Outlining an improved approach that meets the expectations of 21st-century students and teachers, the author proposes a new definition of that object of study which addresses inconsistencies in the literary canon by including nontraditional narratives such as films, comic books and pop songs.

In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, an important conceptual battleground for democratic theorists ought to be, it would seem, the capitalist firm. We are now painfully aware that the typical model of government in so-called investor-owned companies remains profoundly oligarchic, hierarchical, and unequal. Renewing with the literature of the 1970s and 1980s on workplace democracy, a few political theorists have started to advocate democratic reforms of the workplace by relying on an analogy between firm and state. To (...) the extent that a firm is an organization comparable to the state, it too ought to be ruled along democratic lines. Our paper tests the robustness of the analogy between firm and state by considering six major objections to it: the objection from a difference in ends, the objection from shareholders’ property rights, the objection from worker’s consent, the objection from workers’ exit opportunities, the objection from workers’ expertise, and the objection from the fragility of firms. We find all of these objections wanting. While the paper does not ambition to settle the issue of workplace democracy at once, our goal is to pave the way for a more in-depth study of the ways in which firms and states can be compared and the possible implications this may have for our understanding of the nature of managerial authority and the governance of firms. (shrink)

Weber’s conception of politics has long been interpreted in relativistic and “agonistic” terms. Such interpretations neglect Weber’s notion of “objectivity” as well as the complex links between politics as “community,” on the one hand, and as “value sphere,” on the other. Seen against this backdrop, Berufpolitik becomes a balancing act in which the pursuit of subjective values is objectively constrained not only by the ethic of responsibility, but more generally by the political imperative to safeguard the preconditions for communal order (...) and, in late modernity, of liberal freedoms. Without them, neither the objective “clarity” generated by science nor the subjective political commitments based on “clear vision” would be possible. (shrink)

The article illustrates the different meanings of the term “logic” in Weber's work and then proceeds to discuss his approach to the explanation of historical events and in particular to counterfactual analysis. Weber's epistemology is first situated within the neo-Kantian debates of his time as well as legal positivism and historical jurisprudence. The article then focuses on this author's conception of science as a value sphere, on the aims and methods of explanation in the social and historical sciences and on (...) the key concepts of possibility judgements and adequate causation. The central role played by counterfactuals and modal logic is illustrated through the example of the battle of Marathon, which Weber himself saw as the starting point of a causal chain leading to the rise of Western rationalism. The article concludes by highlighting the pioneering role of Weber's counterfactualism for the subsequent development of possible worlds theory and its use in the causal analysis of singular historical events. (shrink)

Il Teatro Sociale di Sondrio, inaugurato nel 1824, rappresenta tra XIX e XX secolo il più importante centro teatrale dell’intera Valtellina. Considerando anche l’importanza che riveste nella storia locale, il teatro sondriese può essere preso come esempio attraverso cui riconoscere, da un punto di vista particolare, le evoluzioni a cui va incontro la drammaturgia italiana a cavallo dei due secoli. Lo studio dei manifesti conservati negli archivi e lo spoglio dei periodici locali hanno permesso di analizzare le modalità e le (...) tempistiche con cui venivano allestiti gli spettacoli e l’accoglienza di questi da parte del pubblico e della critica di Sondrio: su queste basi, il seguente studio cerca di offrire una fisionomia del pubblico teatrale otto-novecentesco, un pubblico provinciale, lontano da quello delle grandi città ma che, come si vuole dimostrare, condivide con quest’ultimo gli stessi gusti: dalla ricerca della novità alla passione per i drammi sentimentali, dalla pièce bien faite alla nuova drammaturgia borghese. (shrink)

En los últimos meses no hay día que no leamos en las noticias o escuchemos en la radio la tragedia de una familia, grupos de jóvenes o de personas mayores que son expulsadas de sus viviendas. Incluso las redes sociales se hacen eco al instante de procesos de desahucio en muchos barrios de nuestras ciudades.

