino found the whiteboard and decided to transform it in an artwork. How? By fastening on it his Giotto’s head. The whiteboard has hence changed its metaphysical (...) status: now it is a different kind of object from what it was before. (shrink)

“Naturalismo” è una parola che si dice in molti modi, almeno tanti quanti nella storia della filosofia e nel sentire comune sono i modi in cui si è parlato di “natura” e di espressioni simili. Oggi, il tema del naturalismo in filosofia e della cosiddetta naturalizzazione che una filosofia dovrebbe eventualmente attrezzare determinate nozioni e teorie è tornato prepotentemente alla ribalta della riflessione filosofica, sulla scia dei successi provenienti dalle scienze cognitive (linguistica, n...

Augustine of Hippo understands the lay faithful in virtue of their regal-sacerdotal anointing at Baptism to exercise, always in unison with the ordained ministry, an indispensable twofold role in the sinner’s reconciliation. In Peter, not only the clergy but indeed all the saintly members of the community receive the spiritual commission to bind and loose. According to their particular vocation, the lay faithful bind the sinner through fraternal correction and loose him through their intercessory prayer. As members of the Totus (...) Christus, they participate in Christ’s unique remissive mediation. A mixed society where saints live among sinners provides the necessary context for this ecclesial reconciliation. (shrink)

This essay deals with some philosophical problems concerning the understanding of ethical conceptions in an alien culture. Its aim is to show that in investigating such conceptions we cannot proceed on purely empirical grounds; our own ethical concepts will, in a conceptual sense, determine what it is conceivable that we find.

In diesem Beitrag werden die Fragen diskutiert: Welche Vorstellungen von Geschlecht und Sexualität finden sich im Buddhismus, welche Frauenrollen oder Frauenbilder lassen sich daraus ableiten, und was geschieht, wenn diese Geschlechtervorstellungen heute auf den europäischen Kontext treffen: Welche Probleme entstehen? Ist Geschlechtergerechtigkeit ein westliches Problem oder wird sie weltweit thematisiert? Lassen sich Wechselwirkungen feststellen, und welche Strategien werden verfolgt, um Geschlechtergerechtigkeit im Buddhismus herzustellen?

El problema del valor cognitivo de las obras literarias ha recibido fundamentalmente dos tipos de respuesta, la cognitivista y la anti-cognitivista, la primera sostiene que la literatura es vehículo de verdades universales y la segunda mantiene que no transmite nada salvo falsedades y trivialidades. Entre estas posiciones opuestas, este ensayo defiende una forma de cognitivismo débil afirmando por una parte, con los cognitivistas, la idea de que aprendemos de la literatura, y por otra parte, con los anti-cognitivistas, la intuición de (...) que la literatura no nos transmite verdades sobre nosotros mismos o sobre el mundo. La idea es que una solución basada en dos niveles, de acuerdo con lo que aprendemos de la literatura, se deriva de una combinación de knowing that y knowing what. En primer lugar, para aprender algo de la literatura necesitamos comprender, y por tanto saber, de qué hablan los textos literarios, tenemos que ser capaces de aferrar el estado de cosas descrito. Este es el primer nivel, relativo a la verdad literaria y al knowing that. En un segundo nivel, nuestro aprendizaje a partir de los textos literarios tiene que ver con imaginar cómo es ser esos personajes involucrados en esos eventos, por lo tanto, knowing what es como vivir una vida diferente de la propia. En este nivel aprendemos de la literatura del mismo modo en que aprendemos de los experimentos mentales, ejemplos o contraejemplos. Esto es lo que Hilary Putnam ha llamado “conocimiento conceptual de vidas posibles. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung Patientinnen und Patienten steht das Recht auf Behandlung nach ihren eigenen Vorstellungen auch dann zu, wenn sie aktuell keinen eigenen Willen bilden können. Advance Care Planning (ACP), als ein spezielles Verfahren der gesundheitlichen Vorsorgeplanung, zielt darauf ab, dieses Dilemma durch eine Willensbestimmung im Voraus aufzulösen. Besonders ausgebildete Gesprächsbegleiter*innen bieten an, bei der Ermittlung, Formulierung und Dokumentation eines solchen, die individuelle gesundheitliche Situation berücksichtigenden Willens zu helfen. Das Umfeld der Betroffenen soll in den Gesprächsprozess einbezogen und es soll organisatorisch gesichert (...) werden, dass deren Willensbestimmung den aktuell Behandelnden im Bedarfsfall faktisch zugänglich ist. Das Verfahren kombiniert also ein kommunikatives mit einem institutionellen Element. Aus ethischer Sicht stellen sich dabei zwei wesentliche Herausforderungen. Erstens erfordert Gesprächsbegleitung mit einem so komplexen Ziel Kompetenzen und setzt bestimmte Haltungen voraus, wie sie für Professionen im strengen Sinne typisch sind. Daher wäre es wichtig, entsprechende professionelle Normen explizit zu machen, beispielsweise in Form eines Berufs-Kodex. Zweitens muss das Verfahren trotz seiner institutionellen Form für die Betroffenen freiwillig sein. Dies ist entscheidend für die Validität des Prozesses, aber auch für dessen Ergebnis. Denn wenn Letzteres rechtlich bindend sein soll, müssen die Betroffenen freiverantwortlich, d. h. ohne sog. Willensmängel handeln können. Es ist deshalb ethische Pflicht, beim Eintritt in und im Verlauf der Beratung auf die Freiwilligkeit zu achten. (shrink)

