The recent global outspread of the COVID-19 pandemic has influenced the lives of people across multiple countries including athletes, coaches, and supporting staff. Along with everybody else, coaches found themselves constrained to an at-home self-isolation, which limited their ability to normally engage with their profession and to interact with their athletes. This situation may also have impacted their own psychological well-being. With this study, we explored coaches’ perceptions of stress in relation to their emotion regulation strategies depending upon their gender (...) and competitive level. A sample of 2272 Italian coaches were surveyed during the period of lockdown. Mean values for perceived stress and emotion regulation strategies were compared to normative data of the two instruments as reported in the original studies. Furthermore, two Multivariate analyses of variance were completed to observe the potential differences in the coaches’ emotion regulation strategies and perception of stress. Finally, a blockwise regression analysis was run to assess how coaches’ emotion regulation strategies impacted upon their perception of stress. Both women and men reported higher levels of perceived stress than those reported in the normative data. Similarly, average scores for emotion regulation strategies were significantly different from those reported for normative data, in particular, coaches reported slightly higher use of emotion regulation strategies than participants in the original study. Significant gender-based differences emerged in terms of emotional regulations, with men adopting more suppression than women. No differences by competitive level were found. In terms of perceived stress, male coaches and elite coaches showed to be more in control of the situation than female coaches and non-elite coaches, respectively, while women experienced more negative stress than men. The blockwise regression evidenced how reappraisal resulted to be predictive in helping coaches to reduce their perception of stress, while suppression predicted higher stress perceptions. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2015 Heft: 206 Seiten: 13-35.

Decentralised ledgers are gaining momentum following the interest of industries and people in smart contracts. Major attention is paid to blockchain applications intended for trading assets that exploit digital cryptographic certificates called tokens. Particularly relevant tokens are the non-fungible tokens (NFTs), namely, unique and non-replicable tokens used to represent the cryptographic counterpart of assets ranging from pieces of art through to licenses and certifications. A relevant consequence of the hard-coded nature of blockchains is the hardness of probing, in particular when (...) advanced searchers involving the capabilities of the smart contracts or the assets digitised by NFTs are required. For this purpose, a formal representation for the operational semantics of smart contracts and of tokens has become particularly urgent, especially in economy and finance, where blockchains become increasingly relevant. Hence, we feel the need to tailor Semantic Web technologies to achieve that semantic representation at least for NFTS. This article reports on an ontology that leverages the Ontology for Agents, Systems, and Integration of Services (“OASIS”) towards the semantic representation of smart contracts responsible for managing ERC721-compliant NFTs and running on the Ethereum blockchain. Called Ether-OASIS, the proposed ontology adopts OASIS and tailors its behaviouristic approach to the Ethereum blockchain by conceiving smart contracts as agents running on the blockchain and, consequently, smart contract interactions as agent commitments. Smart contracts are represented in terms of their actions, purposes and tokens that they manage, thus realising a blockchain that is more usable both by users and automated applications. The ontology is evaluated using standard ontological metrics and applied on a case study concerning the minting and transferring of NFTs that digitise batches of wheat. (shrink)

This article illustrates the main theoretical and practical problem of the study of the anagram in poetry, the still unknown entity of the anagrammatic combination, which requires specific software in order to perform a structural analysis of the text. This difficulty explains the failure of Saussure’s original hypotheses and the gradual decline, following the rediscovery of his work, of the interest of researchers in this subject. However, some poems (by Blake, Moore, Mallarmé, Valéry, Apollinaire, and Leopardi) illustrate the enormous potential (...) of the anagram for the structural analysis of poetic texts: the study of formal structure, of semantic-thematic nuclei and of metaphor, together with the main criteria for examining, with some simplification, the anagrammatic combination. An explanation is also offered for anagrammatic and grammatical-syntactic cooperation, involving the current theory of the lemma. At the time of the generation of a poetic text, the anagram acts as an associative intermediary between the combinatory matrix of the signifieds and the combinatory matrix of the signifiers, producing a lexical selection that gives anagrammatic coherence to the text. This associative intermediary enables us to understand the particular recursive function of semiosis in poetry that is given a distinct unity by the anagram. (shrink)

