Background: Advances in biomedical sciences, technologies and care practices have resulted in an increase in ethical problems and a resulting growth of difficulties encountered by health workers in their professional activity. Objective: The main objective of this study was to analyse knowledge in the ethical field and experience with and the propensity for using ethics consultations by nurses and physicians. Methods: Between March and June 2014, a cross-sectional observational study was conducted on a sample of 351 nurses and 128 physicians (...) in four central Italian hospitals. For data collection, a semi-structured questionnaire was used, consisting of 21 items divided into four sections exploring (1) demographic and occupational characteristics, (2) knowledge in the ethics field, (3) experience with ethical issues and (4) the propensity to use ethics consultation. Ethical considerations: Research ethics approval was obtained from the Italian Nurses Professional Board. Results: The results show that both nurses and physicians are faced with ethically sensitive situations. Nurses were found to have better judgement concerning their own knowledge than physicians, but more physicians were found to have a deeper level of specific training in ethics issues. The propensity to ask for ethics consultations to address ethical issues was found to be significantly associated with the degree to which ethical issues have deepened (and the level of experience acquired in this field). Conclusion: The presence of a consulting service that can lead to shared choices may represent, together with basic and continuing education, a valid support for professional growth in the ethical field for both physicians and nurses. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Dialectic of Reason Observing Nature Observing the Nature of the Self References Further Reading.

This chapter contains sections titled: General Characteristics of the Concept of Natural Life The Path to the Individualization of Matter Chemistry and Individuality: The Appearance and Disappearance of Life Contradiction in Chemicals The Necessary Limits of the Inorganic The Path to the Free Individuality of Life Conclusion References Abbreviations Works Cited.

In Plato’s _Republic_ V, 449a-457b, Socrates argues that the guardian class of Kallipolis will comprise both men and women and that women with the appropriate nature ought to receive the same education and fulfill the same tasks as their male counterparts. In this article I argue, against competing interpretations of this claim as dependent either on the necessity of abolishing the oikos or on eugenic principles, that Socrates’ argument ought to be understood as a genuine argument about women’s natural capabilities (...) and ought to be interpreted in light of the Socratic debate about women’s virtues. Moreover, I show that the legal language mobilized, combined with polemical references to Aristophanes, serves the purpose of evoking Socrates’ trial, thus alerting the reader to the seriousness of the proposal in question. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: What Is ‘High’ and What Is ‘Low’ in the Significance of Reason The Standpoint of Reason: or When Certainty Is Not Yet Truth Philosophical Issues: Standard Views and Reappraisals References Further Reading.

In this paper I adopt Étienne Balibar’s distinction between three forms of universality—“universality as reality,” “fictive universality,” and “ideal universality”—in order to retrieve universalism for feminist politics. The paper articulates a proposal for the feminist adoption of a specific notion of universality, which I call political insurgent universality. This notion is not based on a definition of human essence or of women's nature. It is rather rooted in the “real universality” historically created by capitalism, that is, in the fact that (...) capitalism has generated a world in which people are interdependent and in which capitalist accumulation poses objective universal constraints on social reproduction. (shrink)

My aim in this essay is to lead the reader through the complexity of Hegel’s philosophical understanding of organic nature by highlighting its distinctive theoretical features and by examining these historically, both against the background of the approaches, achievements and trends of the empirical sciences of his time and in light of their scholarly reception.1 First, I focuss on Hegel’s definition of the ‘universal form’ of life, pointing to what the connection is, in his philosophy of nature, between the structure (...) of conceptual and living processes in the path to the individualization of matter. Second, since Hegel calls animal life “the truth of organics,” 2 I shall try to explain how in the philosophy of nature the Idea of life comes to differentiate itself into certain essential characteristics of immediate, finite and individual animals, passing through the stages of geological nature and vegetable organisms. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kant-Studien Jahrgang: 109 Heft: 1 Seiten: 9-46.

Edited by Cinzia Arruzza and Dmitri Nikulin, _Philosophy and Political Power in Antiquity_ is a collection of essays examining reflections by ancient philosophers on the implicit tension between political activity and the philosophical life from a variety of critical perspectives.

