Prosocial organizations represent key actors in the quest to promote positive change, foster social impact, and revitalize cities. Notwithstanding their importance in tackling the increasing challenges threatening our society (e.g., pollution, socio-economic inequalities), these actors may not be perceived as salient in the eyes of different stakeholders, and thus their work may be jeopardized by multiple forms of resistance. Scant attention in research has been devoted to understand how prosocial organizations may acquire saliency and navigate these forms of resistance while (...) pursuing urban revitalization. We address this gap by engaging in a qualitative investigation of a Sicilian cultural center. We found that the prosocial organization in our study could navigate different occurrences of resistance and acquire saliency by enacting mechanisms that leveraged the engagement of supporting stakeholders and the idiosyncratic characteristics of place. Our study contributes to the literature about urban revitalization, prosocial organizations, and stakeholder theory—while also complementing research investigating the role of place in management. (shrink)

Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus' health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion (...) is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled. (shrink)

Abstractionist programs in the philosophy of mathematics have focused on abstraction principles, taken as implicit definitions of the objects in the range of their operators. In second-order logic (SOL) with predicative comprehension, such principles are consistent but also (individually) mathematically weak. This paper, inspired by the work of Boolos (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 87, 137–151, 1986) and Zalta (Abstract Objects, vol. 160 of Synthese Library, 1983), examines explicit definitions of abstract objects. These axioms state that there is a unique (...) abstract encoding all concepts satisfying a given formula $$\phi (F)$$, with F a concept variable. Such a system is inconsistent in full SOL. It can be made consistent with several intricate tweaks, as Zalta has shown. Our approach in this article is simpler: we use a novel method to establish consistency in a restrictive version of predicative SOL. The resulting system, RPEAO, interprets first-order PA in extensional contexts, and has a natural extension delivering a peculiar interpretation of PA $$^2$$. (shrink)

Gothic literature—a genre brimming with madness, supernaturalism, and psychological terror—offers innumerable case studies potentially representing how psychiatric patients perceive their treatment from healthcare professionals. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s famous 1892 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” offers a poignant example of this through its fictional narrator, a diarist many interpret to be suffering from postpartum depression. The fiction here does not stray far from reality: Gilman orchestrated her diarist’s experience to mirror her own, as both real author and fictional character suffocated from (...) a melancholy only made worse by their physicians’ insistence on following the “Rest Cure.” While this instruction to cease all work and activity was a prevalent depression treatment at the time, Gilman, through “The Yellow Wallpaper,” reveals how the intervention ultimately harmed more than helped because it overlooked her—and, by extension, her fictional diarist’s— unique needs and identities. Today, while the ineffective Rest Cure no longer exists, applying observations from “The Yellow Wallpaper” to clinical research calls attention to underrepresentation in treatment development, a costly problem that could be mitigated by mindful incorporation of intersectionality theory into study designs. (shrink)

The paper investigates the epistemological and communicative competences the experts need to use and communicate evidence in the reasoning process leading to diagnosis. The diagnosis and diagnosis communication are presented as intertwined processes that should be jointly addressed in medical consultations, to empower patients’ compliance in illness management. The paper presents defeasible reasoning as specific to the diagnostic praxis, showing how this type of reasoning threatens effective diagnosis communication and entails that we should understand diagnostic evidence as defeasible as well. (...) It argues that metaphors might be effective communicative devices to let the patients understand the relevant defeasors in the diagnostic reasoning process, helping to improve effective diagnosis communication, and also encouraging a change in patients’ beliefs and attitudes on their own experience of illness and illness’ management. (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)

This paper deals with phenomenological distinctions concerning empathy with real persons and empathy with fictional characters. We will introduce both contemporary accounts of our perception of others and Edith Stein’s account of empathy. These theories will turn out to be fruitful in defending our main thesis, i.e. that the differences between empathy with real people and empathy with fictional characters are not structural but just qualitative. We will argue that in both cases empathy is a direct act of perceiving others (...) and their lived experience. However, stemming from Stein’s work, we will underline that empathy with real persons is in principio more vivid and intense than empathy with fictional characters. In order to identify similarities and differences between empathy de vivo and empathy in fiction, we will focus on the following issues: the quality of perception; the motivational context and the “life-world context”; the ontological status of persons vs. characters. (shrink)