The creation of the welfare state has been one of the most significant achievements of the “long” twentieth century, now come to a close. Yet, since at least the 1980s the welfare state has been the object of heated controversy. The capacity of social policy to reconcile economic growth with social justice has been put into serious question, especially in the light of the so-called “globalization” process. More and more frequently, efficiency and equality, growth and redistribution, competitiveness and solidarity are (...) referred to as polar opposites that can only thrive at each other's expenses. The new millennium has opened under the shadow of a resurrected “big trade-off,” offering only two possible coherent value-combinations and thus virtually only one viable institutional scenario, centred around the first combination. Plausible as it may sound, this trade-off logic is certainly not inescapable. But how can we find a way out of it? The task is one of identifying new value combinations and institutional arrangements that are both mixed and virtuous, i.e. capable of producing simultaneous advances on all the affected fronts. In this paper, I will develop some considerations around this thorny challenge, with special reference to pension insurance and health care. (shrink)

Zarzuela, as a musical, humorous, and theatrical genre, was similar to operetta and weighed heavily in creating a utopian viewpoint in Spain at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Such an assertion may contradict the widespread idea that utopian literature was scarce in the country and that the existence of some exceptions only confirms the rule. True, there are not many self-declared utopian works in the period in question. On the whole, utopian ideas were (...) drawn up throughout the nineteenth century, even from standpoints that were inclined to create a new world. In the French case, for example, Riot-Sarcey has noted the strategy adopted by liberals and republicans when it came to.. (shrink)

Hypertext may represent a new paradigm capable of exploring legal sources within which links are established according to pertinent relationships found between statute texts and case law. However, to discover relevant information in such a network, a browsing mechanism is not enough when faced with a large volume of texts. This paper describes a new retrieval model where documents are represented according to both their content and relationships with other sources of information.

Utopianism has found expression in several ways throughout history and has reflected the peculiarities of the cultural, political, social, and economic settings in which it has come about. Spain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been no exception, because while the country has not occupied a significant place in the dominant historical narrative of utopias, recent research has begun to show that it was indeed where many tracts with utopian—and, by way of correlation, dystopian—content came on the scene. Whether (...) we look at the concept of utopia from a formal standpoint, in the sense of a specific literary genre, or we demand certain content features to discuss true utopias, we find that they thrived in.. (shrink)

This article illustrates the relationships between political parties and the healthcare sector in Italy since the 1950s. The several was though which parties have "exploited" health policics are explored, ranging from the selective extension of care entitlements to the various occupational categories to the clientelistic ties with doctors, from the placement of party personnell in the various administrative posts to illegal financing. The author argues that the partitocratie exploitation of the health care sector has greatly contributed to the failure of (...) the 1978 reform establishing a National Health Service. This failure has in its turn backlashed against the partitocratic government, accellerating its demise in the early 1990s. The article concludes with some considerations on the future of Italy's health policy and, more generally, welfare state policy. (shrink)

Fibromyalgia is a chronic pain syndrome characterized by dysfunctional processing of nociceptive stimulation. Neuroimaging studies have pointed out that pain-related network functioning seems to be altered in these patients. It is thought that this clinical symptomatology may be maintained or even strengthened because of an enhanced expectancy for painful stimuli or its forthcoming appearance. However, neural electrophysiological correlates associated with such attentional mechanisms have been scarcely explored. In the current study, expectancy processes of upcoming laser stimulation (painful and non-painful) and (...) its further processing were explored by event-related potentials (ERPs). Nineteen fibromyalgia patients and twenty healthy control volunteers took part in the experiment. Behavioral measures (reaction times and subjective pain perception) were also collected. We manipulated the pain/no pain expectancy through an S1–S2 paradigm (cue-target). S1 (image: triangle or square) predicted the S2 appearance (laser stimulation: warmth or pinprick sensation). Laser stimuli were delivered using a CO2 laser device. Temporal and spatial principal component analyses were employed to define and quantify the ERP component reliability. Statistical analyses revealed the existence of an abnormal pattern of pain expectancy in patients with fibromyalgia. Specifically, our results showed attenuated amplitudes at posterior lCNV component in anticipation of painful stimulation that was not found in healthy participants. In contrast, although larger P2 amplitudes to painful compared to innocuous events were shown, patients did not show any amplitude change in this laser-evoked response as a function of pain predictive cues (as occurred in the healthy control group). Additionally, analyses of the subjective perception of pain and reaction time indicated that laser stimuli preceded by pain cues were rated as more painful than those signaling non-pain expectancy and were associated with faster responses. Differences between groups were not found. The present findings suggest the presence of dysfunction in pain expectation mechanisms in fibromyalgia that eventually may make it difficult for patients to correctly interpret signs that prevent pain symptoms. Furthermore, the abnormal pattern in pain expectancy displayed by fibromyalgia patients could result in ineffective pain coping strategies. Understanding the neural correlates of pain processing and its modulatory factors is crucial to identify treatments for chronic pain syndromes. (shrink)

