This essay develops the concept of the “social body” as a metaphorical representation of hierarchical relationships in Thailand, as well as the physical embodiment of social, religious, and political structures. To do so, I trace the symbolic coordinates of groups that correspond to conceptions of individual bodies, along with the habituated means of perceiving as part of a collective. I argue that conventional Thai social interactions involve active attention to and care of the “social body,” in which differential roles are (...) necessary for group functioning. Ethnographic descriptions of social interactions in public and semi-private arenas depict the spontaneous and embodied root of moral action in these contexts. The values thus enacted, however, challenge normative ideals of distributive justice and open up questions about “care” for a social body that validates unequal power and resource distribution. (shrink)

The latest academic discussion has focused on the potential and risks associated with technological systems. In this perspective, defining a set of legal rules could be the priority but this action appears extremely difficult at the European level and, therefore, in the last years, a set of ethical principles contained in many different documents has been published. The need to develop trustworthy and human-centric AI technologies is accomplished by creating these two types of rule sets: legal and ethical. The paper (...) aims to critically analyse and compare these rule sets in order to understand their possible relationships in the regulation of legal problems, not only theoretically but also, where present, in some practical applications of AI, such as self-driving cars, smart toys, smart contracts and legal design. Indeed, the purpose is to identify how legal rules and ethical principles can interact for adequate regulation of AI, with particular regard to the fields of application that will be analysed. (shrink)

Temporality represents the most important and difficult question of phenomenology: decisive for its idea of phenomenon and consciousness. What means that time is the appearing itself, so not a time of consciousness but the consciousness itself: this is the phenomenological question about the origin of time. Composed in three decades approximately—from 1904 to 1934—Husserlian contributions phenomenology of temporality constitutes the most extensive corpus about this matter in the canon of occidental philosophy. They lead in three main directions and correspond to (...) the same number of periods of their development: the mathesis of intentional manifolds, the metaphysics of individuality, the theory of temporal self-constitution. After the description of the phases, the sources and the internal articulations, the paper makes room for a brief and essential glossary of phenomenology of temporality, made up of some of the most considerable and aporetic notions: the retention, and its bond with protention, individuality and its elusive essence, the flow and the stream. Lastly, the paper inspects and examines some of the most remarkable critics to phenomenology of temporality, from Heidegger to Derrida, from Bergmann to Lévinas, in order to demonstrate how leading was its role in the whole philosophy of the twentieth century. (shrink)

The author analyses how debate over the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has tended to privilege certain conceptions of psychiatric diagnosis over others, as well as to polarise positions regarding psychiatric diagnosis. The article aims to muddy the black and white tenor of many discussions regarding psychiatric diagnosis by moving away from the preoccupation with diagnosis as classification and refocusing attention on diagnosis as a temporally and spatially complex, as well as highly mediated process. (...) The article draws on historical, sociological and first-person perspectives regarding psychiatric diagnosis in order to emphasise the conceptual—and potentially ethical—benefits of ambivalence vis-à-vis the achievements and problems of psychiatric diagnosis. (shrink)

A friend of mine recently lent me a little book entitled What a Young Wife Ought to Know, by Mrs. Emma F. Angell Drake, M.D., of Denver, Colorado. It was published in 1902 and is one of the Self and Sex series of “pure books on avoided subjects.” Its premise is that “Woman [is] fitted by the creator for wifehood and motherhood,” and it has chapters entitled “Home and Dress,” “Marital Relations,” “The Mother the Teacher,” and so on. My friend (...) had come across it in, of all places, the library of a mental hospital where his wife was being treated for postpartum depression. He stole it as a matter of principle. What a Young Wife Ought to Know has its late-medieval equivalent in a poem of around two hundred lines known as “What the Goodwife Taught Her Daughter,” which has been used quite often by medieval historians as evidence for aspects of female behavior in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. There are problems with this, though, as a comparison with Mrs. Emma F. Angell Drake's book shows. Historians of the early twentieth century would not, I assume, use What a Young Wife Ought to Know as evidence of social practice; rather, its interest is ideological. The same is true of “What the Goodwife Taught Her Daughter”: it is a poem that speaks for the special interests that have shaped its form and content. (shrink)

