In this paper, I argue that Herrera’s discussion of the emanative process in his Gate of Heaven is a plausible source for Spinoza’s concept of the attributes as developed in Ethics. While Herrera’s influence on the development of Spinoza’s thought has been discussed, I argue that previous interpretations have not captured the nature of this influence. I will first offer an overview of Herrera’s discussion of the relationship between the One and the sefirot. I will then criticize a recent discussion (...) of Herrera’s influence on Spinoza by Giuseppa Saccaro Del Buffa, and offer a summary of my interpretation of the concept of attribute in Spinoza. Finally, I will show that Herrera’s discussion of the sefirot, the first emanations, as divine activities, rather than created things, inspired Spinoza’s concept of thedivine attributes. (shrink)

Due to the environmental and health impact of the private transport sector, social scientists have largely focused on psychosocial and contextual factors associated with people's choice over transport means. This study aims to contribute to this line of research by applying a user-centered approach, with the objective of taking into account the specific environmental and social context of the metropolitan area of Cagliari city. To accomplish this aim, four groups of people were matched according to their shared starting point: car (...) users vs. public transport users, and light-rail users vs. non-light-rail users. Groups were interviewed using a focus group method. Participants were invited to discuss their everyday travel experiences and to exchange their ideas on different sustainable and less sustainable means of transport. Both consolidated drivers/barriers in the field of environmental psychology and public transportation design features have been investigated. Other than highlighting the importance of socio-psychological factors to promote more sustainable transport choices like in previous studies, the present research offers an insight into how these aspects and factors are shaped and experienced in the narratives of residents. (shrink)

Although the COVID-19 pandemic is a serious public health and economic emergency, and although effective vaccines are the best weapon we have against it, there are groups and individuals who oppose certain kinds of vaccines because of personal moral or religious reasons. The most widely discussed case has been that of certain religious groups that oppose research on COVID-19 vaccines that use cell lines linked to abortions and that object to receiving those vaccine because of their moral opposition to abortion. (...) However, moral opposition to COVID-19 vaccine research can be based on other considerations, both secular and religious. We argue that religious or personal moral objections to vaccine research are unethical and irresponsible, and in an important sense often irrational. They are unethical because of the risk of causing serious harm to other people for no valid reason; irresponsible because they run counter to individual and collective responsibilities to contribute to important public health goals; and in the case of certain kinds of religious opposition, they might be irrational because they are internally inconsistent. All in all, our argument translates into the rather uncontroversial claim that we should prioritize people’s lives over religious freedom in vaccine research and vaccination roll out. (shrink)

The notion of grounding is usually conceived as an objective and explanatory relation. It connects two relata if one—the ground—determines or explains the other—the consequence. In the contemporary literature on grounding, much effort has been devoted to logically characterize the formal aspects of grounding, but a major hard problem remains: defining suitable grounding principles for universal and existential formulae. Indeed, several grounding principles for quantified formulae have been proposed, but all of them are exposed to paradoxes in some very natural (...) contexts of application. We introduce in this paper a first-order formal system that captures the notion of grounding and avoids the paradoxes in a novel and non-trivial way. The system we present formally develops Bolzano’s ideas on grounding by employing Hilbert’s ε-terms and an adapted version of Fine’s theory of arbitrary objects. (shrink)

Moral problems often prompt emotional responses that invoke intuitive judgments of right and wrong. While emotions inform judgment across many domains, they can also lead to ethical failures that could be avoided by using a more deliberative, analytical decision-making process. In this article, we describe joint evaluation as an effective tool to help decision makers manage their emotional assessments of morality.