In the cladistic literature, there is a recurrent perspective that considers homoplasy as something undesirable. Homoplasy, according to this view, is believed to obscure homologies that may lead to synapomorphies. Some cladists often call homoplasies an ad hoc hypothesis or an “error in our preliminary assignment of homology.” Consequently, homoplasy is generally regarded negatively, hindering further investigations, because it matters little whether a character subject to homoplasy is a convergence, a parallelism, or a reversal, since they all fall within the (...) problematic homoplastic category. Nixon and Carpenter developed one of the recent arguments supporting this vision. In this context, I will argue that phylogenetics, being a part of evolutionary biology, must be compatible with its principles. Therefore, I will discuss the idea that homoplasy is more complex than just nonhomology, sometimes even constituting evidence of common ancestry (e.g., parallelism). I will put forward the thesis that it is crucial to differentiate instances of convergence, parallelism, and reversions by incorporating recent advances from EvoDevo research. Ultimately, this approach aims to demonstrate that evolutionary biology and phylogenetics mutually complement each other and assist in providing different lines of evidence that can be used to test different evolutionary hypotheses. (shrink)

When we use secure computer systems, we engage with carefully orchestrated and ordered interactions called “security ceremonies”, all of which exist to assure security. A great deal of attention has been paid to improving the usability of these ceremonies over the last two decades, to make them easier for end-users to engage with. Yet, usability improvements do not seem to have endeared end users to ceremonies. As a consequence, human actors might subvert the ceremony’s processes or avoid engaging with it. (...) Here, we consider whether beautification could be one way of making ceremonies more appealing. To explore beautification in this context, we carried out three studies. Study 1 surveyed 250 participants to derive a wide range of potential dimensions of “beautiful ceremonies”. These statements were sorted into dominant themes and converted into statements, which fed into the second study, with 309 respondents, to reveal the dominant dimensions constituting beauty. Study 3 asked 41 participants to carry out a Q-sort, which revealed the ways that people combine the identified dimensions when characterising security ceremonies as “beautiful”. These studies have allowed us to pin down the perceived dimensions of beauty in the context of security ceremonies, and also to understand how people combine these dimensions in different ways in judging security ceremonies to be beautiful, confirming the old adage of beauty being “in the eye of the beholder”. We conclude by highlighting the constraints imposed by the overarching requirement for security to be maintained in the face of any usability improvements and beautification endeavours. (shrink)

During a Barolo en primeur tasting session, a seasoned wine taster is assailed by a procedural unease which leads him to question the foundations on which his work rests. Sparked off by his reading of Michel Le Gris’ pamphlet Dionysos crucifié, the taster’s objections and perplexities are directed towards teasing out the rules and coordinates of a tasting aesthetic which has become tamed and domesticated, at the service of a narcissistic “tyranny of instant gratification”. Such an approach translates into wines (...) that are beaten into submission by interventionist winemakers, wines that derive from a tasting model that has been pre-emptively cleansed of tension or dissonance so as to exalt products that are easy, reassuring, docile to marketing logic, and increasingly similar. What sort of doubts, what interpretative friction can hope to reacquaint wine criticism with its true and original aims? What relations between the tongue that tastes and the tongue that speaks can respond to the needs of a new approach to wine appreciation, a ‘tasting different’? (shrink)

"Phenomenology was one of the twentieth century's major philosophical movements, and it continues to be a vibrant and widely studied subject today with relevance beyond philosophy in areas such as medicine and cognitive sciences. The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy is an outstanding guide and reference source to this important and fascinating topic. Comprising seventy-five chapters by a team of international contributors, the Handbook offers unparalleled coverage of the subject, and is divided into five clear parts: Phenomenology and (...) the History of Philosophy Issues and Concepts in phnomenology Major Figures in Phenomenology Intersections Phenomenology in the World. Essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy studying phenomenology, The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy is also suitable for those in related disciplines such as psychology, religion, literature, sociology and anthropology"--. (shrink)

The present paper provides the first reconstruction of the discussion between Martin Heidegger and Maximilian Beck, a former member of the Munich Circle of Phenomenology—a discussion that revolved around Beck’s interpretation of the “fundamental ontology” of Being and Time. Based upon the still unpublished correspondence between Heidegger and Beck, the essay first reconstructs their relation and then offers a meticulous discussion of Beck’s major criticism of Heidegger, i.e., “correlativism,” and the latter’s response to it in his courses of 1928.