When considering whether to enact or not to enact a tempting option, people often anticipate how their choices will make them feel, typically resulting in a “mixed bag” of conflicting emotions. Building on earlier work, we propose an integrative theoretical model of this judgment process and empirically test its main propositions using a novel procedure to capture and integrate both the intensity and duration of anticipated emotions. We identify and theoretically integrate four highly relevant key emotions, pleasure, frustration, guilt, and (...) pride. Whereas the former two (basic hedonic) emotions are anticipated to dissipate relatively quickly, the latter two (self-conscious) emotions are anticipated to be more long-lived. Regarding the relative weighting of emotions, we obtained evidence for a relative guilt bias and pride neglect under default conditions. Furthermore, we identify situational influences on this judgment process and find that rendering self-conscious emotions more situationally salient positively impacts self-control decision-making. We discuss how these findings build on an integrative theory of self-control and how they are useful for the design of choice environments and interventions. (shrink)

Accelerating environmental uncertainty and the need to cope with increasingly complex market and social demands, combine to create high value for the intuitive approach to decision-making at the strategic level. Research on intuition suffers from marked fragmentation, due to the existence of disciplinary silos based on diverse, apparently irreconcilable, ontological and epistemological assumptions. Not surprisingly, there is no integrated interdisciplinary framework suitable for a rich account of intuition, contemplating how affect and cognition intertwine in the intuitive process, and how intuition (...) scales up from the individual to collective decision-making. This study contributes to the construction of a broad conceptual framework, suitable for a multi-level account of intuition and for a fruitful dialogue with distant research areas. It critically discusses two mainstream conceptualizations of intuition which claim to be grounded in a cross-disciplinary consensus. Drawing on the complexity paradigm, it then proposes a conceptualization of intuition as emergence. Finally, it explores the theoretical and practical implications. (shrink)

Para gran parte de la crítica literaria chilena, como para el público lector en general, es elocuente la persistencia del imaginario dictatorial en la narrativa chilena de estas primeras dos décadas del siglo XXI. A pesar de que han transcurrido veinticinco años desde que se reconquistó la democracia, dicho imaginario parece seguir fortaleciéndose y reactualizándose. Esta situación adquiere particular importancia al tener en cuenta un corpus narrativo publicado entre el 2000 y 2014, conformado por escritores nacidos entre 1970 y 1990. (...) Se está ante una producción literaria que ha sido definida como “novela de los hijos”, entendiendo por ello una novela escrita por los hijos de quienes fueron víctimas directas de la dictadura, una narrativa donde se articulan de otra manera los temas de la memoria, el duelo y el trauma. (shrink)

El siguiente artículo tiene por objetivo mostrar la mutua correspondencia entre experiencia e historicidad en la obra de Hans-Georg Gadamer. La experiencia es entendida como el movimiento fundamental de la existencia histórica, la que articula las diversas esferas de la acción humana. La experiencia hermenéutica pone de manifiesto que el comprender no puede fundarse en un procedimiento metódico, sino en la forma del existir situado en el mundo. El acto hermenéutico es entendido como un continuo proceso de apropiación, que se (...) realiza mediante el lenguaje, y donde se van actualizando nuevos significados que develan el carácter aconteciente y móvil de la interpretación. Por ello, la historicidad de la comprensión será el principio hermenéutico fundamental que excluye la posibilidad de una conciencia histórica absoluta, a favor de una “conciencia de la repercusión histórica” (wirkungsgeschtliches Bewußtseins). The following article aims at showing the mutual correspondence between experience and historicity in the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Experience is understood as the fundamental movement of the historical existence, whichvarious spheres ofhuman action. The hermeneutic experience shows thatnot lie in methodical procedure, but in the way of existence in the world. The hermeneuticis understood as a continuing process that is carried out through language and where new meanings are updated, that reveal mobile characteristics of the interpretation. Therefore, the understanding the hermeneutical principle which excludes possibility ofabsolute consciousness, in favor of a historically-effected consciousness (wirkungsgeschtliches Bewußtseins). (shrink)