This article addresses the notions of gender performativity and temporality in Butler’s early work on gender. The paper is articulated in four steps. First it gives an account of the role and nature of temporality in Butler’s theory of gender performativity. Second, it shows some similarities and connections between the role played by temporality in Butler’s theory of gender performativity and its role in Marx’s analysis of capital. Third, it raises some criticisms of Butler’s understanding of temporality and historicity, focusing (...) in particular on the lack of historicisation of her own categories in bothGender TroubleandBodies that Matter. This deficit is a consequence of the epistemological framework within which she is operating, in particular of her understanding of social practices and relations through the lens of linguistic concepts extrapolated from their theoretical context. The article concludes by referring to Floyd’s and Hennessy’s analyses of the formation of sexual identities as examples of the fruitful historicisation of gender performativity, which also sheds some light on the ‘the abstract character’ of the temporality of gender performativity. (shrink)

Les théories féministes de la reproduction ont été soumises à trois types d’objections : elles seraient soit fonctionnalistes, soit économicistes, ou biologisantes. Ces objections reposent sur un contresens concernant les notions marxistes de production et reproduction ainsi que sur une conception réifiée de la nature des sociétés capitalistes. De plus, ces objections ne sont pas capables de proposer une alternative convaincante et débouchent sur des impasses comme celles qui sont propres aux théories des systèmes double ou triple. Au contraire, le (...) concept de reproduction sociale permet de sortir de ces impasses en même temps qu’il rend possible une conception non-réductionniste du mode de production capitaliste dans laquelle le capital n’est pas conçu comme le sujet d’un processus strictement « économique ». (shrink)

This paper provides an overview of semiotic studies about advertising, beginning with the early work done in the 1960s. Advertising communication plays a particular role in semiotic studies in the second half of the twentieth century. Pioneering studies of advertising messages, in particular those of Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco, date to the 1960s and were carried out for the most part using the tools of classical rhetoric. Following a period in which semiotics displayed a relative lack of interest in (...) advertisements, in the 1980s advertising texts were used as examples in applied narratological analysis by Jean-Marie Floch and others. This occurred at the same time as the so-called “passion turn of semiotics,” which stressed that the passions and emotions present in texts are crucial issues in textual semiotics, and it also seemed to offer fresh perspectives for the analysis of advertising communication. The passion turn took account of the evolution of advertising itself, since modern advertising is more and more interested in conveying passions and emotions. The effectiveness of an advert tends to be closely bound up with the presentation of sensations associated with a given product or brand. Recently, semioticians have begun to study more general features of advertising and marketing discourse. (shrink)

Massimiliano Tomba’s book, Marx’s Temporalities, stresses the centrality of the body for the critique of exploitation and suggests that a new phenotype is produced by consumerism and by the dynamic of capitalist accumulation, with its plural temporalities. However, both the body of the worker and the new phenotype do not appear to have a sex or a gender in Tomba’s book. In this intervention, I read some of Tomba’s insights about the body, the new phenotype, and primary accumulation in the (...) light of a critical gender and feminist perspective. (shrink)

The purpose of my study is to reconstruct the historical development of Kant's pre- critical approach to mechanical explanation and cosmology. I shall focus on three main works: the 1755 Theorie des Himmels, the 1763 Beweisgrund and the 1766 Träume. I shall challenge some interpretations of the relation between mechanism and finalism, looking for the emergence of a principle of demarcation separating both ontologically and epistemologically organics from inorganics products. I shall try to show why Kant came to be dissatisfied (...) with his early systematic account of the formation and arrangement of the heavenly bodies on purely mechanical principles. Finally I shall argue that the pre-critical period ends, paving the way to a revision of cosmology in the light of an appreciation of the role of chemical affinity for the construction of the world-edifice. (shrink)

Unaffordable housing, poverty wages, inadequate healthcare, border policing, climate change--these are not what you ordinarily hear feminists talking about. But aren't they the biggest issues for the vast majority of women around the globe? Taking as its inspiration the new wave of feminist militancy that has erupted globally, this manifesto makes a simple but powerful case: feminism shouldn't start--or stop--with the drive to have women represented at the top of their professions. It must focus on those at the bottom, and (...) fight for the world they deserve. And that means targeting capitalism. Feminism must be anticapitalist, eco-socialist and antiracist. (shrink)

This paper recounts a dramatic paradigm shift in the debate on the value and significance of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, from the harsh criticism it faced over the past two centuries to its reappraisal, in the last three decades, through both the vindication of Hegel’s competence in the empirical sciences and the appreciation of his assessment of organic life and habitat, at the intersection with anthropology. The paper concludes with the most recent trends in scholarship, which focus on the problem (...) of the naturality of man in respect to culture and to democratic societies and on the systematic transition from Hegel’s philosophy of nature to the philosophy of spirit. (shrink)