In this paper, we present some experimental findings whose best explanation, first of all, provides a positive answer to a philosophical question in ontology as to whether, in the overall domain of beings, there are fictional characters (_ficta_) over and above concrete individuals. Moreover, since such findings arise out of different comparisons between fictional characters and concrete individuals on the one hand and fictional characters again and non-items that do not belong at all to such an overall domain on the (...) other hand, they also suggest that _ficta_ are allowed as inhabiting a particular subrealm of that domain distinct from the one inhabited by concrete individuals, as previous findings in cognitive psychology had suggested. (shrink)

Una forma frecuente de medir y estimular el desarrollo narrativo infantil utiliza el recontado de una narración. En Chile, se han diseñado tareas considerando la estructura del input verbal, tanto en un nivel léxico-sintáctico como textual, estableciéndose –incluso– niveles de complejidad. En el marco del Proyecto FONDECYT 1130420, para elaborar un cuento infantil –input de la tarea de recontado– se hizo hincapié no solo en los rasgos verbales, sino también visuales del relato. De tal forma, se propuso un doble objetivo: (...) diseñar las imágenes de una historia potenciando su significado a través de una gramática visual y observar en qué medida estos elementos aparecen reflejados en el recontado oral de los sujetos. Para este propósito, junto a la Gramática de la Historia para el discurso, se consideró la Gramática de Diseño Visual y sus herramientas analíticas para la construcción de imágenes. El cuento se piloteó en una muestra de 20 pre-escolares de Kinder de un colegio particular subvencionado de la Región de Valparaíso. Sus discursos fueron videograbados, transcritos y analizados. Se observó que todas las imágenes narrativas aparecen mencionadas en más de un 60% de los recontados. Además, existen tres referidas en el 90% de los discursos infantiles y representan momentos cruciales del relato o cierta complejidad del input como la simultaneidad de acciones. Estos resultados permiten valorar la importancia de los elementos visuales del cuento en la tarea de recontado infantil. (shrink)

Gli oggetti fittizi sono quegli oggetti presenti nelle opere di finzione, dalla letteratura al cinema, dal teatro ai dipinti. Questo saggio prende in con­siderazione, prevalentemente, gli oggetti della finzione letteraria. Tali og­getti pongono interessanti quesiti tanto sul versante ontologico quanto sul versante semantico: in primo luogo occorre fare chiarezza sulle condizioni alle quali essi possono legittimamente essere considerati degli oggetti, in se­condo luogo è importante individuare il valore semantico degli enunciati de­signanti oggetti di tal sorta e infine è in­di­spensabile esplicitare (...) lo statuto on­tologico di tali entità al fine di spiegare come avviene che pro­viamo emo­zioni nei loro confronti.Fictional entities are those entities we find in fictional works, from li­te­rature to cinema, from theatre to paintings. This essay will mostly concern li­terary fictional entities. These entities pose interesting questions both for se­mantics and for ontology: first we need to clarify the conditions ac­cording to which they can legitimately be considered as objects, secondly we need to understand the semantical value of sentences referring to ob­jects of that sort, and finally we need to emphasize the importance of those en­tities in order to explain how does it happen that we prove emotions to­wards them. (shrink)