Background: The rapid pace of progress in medical research, the consequent need for the timely transfer of new knowledge into practice, and the increasing need for ethics support, is making the work of Ethics Committees (ECs) ever more complex and demanding. As a response, ECs in many countries exhibit large variation in number, mandate, organization and member competences. This cross-sectional study aims to give an overview of the different types of activities of Italian ECs and favour discussion at a European (...) level.Methods: A questionnaire was emailed to all Italian Ethics Committees contained in the national Registry of the Ministry of Health, enquiring whether the EC was conducting, or planning to conduct, 4 specific activities. A telephone interview was conducted to determine reasons for failure to respond.Results: Response rate was 53% (101 respondents out of 191). 20% of ECs restrict their responsibilities to research protocol review, 25% also offer ethical consultation to institutions, support on individual health care decisions and promotes educational initiatives, while the remaining 50% conduct a few of the examined activities to varying degrees. Large variation was observed across different types of hosting institutions and geographical locations.Conclusions: A common European model should be developed, defining EC functions, member selection modalities, necessary member competences, decision-making criteria and measures for work verification. In the absence of sound empirical evidence, it would be interesting to study the effectiveness and efficiency of the different existing models. (shrink)

The Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis and the social brain hypothesis have revolutionized traditional views on how primate cognition can be studied. Beyond the study of individual problem-solving capacities of various primates, these hypotheses have demonstrated the close relationship between the complexity of primate social life and the emergence of more sophisticated cognitive skills. The social brain hypothesis demonstrated the existence of a close correlation between the volume of the neocortex and the number of individuals in primate social groups. The amount of (...) studies in this area have increased dramatically and have successfully enhanced our understanding of the evolutionary roots of complex social phenomena, including theory of mind, cultural transmission, social learning, and shared attention. The cognitive capacities present in primates also underlie the evolution of cognitive capacities in humans. This chapter introduces present avenues taken in research on primate social cognition, and it walks the reader through the chapters of this volume. (shrink)

This essay provides a close reading of the intriguing aphorism entitled “In the great silence”’ that opens the final part of Nietzsche’s text of 1881, Dawn (Morgenröthe). Highly enigmatic and interpretatively demanding, aphorism 423 of the book is an instance of Nietzsche's unique style of doing philosophy and reveals important facets of his thinking. Our essay in particular attempts to illuminate Nietzsche’s thinking on nature, the sublime, and silence. We bring him into rapport with Emerson in an effort to clarify (...) the aphorism’s teaching on silence and with Santayana to illuminate the nature and character of our sympathy with nature. (shrink)

The development of vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) presented a unique set of challenges. There was a global need for safe, effective vaccines against a new virus. In response to the development of vaccines for COVID-19 (some of which used novel technologies), there was a proliferation of no-fault compensation schemes (NFCS) for COVID-19 vaccine injuries. We identified 28 national vaccine injury NFCS operating in December 2019. Just 2 years later, over 130 countries had some NFCS coverage for COVID-19 vaccines. This rapid (...) expansion was primarily driven by the creation of three multinational schemes. The COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) scheme covers vaccines given under the COVAX framework in 92 low and middle-income countries across the globe. The African Vaccines Acquisition Trust (AVAT) scheme covers vaccines administered under the AVAT framework in 36 African and Caribbean countries. The UNICEF scheme covers vaccines administered by UNICEF in 18 Asian countries.Because of the sudden expansion of no-fault compensation for vaccine injury, especially in developing economies, more research on the foundations, procedures and outcomes of NFCS is needed. In this article, we examine how these NFCS meet the needs of individual claimants and society more widely. To do so, we first review the rationales offered to support the creation of vaccine injury NFCS. We then argue that, in order to achieve their function as compensation mechanisms, NFCS should be accessible and offer substantive and procedural justice to claimants. Finally, we focus on transparency and accountability as necessary requirements to allow scrutiny over existing NFCS and their wider impacts. (shrink)