This paper examines an issue that seems particularly overlooked in the debate on Plato and Popper, namely that of political change. The aim of the paper is to challenge the largely unchallenged assumption that modern liberal democracy can play the role of the general standard, upon which basis we can judge the thinkers of the past. Indeed, in the Open Society liberal democracy sets the boundaries of what is considered as a ‘rational’ political change, thus revealing that Popper holds a (...) form of teleological conception of historical development. The paper argues for a different interpretation of Plato’s approach to the question of political change, against Popper’s claim that the final aim of the utopian city of the Republic is the elimination of change. The conclusion is that Plato’s utopian construction provides us with better tools than Popper’s framework for thinking of change in politics. (shrink)

Vignette research is a phenomenological approach that attempts to access the experiential basis of knowledge by examining lifeworlds in educational or social contexts, going ‘to the things themselves’ (Husserl). The vignette methodology enables researchers to capture their own experiences with the experiences of others as they occur in the field by adopting a stance of ‘co-experiential experience’. The vignette aims to provide a depiction of pedagogical events as close as possible to lived experience. The focus is on experiential circumstances that (...) affect researchers in the field. A vignette, as a linguistically condensed text, presents a short, concise narrative in which something surprising, special, or peculiar emerges. The final vignette is subjected to phenomenological analysis, a process known as ‘vignette reading’, wherein processes of categorisation or operationalisation are set aside, and the vignette is approached by the reader without drawing conclusions from the experience. (shrink)

Russian-speaking homecare workers deploy two divergent discursive practices—professionalism and sainthood—in understanding carework. These two meaning-making systems have consequences for how this work is performed and experienced by workers. Surprisingly, the division is not based on gender. Instead, immigration laws filter Jewish and Orthodox Christian immigrants from the former Soviet Union into two separate sets of resettlement institutions. The characteristics of these separate institutional settings shape the discursive tools available to these two groups, leading Jewish refugees to deploy professionalism while Orthodox (...) Christian immigrants deploy sainthood. These discursive practices affect gendered identities, allowing workers in some cases to renegotiate hegemonic notions of masculinity and create new models of “feminine” caregiving. (shrink)

Any historical and critical appreciation of Hegel's basic thesis of the identity of metaphysics with logic cannot fail to compare it with his charging Kant and Fichte with attaching a merely subjective meaning to logical determinations, as well as Schelling with spinozism and extrinsicalness in conceiving the absolute indifference of subject with object. This paper aims to give an account of Hegel's notion of nature as it arises from the fulfillment of the logical idea (as the Anderssein of the idea (...) in which it is in the form of the alienation (Entaeusserung)) by focussing attention on the logical pathway of the notion of externality (Aeusserlichkeit) in the Doctrine of Being. I argue for an alternative to the received view on the outcome of the Logic of Being, by pointing out two different meanings, overlooked so far, attached to the category of measure vs. the notion of Mode and to Spinoza's substance in 1812 and 1832. (shrink)

To readers of the Science of Logic, “mode” signifies the externality of the absolute, and its proper place within the text is at the level of the determinations of reflection, within the Doctrine of Essence. Let us take a look at the third section of the Doctrine of Essence: “Actuality”. In its broadest meaning, this signifies “reflected absoluteness,” that is to say, the unity of essence and existence; therefore, it is not a purely immediate existence, but “the immediate unity of (...) form between inner and outer.” Through this definition, a new kind of logical process is made possible - that of the actual totality’s self-manifestation. In the opening chapter of this section, headed “The Absolute,” the determination of the absolute is carried through from its initial unity to truly absolute identity by means of the complex play of reflection. Hegel’s treatment of this subject is beyond the scope of this paper; but if, at the initial stage of its dialectical cycle, reflection is external to the absolute - instead of being the proper determination of it - then it can at least be observed that in the third subdivision of the chapter what is under consideration is the negative return of the absolute into itself, and that this return is accomplished in such a way that “mode” is both the externality of the absolute and its reflection into itself: its being into itself and for itself. As one of the recent commentators on the Science of Logic has pointed out: “Le mode est ‘1’apparance comme apparance’: avec lui se profile un type d’extériorité qui ne sera plus en dette à l’egard d’une interiorité … la manifestation de l’absolu n’est pas une sortie de soi, mais plutôt sa constitution dans l’exteriorité des modes, puis des modalités de l’effectivité.”. (shrink)