In ontology, realism and anti-realism may be taken as opposite attitudes towards entities of different kinds, so that one may turn out to be a realist with respect to certain entities, and an anti-realist with respect to others. In this book, the editors focus on this controversy concerning social entities in general and fictional entities in particular, the latter often being considered nowadays as kinds of social entities. More specifically, fictionalists (those who maintain that we only make-believe that there are (...) entities of a certain kind) and creationists (those who believe that entities of a certain kind are the products of human activity) present themselves as the champions of the anti-realist and the realist stance, respectively, regarding the above entities. By evaluating the pros and cons of both these positions, this book intends to focus new light on a longstanding debate. (shrink)

Nonostante Don Chisciotte e Madame Bovary si siano rovinati (letteralmente) la vita a forza di leggere romanzi, è opinione condivisa che le opere letterarie possano essere molto importanti, se non addirittura fondamentali, quale fonte di conoscenza. Non è quindi per caso che si comincino a leggere le storie ai bambini piccoli, che se ne richieda la lettura ai ragazzi a scuola e si cerchi di sensibilizzare il più possibile al mondo dei libri, perché, come diceva Umberto Eco, «[…] la nostra (...) ric... (shrink)

What happens when we read a text like The Name of the Rose? How may we understand what is fictional and what is true in it? By working on Eco’s Confessions of a Young Novelist, we will try to investigate the phenomenology of reading together with immersivity and our emotional involvement with fiction.

What makes Nespolo’s Madama Butterfly so distinct? Not the fact that it is its unique exemplar, in fact artworks as grand operas are essentially repeatable. What does that mean? How could we then explain why Nespolo’s stage costumes and scenery perfecty fit? By clarifying the kind of object Madama Butterfly is.

Theorists and practitioners in the fields of both Corporate Responsibility and Corporate Reputation have recently stressed the importance of taking a stakeholderperspective when researching the nature, development and impact of these concepts. While models of Corporate Reputation, such as the Reputation Quotient and SPIRIT were developed by actively engaging stakeholders in research, models of Corporate Responsibility have been developed in a more theoretical manner. There have thus been calls for the research approaches taken in reputation research to be applied to (...) the field of responsibility. This paper answers these calls and thereby provides two related outcomes: First, a conceptualisation of Corporate Responsibility is developed that draws directly upon stakeholder perceptions (in this case customers and employees of a financial institution). Secondly, a comparison between this conceptualisation and two existing models of Corporate Reputation is conducted. A formal comparison between the model of Corporate Responsibility developed in this paper and the RQ and SPIRIT models of Corporate Reputation suggests that there are considerable similarities between stakeholder conceptualisations of responsibility and models of reputation.Stakeholders may therefore not view responsibility separate from reputation, but rather as a largely overlapping concept. Questions about the causal relationship between the two concepts are also discussed. (shrink)

This article is based on narrative, autobiographic interviews with domestic workers in Peru focusing on their migration and work experiences. The interviewees evoke a border discourse that divides and hierarchizes Peruvian society and stigmatizes migrants, especially migrant domestic workers. As domestic service leads to intense social interactions at this ‘border’, the interviewees are constantly forced to ‘translate’ when constructing their identity. The discourse-analytical bottom—up perspective focusing on membership categorization devices evaluates the performativity of the discourses of those considered as ‘oppressed’; (...) it analyses processes of subjection and subjectification: whereas some of the interviewees internalize the discursively attributed inferior ‘Me’, others use the constructed borders as an opportunity to develop hybrid discourse strategies that cross and even deconstruct social categorizations. By focusing on the agency of ‘border-crossers’, the article aims at scientifically ‘rethinking the social with cultural difference as a constitutive feature’. (shrink)