From a moral point of view, what arguments are there for and against seeking COVID-19 vaccination? Can it be morally permissible to require (parts of) a population to receive a vaccine? The present paper adopts a perspective of virtue ethics and argues both that it is morally right for an individual virtuous moral agent to seek COVID-19 vaccination and for a virtuous ruler to impose mandatory vaccinations on her population.We begin by first presenting virtue ethics and the current vaccine controversy. (...) Second, we examine whether a virtuous individual should get vaccinated. Third, we consider whether, from a moral point of view, it is right for a ruler to impose mandatory vaccinations on her citizens. Fourth, we answer some objections to our argument. Finally, we conclude that virtue ethical considerations warrant both the individual choice of getting vaccinated and mandatory vaccinations against COVID-19. (shrink)

Die Philosophie Helmuth Plessners hat in den letzten Jahren eine Renaissance erfahren: Plessner wurde als relevanter Vertreter einer Biophilosophie (wieder) entdeckt, die nicht nur die uberkommene Trennung von Natur und Kultur, sondern auch die Gegenuberstellung disjunkter Wissenschaftskulturen in Frage stellt und ihr Verhaltnis neu bestimmt. DAs Buch nimmt die verschiedenen disziplinaren Faden auf, die die Konzeption von Plessners Biophilosophie insbesondere in den Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch (1928) verstandlich machen. ES stellt Plessners uberlegungen im Kontext von naturwissenschaftlichen (von Uexkull, (...) Buytendijk, Driesch, von Weizsacker, Portmann, Kohler) sowie philosophischen (Bergson, Misch, Hartmann, Scheler, Heidegger, Jonas) Theorien seiner Zeit vor. (shrink)

Most of the existing natural language processing systems for legal texts are developed for the English language. Nevertheless, there are several application domains where multiple versions of the same documents are provided in different languages, especially inside the European Union. One notable example is given by Terms of Service (ToS). In this paper, we compare different approaches to the task of detecting potential unfair clauses in ToS across multiple languages. In particular, after developing an annotated corpus and a machine learning (...) classifier for English, we consider and compare several strategies to extend the system to other languages: building a novel corpus and training a novel machine learning system for each language, from scratch; projecting annotations across documents in different languages, to avoid the creation of novel corpora; translating training documents while keeping the original annotations; translating queries at prediction time and relying on the English system only. An extended experimental evaluation conducted on a large, original dataset indicates that the time-consuming task of re-building a novel annotated corpus for each language can often be avoided with no significant degradation in terms of performance. (shrink)

This paper presents an overview of the methods of nested sequents or tree-hypersequents that were originally introduced to provide a comprehensive proof theory for modal logic. The paper retraces the history of how these methods have developed. Its aim is also to present, in an unified and harmonious way, the most recent results that have been obtained in this framework. These results encompass several technical achievements, such as the interpolation theorem and the construction of countermodels. Special emphasis is also given (...) to the application to logics other than the standard modal ones as well as to relations to other proof theoretic formalisms. (shrink)

This article provides new information on the publication history of the first edition of the text that, according to many scholars, laid the ground for the growth of international law: Hugo Grotius’s De iure belli ac pacis. Drawing on the preliminary findings of the Grotius Census Project at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft), the following pages shed light on the first three states of the typescript, the (...) sources that Grotius had access to in France while drafting the book, and the early circulation of the 1625 edition, published by Nicolas Buon in Paris. The goal of this publication is to disseminate updated information on the printing history of this key text in the history of legal and political thought, and to invite readers to come forward with more information about the location of the remaining copies of the text, in order to advance our understanding of the rise of international law around the world. (shrink)