In the 1787 Transcendental Deduction of the Categories Kant indicates the only possible ways by which one can account for a necessary agreement of experience with the concepts of its objects (B166), using analogies between modes of explanation and biological theories about the origin of life. He endorses epigenesis as a model for his system of pure reason (B167). This paper examines various interpretive claims about the meaning of this theory of generation and its significance for Kant’s philosophy (Section 1), (...) showing that, after his Critical shift in perspective, in 1775/77 Kant already combined preformed elements and their purposively oriented formation by natural forces (Section 2). Contrary to the standard view, Kant’s theory of race appears to constitute the background to assess Blumenbach’s later (1799/1781) shift to epigenesis after supporting Haller’s preformism (Section 3). In Section 4, I argue that the ground of affinity between epigenesis and formal idealism rests in tracing the first origin of these conformities: externala posterioriclimate conditions and predisposed germs and dispositions within the generative power of the human body; and externala posterioriexperience and spontaneousa prioriconcepts of its objects, within pure sensory intuiting and pure thinking. In both cases the external empirical conditions would function as occasioning propelling factors affecting internal pre-established forms of generation. (shrink)

From 1754 to 1756 Kant wrote on such central, related topics as the axial rotation of the Earth, the theory of heat, and the composition of matter, focusing on space, force, and motion. It has been noted that each of these topics pertains to his 1755 Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, in which he drew on extant cosmogonies and the analogical form of Newtonianism developed by naturalists including Buffon, Haller, and Thomas Wright. How does Kant build on (...) these various sources? This article aims to provide a nuanced account of specific features of the relation between natural history and natural philosophy in Kant’s early developmental theory of the universe and to illuminate the strategy that guides his innovative, selective appropriation of contemporaneous insights. -/- . (shrink)

Italy is one of the European countries with the highest levels of gender inequalities (World Economic Forum 2011). The aims of this paper were to understand to what extent the well-documented gender gap in Italian adult society has an impact on both political and civic actions of younger generations, and whether the process of participation assumes specific features according to gender. 835 Italian participants (49.6% males; 50.4% female, aged from 16 to 26 years old; 20% under voting age) completed a (...) self-administered questionnaire. Analyses confirmed general trends (voting at elections is the most frequently performed political action among Italian youth) and showed the existence of a small gender gap (a major orientation of young women toward civic action, while young men are more engaged in manifest political participation). The results confirmed that family cultural capital and normative support are significant predictors of political participation, in particular for girls and young women. (shrink)

This text introduces a symposium on the thought and legacy of the French Marxist, Daniel Bensaïd. The authors consider Bensaïd’s theoretical contributions to Marxism, especially the concepts of temporality, political strategy, and revolutionary organisation, as well as his ability to fuse militant activism and intellectual work. This is followed by brief summaries of the articles gathered in the symposium, and a reflection on Bensaïd’s relevance for future Marxist research.

The significance of the notions of actuality and potentiality in Plotinus' thought can hardly be overstated. Throughout the Enneads, they are crucial to understanding the specific causality of intelligible realities and the relation of participation between intelligible and sensible realms. In Ennead II.5, Plotinus for the first time provides a systematic clarification of his peculiar use of these terms, through a sustained revision of Aristotle's own elaboration of the topic and of his terminology. The treatise discusses the different meanings of (...) potentiality and actuality as well as the way each of them applies or does not apply to the sensible realm, to the intelligible realm, and to matter. (shrink)

This article analyzes the status of passive potentiality of prime matter and sensible objects in Plotinus' Enneads. In particular, it will focus on Enneads II 5 [25] and confront it with other treatises, specifically Enneads III 6 [26]; II 6 [17]; VI 2 [43] and VI 3 [44]. It aims at offering a new interpretation of treatise 25 and at proposing a reconstruction of Plotinus' notion of change in the sensible realm that illustrates both his critique of Aristotle's notion of (...) substantial change and his acceptance of Aristotle's view of qualitative change. (shrink)

This article deals with the issue of the abolition of both property and family for the Guardians in Plato's Republic. My aim is to show that such abolition answers to the problem of the art of ruling raised in Book I: how can the rulers rule not in their own interest, but rather in the interest of the ruled? The abolition of property and family changes the very economic and social framework of the city, leading to an identity of the (...) private interests of the rulers and of the common interests of the polis, by establishing a koinÜnia among the Guardians and a relationship of interdependence between them and the producers. Nevertheless, the exclusion of the lower class from the abolition of property and family creates a situation of fundamental asymmetry in the relationship between the classes and renders ambiguous the manner in which the producers belong to the city, creating in this way a 'differential inclusion into citizenship'. (shrink)

The article traces the reflections found in the Hellenika on the theme of Athens/Sparta bipolarity, with the intention of illustrating Xenophon's interest in this international arrangement of the Greek world and of emphasizing its repercussions in Xenophon’s historiographical project.