This collection offers the first systematic, comparative analysis of Wilfrid Sellars's Pittsburgh school of thought and Husserlian phenomenology. Beginning with an introduction to contemporary philosophical debates about the mind and pragmatism, the essays examine and clarify the discursive divide between analytic and Continental philosophy.

In the following paper we will attempt to analyze and reconstruct Edith Stein’s interpretation of Husserl’s “transcendental idealism,” notably, the reason why, in her opinion, the latter ended up embracing that specific philosophical position. As will soon become apparent, according to Stein, Husserl misunderstands the peculiar ontological structure of individual essences and, in particular, the specific connection with reality that they carry within themselves. Without raising the question of whether Stein’s own understanding of transcendental idealism perfectly corresponds with Husserl’s, we (...) will confine ourselves to discussing, first, the wider context within which she tackles it and, second, the relation between Husserl’s idealism and the formal-ontological issue of how to characterize the internal content of individual essences. No matter what we think of Stein’s critical assessment, her approach has the great and undeniable merit of forcing the “interpreter” to face the problem of the tight connection between the transcendental dimension and the eidetic dimension of Husserl’s thought. (shrink)

This paper aims at offering a concise, yet systematic, presentation of the Husserlian method of “self-variation” in connection to eidetic variation sic et simpliciter. After a brief review of the different meanings of this method in Husserl’s writings, I will focus on the way in which Husserl employs it to bring the eidos “ego” to the fore. To this end, I will take into account the specific subject matter of self-variation by resorting to a twofold concept of essence as well (...) as to the formal-ontological notion of τóδε τι. The present investigation will have an almost exclusively methodological character, its purpose being to clarify a specific, yet still quite unexplored, tool of Husserl’s phenomenology. (shrink)

In the end of the section 219a 10-21 of the 11th chapter of Physics IV Aristotle defines the ‘before and after’ in movement as follows: «The ‘before and after’ in motion is identical ὅ ποτε ὂυ with motion, yet differs from it τò εἶυατ αύτῷ, and is not identical with motion t (11. 19-21)». These lines convey the answer to the question whether the ‘before’ and after’ are the same thing as movement or not: in one sense, ὅ ποτε ὂυ, (...) they are, in another sense, τò εἶυαι, they are not. But, first and foremost, the opposition of ὅ ποτε ὂυ to то τò εἶυαι is very useful to Aristotle to solve the main aporia of the chapter about the contradictory – at a first sight – and concurrent diversity and identity of the instant, τò υῠυ. Therefore, this aporia will be solved, if only ὅ ποτε ὂυ and то τò εἶυαι mean two really opposing points of view. But what are these points of view? What do they really mean? As it is well known, the phrase ὅ ποτε ὂυ is one of the most enigmatic in the Aristotelian corpus, and yet one of the most important in his physical research because concerns the nature and definition of time. The lower was the agreement among the scholars, with greater force the debate has flared up. An alternative way for attempting to successfully tackle the problem is take in consideration the occurrence of the same phrase in other works than Physica, since the other occurrences of it in the 11th and 14th chapter of the same book are of no help. It is present in only two other works: On Generation and Corruption, I, 3, 319b 3 and Parts of Animals, II, 2, 649a 15; II, 3, 649b 24. In both works we are led to take ὅ ποτε ὂυ as being associated to such terms as ύποκεἰμενον and ύπóκειται. So, Aristotle seems to point out a contrast between a formal respect and a material respect by the opposition of τò εἶυαι to ὅ ποτε ὂυ. The reading of all passages from Physics – particularly, 219a 20-21 – wherein ὅ ποτε ὂυ occurs provides further confirmation of this contrast. As matter of fact, in all three works τò εἶυαι was employed by Aristotle for the same purpose: to set out the difference between a substratum of its own and its ability to actually exist just as substratum underlying worldly things. This difference implies that a substratum cannot but be limited by or relating to time. A condition which is emphasized by the presence of the term ποτε. In conclusion, each instant comes out from the division by the ‘before and after’ of movement’s substratum. If this substratum is found to exist in time, the ‘before and after’ turns out to be ‘what that is now and then’ (ὅ ποτε ὂυ), which, reversely, is the same as the ‘before and after’ in the movement. The occurrences of the incomplete phrase (as ὅ ποτε plus other verbal voices than ὂυ) in other works substantiate this view. (shrink)