In my paper, I will address two issues on the characterisation of social objects as subject-dependent objects: (i) Does phenomenological realism imply Platonism in social ontology? (ii) Which type of intentionality is the protagonist of social objects’ existential dependence on subjects? Both questions deal with Ferraris’ reception of Reinach’s phenomenological realism, on the one hand, and with the role played by the intentionality of social acts in the constitution of social objects, on the other (Reinach 1913, Ferraris 2009). According to (...) Ferraris, Reinach’s phenomenological realism becomes a sort of “social Platonism”, and the intentionality of social acts is an individual intentionality. On the contrary, I will maintain that phenomenological realism does not imply social Platonism in social ontology, and that social intentionality is not an individual and solitary intentionality: it is, rather, a heterotropic intentionality which necessarily refers to and depends on other subjects. (shrink)

Eye contact constitutes a strong social signal in humans and affects various attentional processes. However, eye contact with another human evokes different responses compared with a direct gaze of an image on a screen. The question of interest is whether this holds also for eye contact with a robot. Previous experiments with physically present iCub humanoid robot showed that eye contact affects participants’ orienting of attention. In the present study, we investigated whether a robot’s eye contact on the screen could (...) show similar effects. Specifically, in two experiments we examined the impact of eye contact on the gaze-cueing effect (orienting of attention in response to a directional gaze shift) while we varied the timing of the events within a trial sequence. Our results showed that the robot’s eye contact did not modulate the gaze-cueing effect (gaze-cueing effect present in all conditions), thereby suggesting that eye contact gaze presented in a 2D format on the screen has less impact on observers than its 3D embodied version in a physically present robot. Overall, our findings stress the importance of embodied interactions for understanding the mechanisms of social cognition. (shrink)

The tenth volume of the Frontiers of Japanese Philosophy focuses on the theme of “transition,” dealing with transitory and intermediary phenomena and practices such as translation, transmission, and transformation. Written in English, German and Japanese, the contributions explore a wide range of topics, crossing disciplinary borders between phenomenology, linguistics, feminism, epistemology, aesthetics, political history, martial arts, spiritual practice and anthropology, and bringing Japanese philosophy into cross-cultural dialogue with other philosophical traditions. As exercises in “thinking in transition,” the essays reveal novel (...) modes of doing philosophy as a way of boundary crossing that takes transition not only as an object of inquiry, but also as a method of philosophical practice itself. (shrink)

L'uomo è un animale razionale, oltreché politico, socievole, come dice Aristotele. Ma quello del pensiero occidentale è un cammino, non sempre lineare, lungo momenti di apertura e ripiegamento della ragione. Quando la ragione è strumento del conoscere è in una fase di apertura, in cui fioriscono le scoperte scientifiche, l'arte, il pensiero politico ed economico; quando invece la stessa ragione perde il suo carattere strumentale divenendo pensiero assoluto, ripiegato su di sé, cede il passo alla follia, fino agli orrori del (...) Nazismo. La follia è il capitolo oscuro di un logos assolutizzato, che non lascia spazio alla molteplicità dei punti di vista, è la deriva di una ragione non 'addomesticata', privata del contraddittorio con il reale. Con un linguaggio preciso ma accessibile, Campana Comparini, al dualismo ragione 'aperta' e feconda/ragione 'chiusa' e assolutizzata, oppone una diversa categoria filosofica di lettura del reale: la follia della croce; ovvero una prospettiva in cui la fede nel Cristo-uomo diventa la base da cui partire per rifondare la principale caratteristica dell'uomo, cioè il pensiero. La 'follia della croce' non è tanto un'alternativa, quanto il terreno su cui reimpiantare la logica della razionalità umana, poiché viene prima di essa. Una lettura per guardare da un'altra prospettiva le origini del pensiero occidentale."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