Apresenta os fundamentos históricos e institucionais da Educação grega clássica e da proposta de educação originada na Paideia Cristã. Aponta aspectos da formação do Cristianismo a partir da missionarização de Paulo e de suas Cartas, destinadas às comunidades cristãs emergentes, distantes de Jerusalém, núcleo originário do Cristianismo. Destaca o papel das Cartas Paulinas na constituição das comunidades cristãs primordiais. Apresenta as atuais definições de Educação à Distância e de Cibercultura, analisando aspectos da dinâmica atual de apresentação de percursos formativos à (...) Distância e de suas potencialidades e desafios. Aponta para a defesa da Educação à Distância como dispositivo plenamente potencial de formação acadêmica, cultural e educacional, tal como se deu na Paideia Cristã. (shrink)

Essays discuss reason, self-control, self-definition, time, cause and effect, accidents, and responsibility, and explain why people want free will.

Ethologists and others studying animal behavior in a spirit are in need of a descriptive language and method that are neither anachronistically bound by behaviorist scruples nor prematurely committed to particular Just such an interim descriptive method can be found in intentional system theory. The use of intentional system theory is illustrated with the case of the apparently communicative behavior of vervet monkeys. A way of using the theory to generate data - including usable, testable data - is sketched. The (...) underlying assumptions of this approach can be seen to ally it directly with theorizing in evolutionary biology, which has recently come under attack from Stephen Gould and Richard Lewontin, who castigate it as the Their arguments, which are strongly analogous to B. F, Skinner's arguments against point to certain pitfalls that attend the careless exercise of such thinking (and rival varieties of thinking as well), but do not constitute a fundamental objection to either adaptationist theorizing or its cousin, intentional system theory. (shrink)

The controversy over the old ideal of “value-free science” has cooled significantly over the past decade. Many philosophers of science now agree that even ethical and political values may play a substantial role in all aspects of scientific inquiry. Consequently, in the last few years, work in science and values has become more specific: Which values may influence science, and in which ways? Or, how do we distinguish illegitimate from illegitimate kinds of influence? In this paper, I argue that this (...) problem requires philosophers of science to take a new direction. I present two case studies in the influence of values on scientific inquiry: feminist values in archaeology and commercial values in pharmaceutical research. I offer a preliminary assessment of these cases, that the influence of values was legitimate in the feminist case, but not in the pharmaceutical case. I then turn to three major approaches to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate influences of values, including the distinction between epistemic and non-epistemic values and Heather Douglas’ distinction between direct and indirect roles for values. I argue that none of these three approaches gives an adequate analysis of the two cases. In the concluding section, I briefly sketch my own approach, which draws more heavily on ethics than the others, and is more promising as a solution to the current problem. This is the new direction in which I think science and values should move. (shrink)

This book brings together his essays on the philosphy of mind, artificial intelligence, and cognitive ethology that appeared in inaccessible journals from 1984...

This article explores the ethical architecture of the ‘beneficiary pays’ principle, which holds that agents can come to possess remedial obligations of corrective justice to others through the involuntary receipt of benefits stemming from injustice. Advocates of the principle face challenges of both persuasion and limitation in seeking to convince those unmoved of its normative force, and to explain in which cases of benefiting from injustice it does and does not give rise to rectificatory obligations. The article considers ways in (...) which advocates of the principle might seek to win over those sceptical of its merits by employing a modified principle which sidesteps the issue of enforceability, before considering the question of whether the argument can be expanded from cases of benefiting from wrongdoing specifically to other sorts of situation where one agent involuntarily benefits from another's loss. (shrink)

Using a parallel with stage magic, it is argued that far from being seen as an extreme alternative, illusionism as articulated by Frankish should be considered the front runner, a conservative theory to be developed in detail, and abandoned only if it demonstrably fails to account for phenomena, not prematurely dismissed as 'counterintuitive'. We should explore the mundane possibilities thoroughly before investing in any magical hypotheses.