In this paper an aesthetics is proposed based on the De Martino concept of “crisis of presence”. If one takes such a terrifying notion seriously a very different idea of art can be experienced, an art suited in the apocalyptic time of the “end of the world”. An art that can only begin when the fear for the non-human and materic in us is set aside.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Towards Language Justice:A Call to Identify and Overcome Structural BarriersFelicity RatwayThe patient I am interpreting for praises my interpretation. I've done nothing particularly noteworthy to merit her praise; I followed basic ethical tenets, nothing more. Hearing everything the provider says rather than a brief synopsis exceeds her expectations after many experiences working with untrained interpreters, or being refused interpreting services altogether. The bar shouldn't be this low.I am exhausted. (...) Like most interpreters, I am an independent contractor. I must work 5 am–9 pm to get paid for 8 hours of work. With some language companies, I earn less than minimum wage. To many new interpreters, $35 per hour sounds great—then they realize that driving to and from a one-hour appointment involves two hours of unpaid drive time. In rural areas, this really takes a toll. I spend hours checking pay stubs; I find errors nearly every pay period, but I wouldn't have a court case for the repeated underpayments because when I reach out to ask for the errors to be fixed, they are eventually corrected. Despite my state and national certifications and Master's degree in Interpreting and Translation Studies, medical interpreting doesn't pay the bills. I supplement my income through multiple other jobs.Laws intended to protect the patients we work with as interpreters are seldom enforced. Title VI Guidance defines a competent interpreter as one who has been trained, demonstrated proficiency, demonstrated interpreting skills, and agrees to abide by ethical standards. Patients fare better when competent interpreters are available, but when most patient and provider experiences are with interpreters who haven't met competency standards, patients and providers (understandably) lose trust in the profession. The profession has few opportunities for advancement and struggles to attract interpreters to go through rigorous training or build a long-term career. Skilled interpreters soon leave for greener pastures: the Oregon Health Authority (OHA) houses a registry of interpreters who meet minimum state training and proficiency requirements, and a 2019–2021 study found that roughly 92% of interpreters due to renew dropped off of the registry instead.When I began interpreting, I was shocked by how infrequently laws protecting patients' rights to interpreting services were followed in practice. At primary care appointments, patients often cannot answer questions about specialist visits because interpretation was not provided at the specialist's office. I knew recipients of federal funds couldn't [End Page 164] legally bill patients for interpreting services, yet I was asked to sight-translate paperwork that stated patients would be billed for interpreting services if they were late to an appointment. I reported the issue; years later, the same paperwork would still appear on their public-facing website. I discovered that though state law required credentialed interpreters to be made available, no agency had been tasked with enforcing that law; all that could be done with my complaint was to refer it to the patient's insurance company.In Oregon, Coordinated Care Organizations (CCOs) manage Medicaid plans, and are required to pay for interpreting services for their members. Instead of hiring interpreters directly, many contract with language companies that, in turn, hire us. Providers must book interpreters through the specific language companies contracted with the patient's CCO to avoid paying for the interpreter themselves. I am often called to interpret for speakers of indigenous languages even though I am not able to meet their needs as a Spanish interpreter. I offer contact information for organizations that could provide interpretation in the appropriate language, but the receptionist tells me that she can only go through specific vendors because the clinic doesn't want to have to pay out-of-pocket. Indigenous-led organizations that pay indigenous interpreters a living wage are not contracted with the CCOs in my region. In some cases, when interpreters are not available for a particular language through the CCO's preferred vendor, providers instead ask that an appointment be rescheduled, hoping that an interpreter will be available later. I have seen speakers of rare languages seeking primary care end up in the hospital after being rescheduled several times.Providers I work with often don't know... (shrink)

This article investigates the place of trust in learning relations in the classroom, not only between teacher and student, but also between student and student. To do this, it will first examine a pedagogy called community of inquiry, espoused by John Dewey and used in most Philosophy for Children courses in Australia. It will then consider what different forms of trust are involved in other power relations in the classroom, particularly the rational structuralism of R.S Peters, or the experiential philosophy (...) of Maria Montessori. It concludes that a community of inquiry shifts the ethical learning relation in significantly different ways because for educational growth, it values ethical trust more highly than a strategic trust in logical principle, duty, Truth, or cost/benefit analysis. (shrink)

This article investigates how the turn to affect within the humanities and social sciences re-imagines the relationship between cultural theory and science. We focus on how the writings of two neuroscientists (Antonio Damasio and Joseph LeDoux) and one developmental psychologist (Daniel Stern) are used in order to ground certain claims about affect within cultural theory. We examine the motifs at play in cultural theories of affect, the models of (neuro)biology with which they work, and some fascinating missteps characterizing the taking (...) up of scientific literature. While neuroscience frames the affective as part of a system of regulation that makes both self and social coherence possible, in cultural theory’s narratives, by contrast, affectivity becomes a placeholder for the inherent dynamism and mutability of matter. The article interrogates the consequences of cultural theory’s strange borrowings from neuroscience and developmental psychology in their institution of a model of subjectivity preoccupied with a lived present in excess of the hold of habit and embodied history. (shrink)

Felice argues that individual human rights, which have proven to be of enormous value in the twentieth century, must be extended to communities ranging from the family unit to the entire human community.