[Esotericism. One-day Workshop about the Annale n. 25 of the Storia d'Italia Einaudi]. This section contains the proceedings of the one-day workshop on the book Esoterismo, published as the Annale n. 25 in the collection "History of Italy" by Einaudi. The workshop was organized by ISPF on the October 26, 2011 to promote the discussion on the significance of Western esotericist traditions in Italian history. S. Caianiello’s introduction highlights some major concepts and goals of the recent field of studies about (...) Western Esotericism, and some open problems about its definition. M. Cambi comments on the substantial transformation of esotericist themes in Giordano Bruno’s natural philosophy, whereby the sources of the magician’s power are completely enclosed in the realm of nature, thus rejecting any transcendent foundation. M. Conforti focuses on "the function and opportunities" offered by the Western Esotericism approach "to the genesis and development of early modern science" and comments from this perspective on different contributions in the volume, emphasizing however the importance of largely pre-existing traditions in the history of science and medicine which have long challenged the wiggish separation between science and magic, rational and irrational thought. L. Simonutti provides new material to the general theme, with a historical-philosophical analysis of the esotericist elements in Picart’s iconography of the 18th Century edition of "Cymbalum mundi". F. Sofia discusses the effective role of esotericist traditions in the attempts to establish a "civil religion" in Italy from Risorgimento to Fascism, a history in which, she argues, it is difficult to establish "how much esotericism was an intentional choice or the product of an unavoidable nicodemism". C. Castellano reviews the contributions dedicated to the "political teology" of Italian Risorgimento, dealing in depth with the complex relationship between Freemasonry and Carbonari in Italy – in her view, more of a cultural than of a strictly political connection – and highlights the relevance of the anticurial component in their esotericist inspiration. G.M. Cazzaniga, author and editor of the Annale, beyond reacting to the different stimuli offered by the discussion, provides a brief history of Western Esotericism studies in Europe and of the reasons of their difficult reception in Italy. (shrink)

Apoptotic pathways have always been regarded as a key‐player in preserving tissue and organ homeostasis. Excessive activation or resistance to activation of cell death signaling may indeed be responsible for several mechanisms of disease, including malignancy and chronic degenerative diseases. Therefore, targeting apoptotic factors gained more and more attention in the scientific community and novel strategies emerged aimed at selectively blocking or stimulating cell death signaling. This is also the case for the TMEM219 death receptor, which is activated by a (...) circulating ligand, the Insulin‐like growth factor binding protein 3 (IGFBP3) and induces a caspase‐8‐dependent apoptosis of the target cells. Interestingly, stimulation of the IGFBP3/TMEM219 axis exerts an anti‐proliferative effect, while blockade of the TMEM219 deleterious signal protects TMEM219‐expressing cells of the endocrine pancreas, lung, and intestine from damage and death. Here, we summarize the most updated reports on the role of the IGFBP3/TMEM219 apoptotic axis in disease conditions, including intestinal disorders and diabetes, and we describe the advancements in designing and testing novel TMEM219‐based targeting approaches in emerging potential clinical applications. (shrink)

In Memory, History, Forgetting, Ricœur does not provide us with a clear definition of collective memory. In this article, we will try to show how it could nevertheless be described, based on the same text, as the capacity for recognition, by way of reciprocal attribution, memories that are engraved in temporal spaces and are shared with our neighbors and, through them, with strangers. To verify this hypothesis, we will analyse Ricœur’s reflection on architecture as public memory’s engraving into space, presented (...) for the first time in the text “Architecture et narrativité.” Lastly, we will consider imagination and bodily memory, i.e. habit emanating from the act of inhabiting, as the conditions of possibility for the crystallization of memories in shared places. (shrink)

I put forward four these concerning phenomenologically clarifying criteria to characterise social entities. The first thesis maintains that social entities have a sui generis ontological status: unlike natural and ideal entities, social entities depend existentially on individuals’ intentionality and are specifically normative entities. The second thesis claims that social entities existentially depend on heterotropic intentionality – i.e. on intentionality that involves at least two individuals –, and not on solitary intentionality. The third thesis identifies at least three different types of (...) heterotropic intentionality: collective, social and intersubjective intentionality. The fourth thesis states that all three types of heterotropic intentionality are effective: they create social entities, even if each of them creates social entities of different kinds. (shrink)