In recent decades, many jurisdictions have moved toward legalizing euthanasia and assisted suicide—together with a growing recognition of the moral right to a medically assisted death. Herewe draw on a comprehensive quantitative review of existing laws on assisted dying, experimental survey evidence, and four decades of time-series data to explore the relationship between these legislative transitions and changing moral attitudes. Our analysis reveals that existing laws on medical aid in dying impose a common set of eligibility restrictions, based on the (...) patient’s age, decision-making capacity, prognosis and the nature of their illness. These eligibility restrictions shape public moral approval of physician-assisted death, equally in countries where euthanasia is legal (i.e., Spain) and illegal (i.e., the United Kingdom). Additionally, records of public attitudes toward euthanasia across numerous countries over a forty-year period uncovered anticipatory growth in moral approval leading up to legalization, but no accelerated growth thereafter. Collectively, our findings suggest that legal frameworks for medical aid in dying crystallize patterns of moral intuition. (shrink)

Despite growing interest in risks of societal collapse due to anthropogenic climate change, there exists no consensus about how collapse should be understood. In this article, we critically examine existing definitions and argue that none adequately address the challenges for conceptualizing collapse that climate change presents. We therefore propose an alternative conception, which regards collapse as a reduction of collective capacity resulting in a pervasive and difficult-to-reverse loss of basic functionality. Our conception is dynamic in that it focuses on the (...) interrelations of constituent subsystems. It also distinguishes collapse from transformations needed to address climate change and provides insight into the relationship between collapse and sustainability. [Open access]. (shrink)

The fundamental postulate of sociobiology is that individuals exploit favorable environments to increase their genetic representation in the next generation. The data on fertility differentials among contemporary humans are not cotvietent with this postulate. Given the importance ofHomo sapiensas an animal species in the natural world today, these data constitute particularly challenging and interesting problem for both human sociobiology and sociobiology as a whole.The first part of this paper reviews the evidence showing an inverse relationship between reproductive fitness and “endowment” (...) in contemporary, urbanized societies. It is shown that a positive relationship is observed only for those cohorts who bore their children during a unique period of rising fertility, 1935–1960, and that these cohorts are most often cited by sociobiologists as supporting the central postulate of sociobiology. Cohorts preceding and following these show the characteristic inverse relationship between endowment and fertility. The second section reviews the existing so-ciobiological models of this inverse relationship, namely, those of Barkow, Burley, and Irons, as well as more informal responses among sociobiologists to the persistent violation of sociobiology's central postulate, such as those of Alexander and Dawkins. The third section asks whether the goals of sociobiology, given the violation of its fundamental postulate by contemporary human societies, might not be better thought of as applied rather than descriptive, with respect to these societies. A proper answer to this question begins with the measurement of the pace and direction of natural selection within modern human populations, as compared to other sources of change. The vast preponderance of the shifts in human trait distributions, including the IQ distribution, appears to be due to environmental rather than genetic change. However, there remains the question of just how elastic these distributions are in the absence of reinforcing genetic change. (shrink)

This book offers an account of Kant's theory of moral motivation that comprehends the most challenging and controversial aspects of Kant's theory of the will and human moral motivational psychology. It argues for a new approach to the question about the purity of the Kantian moral motive.

Sometimes it takes years of debate for philosophers to discover what it is they really disagree about. Sometimes they talk past each other in long series of books and articles, never guessing at the root disagreement that divides them. But occasionally a day comes when something happens to coax the cat out of the bag. "Aha!" one philosopher exclaims to another, "so that's why you've been disagreeing with me, misunderstanding me, resisting my conclusions, puzzling me all these years!".