Drawing on a wide range of texts - from philosophical ethology to classical texts, and from continental philosophy to literature - Cimatti creates a dialogue with Flaubert, Derrida, Temple Grandin, Heidegger as well as Malaparte and Landolfi explores what human animality looks like, with a particular focus on the work of Gilles Deleuze.

Marshall's article used Wittgenstein to argue that self functions as an explanation for a name rather than a referent. This brief response tries to rescue Marshall from an apparent reduction of self to material body without returning him to the mind/body dualism that he, with Wittgenstein and Dennett, seeks to avoid. It treats ‘I’ as an emergent institutional fact, not inconsistent with a constructed explanation or narrative, but emerging from shared social practices rather than an abstracted agent.

The essay aims to examine some contributions of A. Schutz to general epistemological questions, starting from his view of the scientific theories and concepts formation, of type and model, of relevance, of proof and degree of belief. Great attention is paid to the resumption of Carneades’ mechanism, in which each operation of confirmation is linked to a level of credibility. The focus on these issues allows not only to understand Schutz’s context, but also to establish a comparison with Chisholm’s reading (...) of Carneades. (shrink)

ArgumentAmong the many limitations of the deficit model of science communication is its inability to account for the qualities of communication products that arise from creative decisions about form and style. This paper examines two documentaries about the nature of time – Patricio Guzmán'sNostalgia for the Lightand the first episode of the BBC'sWonders of the Universeseries – in order to consider how film style inflects science with different meanings. The analysis pays particular attention to the ways in which authority is (...) assigned between film author, narrator, and depicted subjects and the degree to which different film styles promote epistemological certainty or hesitancy. (shrink)

More than any other early modern text, Montaigne's Essais have come to be associated with the emergence of a distinctively modern subjectivity, defined in opposition to the artifices of language and social performance. Felicity Green challenges this interpretation with a compelling revisionist reading of Montaigne's text, centred on one of his deepest but hitherto most neglected preoccupations: the need to secure for himself a sphere of liberty and independence that he can properly call his own, or himself. Montaigne and (...) the Life of Freedom restores the Essais to its historical context by examining the sources, character and significance of Montaigne's project of self-study. That project, as Green shows, reactivates and reshapes ancient practices of self-awareness and self-regulation, in order to establish the self as a space of inner refuge, tranquillity and dominion, free from the inward compulsion of the passions and from subjection to external objects, forces and persons. (shrink)

Giorgio Prodi was an important Italian scientist who developed an original philosophy based on two basic assumptions: 1. life is mainly a semiotic phenomenon; 2. matter is somewhat a semiotic phenomenon. Prodi applies Peirce's cenopythagorean categories to all phenomena of life and matter: Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. They are interconnected meaning that the very ontology of the world, according to Prodi, is somewhat semiotic. In fact, when one describes matter as “made of” Firstness and Secondness, this means that matter ‘intrinsically’ (...) implies semiotics. At the very heart of Prodi’s theory lies a metaphysical hypothesis which is an ambitious theoretical gesture that places Prodi in an awkward position with respect to the customary philosophical tradition. In fact, his own ontology is neither dualistic nor monistic. Such a conclusion is unusual and weird, but much less unusual in present time than it was when it was first introduced. The actual resurgence of various “realisms” make Prodi’s semiotic realism much more interesting than when he first proposed his philosophical approach. What is uncommon, in Prodi perspective, is that he never separated semiotics from the materiality of the world. Prodi does not agree with the “standard” structuralist view of semiosis as an artificial and unnatural activity. On the contrary, Prodi believed semiosis lies at the very bottom of life. On one hand, Prodi maintains a strong realist stance; on the other, a realism that includes semiosis as ‘natural’ phenomena. This last view is very unusual because all forms, more or less, of realism exclude semiosis from nature but they frequently “reduce” semiosis to non-semiotic elements. According to Prodi, semiosis is a completely natural phenomenon. (shrink)

The negation constitutes one of the main troubles for attempts to naturalise the semantics of the logical vocabulary, as shown by the problems related to the interpretation of disjunction in the treatment of error (Fodor) or to the definition of contraries in the analysis of reidentification abilities (Millikan). There seems to be no way out between “no (naturalized) negation, no grip of logic on the world” and “no (truth-functional) negation, no logic”. Unexpected help may come from the cognitive phenomenology of (...) negation. For three reasons: • Firstly, because it allows a distinction to be made between semantic analysis, identification of the possession conditions and psychology of the acquisition of the notion of negation, a distinction whose absence produces many misunderstandings between those who support a naturalization of semantics and those who oppose it. • Then because it places negation at the level of the contrast between beliefs, a terrain that is hostile to some naturalizers. • Finally, because it makes it possible to define a peculiar type of liberalised naturalization of semantics and, consequently, to present a hypothesis for the naturalization of cognitive phenomenology. (shrink)