In this paper we investigate ways to comply with justice in a liberal democracy. In order to do that, we sketch Rawls’s account of moral-consensus stability and discuss the alternative idea of stability reached through a modus vivendi. We defend modus vivendi as a way to achieve stability backed by a variety of reasons and even by ‘non-reasons’. By ‘non-reasons’ we mean alternative sources of motivation for compliance as a precondition of a stable coexistence. We focus on such sources, which (...) differ from reasons and beliefs, that are practices, shared values, and value experiences, in light of both a theoretical-political and a qualitative social-ontological perspective. We argue that individuals who experience the same values become collectives and even stable ones: the sharing of values creates social unity and makes collectives solid and resistant to individualistically centrifugal tendencies. (shrink)

Early diagnosis of leaf diseases is a fundamental tool in precision agriculture, thanks to its high correlation with food safety and environmental sustainability. It is proven that plant diseases are responsible for serious economic losses every year. The aim of this work is to study an efficient network capable of assisting farmers in recognizing pear leaf symptoms and providing targeted information for rational use of pesticides. The proposed model consists of a multioutput system based on convolutional neural networks. The deep (...) learning approach considers five pretrained CNN architectures, namely, VGG-16, VGG-19, ResNet50, InceptionV3, MobileNetV2, and EfficientNetB0, as feature extractors to classify three diseases and six severity levels. Computational experiments are conducted to evaluate the model on the DiaMOS Plant dataset, a self-collected dataset in the field. The results obtained confirm the robustness of the proposed model in automatically extracting the discriminating features of diseased leaves by adopting the multitasking learning paradigm. (shrink)

In his target article, Ismaili M’hamdi advocates for perfectionist public health policymaking, which entails fostering relevant and objectively valuable public health-related capabilities wh...

The paper describes a highly specific Italian action research experience, connected with the trade unions, going through different phases from the 1970s to the present day. The journey is not only a journey through time but also through different approaches. It ranges from the initial experience focusing on health and safety problems at the workplace involving the workers as co-designers of new working environments to today’s search conference experience. For each phase there is a full description and comment on the (...) methods utilised by the research group. The main methodological shift described in the paper is the one from discussion groups, based on Bion’s thinking, to the search conferences, based on Emery’s line of thinking. Both are oriented to the subjectivity of the people involved, although in the discussion group experience the research groups considered the subjectivity of the people involved as the subject of the observation. The researchers’ aim of was to acquire a reliable knowledge of what was at stake and to pass it on to the union that organised the research in order to promote actions. Hence, the action-research circuit is based upon different actors and the process is integrated only from the point of view of the union. In the search conference experience the researchers are involved in a co-design process and so the action-research circuit is really integrated from the researchers’ perspective; there are, of course, multiple perspectives in this case and this opens up epistemological problems that are not discussed in the paper. (shrink)

_Islamicate Occult Sciences in Theory and Practice_ presents the latest research on Islamic occult sciences from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, namely intellectual history, manuscript studies and material culture.

A cavallo tra i due concili di Costanza e Basilea, che hanno fortemente influito sul giudizio della Chiesa in relazione alle donne visionarie, si staglia la figura di Francesca Bussa dei Ponziani. Le visioni politiche di Francesca rappresentano un fulgido esempio di come i modelli brigidini e cateriniani siano stati ripresi e rimodellati su un nuovo, mutato contesto storico. La sua consolidata autorità le consentì di ammonire a più riprese papa Eugenio IV riguardo alla sua partecipazione al concilio (...) di Basilea, intervenendo attivamente nello scenario religioso e politico romano. (shrink)

The contradictions between food poverty affecting a large section of the global population and the everyday wastage of food, particularly in high income countries, have raised significant academic and public attention. All actors in the food chain have a role to play in food waste prevention and reduction, including farmers, food manufacturers and processors, caterers and retailers and ultimately consumers. Food surplus redistribution is considered by many as a partial solution to food waste reduction and food poverty mitigation, while others (...) criticize charitable initiatives as inadequate responses, that inhibit governments from responsibly protecting the citizens right to food. This paper frames food assistance as “hybrid systems”, situating at the intersection of territorial food, public welfare and third sector voluntary systems. Based on available literature and reflections on previous research examining food banks in Italy, we develop a system dynamics conceptual mapping. The aim is to model a set of relations and dynamic mechanisms associated with variables relevant to food waste generation, food recovery for social purposes and food poverty alleviation. The analysis of feedback interactions highlights the vulnerabilities of food assistance systems that occur when addressing food poverty by reducing food surplus. In summary, as the awareness on food poverty and food surplus arises, incentives to food recovery and redistribution strengthen the role of food assistance actors, increasing their exposure to drivers of change, such as retailers’ standards for food surplus prevention. This paper contributes to the current academic debate on charitable food assistance, with insights for policy makers and other systems’ actors. (shrink)