Starting from the Italian results of the PISA 2015 surveys as regards the competence of young students in collaborative problem-solving, in this paper we conduct a critical analysis of the concept of competence, as seen through the lens of the Capability Approach. The Philosophy for Children curriculum is presented as a pedagogical and didactic proposal capable of re-conceptualizing the constructs of ‘problem-solving’ and ‘collaboration’. In the light of ‘Complex Thinking’ theory and the ‘community of inquiry’ classroom methodology, the general theoretical (...) frame of the PISA and DeSeCo approach to problem-solving has been criticized for its focus on what has been defined in terms of “internal mental structures in the sense of abilities, dispositions or resources embedded in the individual”. The proposal of Philosophy for Children and its ‘community of inquiry’ methodology are considered and discussed. This educational curriculum provides a real opportunity to rethink citizenship education by concentrating on the value and power of collective agency and the ability to wonder about our world. The pedagogical implications are significant because this means that we should be aiming to align academic education not with what society is, but with what it could or should be. To achieve this, education policies and planning actions need to focus on values and principles, on matters such as freedom, social equity and participation. These matters are not exclusive to the realms of individual endowment and performance. They have fundamental ethical and cultural components. Philosophy for Children can be considered as an opportunity to work towards the educational and political goal of creating “flourishing communities”. (shrink)

The main goal of this article is to examine Edmund Husserl’s method of “eidetic variation”—that is, to examine the way this method is supposed to work in connection with the notion of “similarity” (Ähnlichkeit). Unlike most interpretations, it will be suggested that similarity represents the leading methodologicalprinciple of eidetic variation. We will argue, therefore, that, on the one hand, this method is rooted in the sphere of association and passivity while, on the otherhand, it is constituted by the transposition of (...) a passive synthesis into an active operation. After having introduced and discussed a twofold notion of phantasy(as “localized phantasy” and as “pure phantasy”) as well as a twofold concept of eidos (as “hen epi pollon” and as “pure eidos”), the extent to which for Husserl there cannot be any eidetic variation without a monadology will be shown. (shrink)

Aristotle�s account on natural slavery is neither misleading nor paradoxical, but plausible even though controversial, unlike many commentators think of. On his view natural masters are essentially the virtuous people, viz. those who have been perfected in their process of growing, and natural slaves are essentially the vicious people, viz. those who have been injured or corrupted in some way in their growing up so as to suffer from a lack of autonomous practical rationality. Of course, many barbarians are in (...) this state, but there is no need to presume that all of them are. More to the point, some Greeks will be in this state, especially the many and he who the many have a high regard for. Because of this state, slavery is for the better allowing a slave�s life to become more worthwhile as an instrumental part of the master�s living a good life. Particularly, nature requires that some humans will be able to attain happiness some other will not. Masters and slaves are linked through the rational pursuit of happiness by the political community where they play different roles but equally required. Thus, master and slave will form a single system whose working unity does confirm that a clear separation between that which dominates and that is being dominated must always take place for natural things to be according the best standard. (shrink)

‘Nomofanie’ sta per “manifestazioni del nómos”. Nel libro si presentano configurazioni concettuali, problemi teoretici e contesti empirici che sono altrettanti dispositivi nomofanici, cioè produttivi di varie e molteplici manifestazioni di quel nómos che la filosofia del diritto è chiamata ad indagare. Quattro i filosofi più richiamati: Aristotele, Tommaso d’Aquino, Kant e Hegel, che costituiscono una sorta di “quadratura” per pensare alcune questioni critiche del vivere-insieme anche nelle società presenti.

Réflexions sur la façon de dire et de montrer le paysage au XXIe siècle. Aborde la question en s'appuyant sur de nombreuses disciplines comme l'art, l'esthétique, le théâtre ou les sciences et techniques.

Noetherian type and Noetherian π-type are two cardinal functions which were introduced by Peregudov in 1997, capturing some properties studied earlier by the Russian School. Their behavior has been shown to be akin to that of the cellularity, that is the supremum of the sizes of pairwise disjoint non-empty open sets in a topological space. Building on that analogy, we study the Noetherian π-type of κ-Suslin Lines, and we are able to determine it for every κ up to the first (...) singular cardinal. We then prove a consequence of Changʼs Conjecture for ℵω regarding the Noetherian type of countably supported box products which generalizes a result of Lajos Soukup. We finish with a connection between PCF theory and the Noetherian type of certain Pixley–Roy hyperspaces. (shrink)