In Poggiolesi we have introduced a rigorous definition of the notion of complete and immediate formal grounding; in the present paper our aim is to construct a logic for the notion of complete and immediate formal grounding based on that definition. Our logic will have the form of a calculus of natural deduction, will be proved to be sound and complete and will allow us to have fine-grained grounding principles.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 44, no. 2. © 2018 by Francesca T. Royster 503 Francesca T. Royster Stories We Tell After Orlando We are in Laila’s backyard for a Sunday barbecue, a cool and windy Chicago June day that immediately followed one of the very hottest days so far this year. My partner Annie and I have brought our fouryear -old daughter Cece and her best friend Gilda to (...) the barbecue, and they’ve dressed themselves in layers, with leggings and hoodies and dresses, girlie but survivalist at the same time in their sequins and metallic purple, discowear for preschoolers. We are at the end of a daylong play date, and we’ve already survived two playgrounds and several tearful standoffs, the ups and downs that come with friends so young. So Annie and I come hungry for some time with our adult friends. The closely packed, brick, three-flat apartment buildings on either side of Laila’s yard provide us with some protection from the wind for a good part of the afternoon. But as the sun goes down and the light dims, we pile on more jackets and scarves over our T-shirts and shorts. Gusts of wind randomly fan the flames until they’re visible over the lid of the grill as Laila cooks. I look out for Laila at the grill while Annie plays catch with the little girls. But I have to do so in stealth, because Laila is as stubborn as she is glamorous. She has insisted on wearing a jacket with green flowing sleeves as she tends the fire, and while she has put her long, graying blond hair up in a chop-sticked bun, she has also pulled out long wispy strands to achieve high femme style. It flies around her face in the wind, flirting with the flames. 504 Francesca T. Royster We are all getting together because later this week Laila will be boarding a plane for the twelve-hour flight home to spend time with her aging mother and father for the summer. “Home” is Lebanon, and we have already experienced losing Laila for a several months in 2006 during a visit home when Israel and Lebanon’s tensions grew into a violent series of bombings that came very close to her Beirut apartment. At the nadir of that time, Laila sent us frantic group letters conveying her worry, sometimes her despair, and her flashbacks to her childhood experiences in wartime Beirut in the 1970s and also in the war of 1982. For a few agonizing weeks her letters stopped coming altogether. The afternoon of our barbecue was the same day as the early morning shootings in the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, where forty -nine people were killed, and at least fifty others were wounded. The victims were all killed while practicing a rite that all of us considered as sacred and necessary as going to church might be for some—dancing the night away in a gay nightclub. This morning we had woken up to this news, blinking still without our glasses, the magnitude of the news headline hard to fathom as it flashed across the screens of our phones. It’s wrong that mass shootings have become part of the fabric of our lives, and probably will be for the lives of Cece and Gilda. The story feels both shocking and sadly familiar: the apparently easy availability of weapons and a pattern of anger taken to the next outrageous step. And then there’s the gay part. Even when I first heard that the shooting took place at a gay bar, I wondered if the killer, Omar Mateen might be gay himself. “Why Orlando?” I thought. Why a mostly unknown dance club? I thought of the messy, red-hot fury of hate and desire when they get mixed up together. As Annie and I talked about the shooting in hushed voices on the playground that morning, we thought of Matthew Shepard. We thought of the recent theory that Shepard most likely knew his killers; that he hung out with them, maybe did drugs with them. Some have written that the narrative that Mateen is gay only confirms the... (shrink)

Dung’s abstract argumentation frameworks have had a very significant role in the rise in interest in argumentation throughout this century. In this paper we will explore the impact of this seminal...