The transition from primary to secondary education is one of the most stressful events in a young person’s life (Zeedyk et al., 2003) and can have a negative impact on psychological wellbeing and academic achievement. One explanation for these negative impacts is that the transition coincides with early adolescence, a period during which certain psychological disorders (i.e., anxiety disorders) become more salient (Kessler et al., 2005) and marked social, biological, and psychological development occurs (Anderson, Jacobs, Schramm, & Splittgerber, 2000). This (...) review evaluates the existing literature on the psychological and academic impacts of the transition to secondary education on young adolescents. We examine the factors that plausibly increase or mitigate the risk of developing mental health issues and/or a decline in academic performance during the transition to secondary education. We also review the interplay between psychological health and academic achievement across and beyond the transition. We conclude with a summary of what schools and parents can learn from these findings to support children in a successful transition into secondary education. (shrink)

A deep investigation of proprioceptive processes is necessary to understand the relationship between sensory afferent inputs and motor outcomes. In this work, we investigate whether and how perception of wrist position is influenced by the direction along which the movement occurs. Most previous studies have tested Joint Position Sense through 1 degree of freedom wrist movements, such as flexion/extension or radial/ulnar deviation. However, the wrist joint has 3-DoF and many activities of daily living produce combined movements, requiring at least 2-DoF (...) wrist coordination. For this reason, in this study, target positions involved movement directions that combined wrist flexion or extension with radial or ulnar deviation. The chosen task was a robot-aided Joint Position Matching, in which blindfolded participants actively reproduced a previously passively assumed target joint configuration. The JPM performance of 20 healthy participants was quantified through measures of accuracy and precision, in terms of both perceived target direction and distance along each direction of movement. Twelve different directions of movement were selected and both hands tested. The left and right hand led to comparable results, both target extents and directions were differently perceived according to the target direction on the FE/RUD space. Moreover, during 2-DoF combined movements, subjects’ perception of directions was impaired when compared to 1-DoF target movements. In summary, our results showed that human perception of wrist position on the FE/RUD space is symmetric between hands but not isotropic among movement directions. (shrink)

In today’s pluralistic society, clinical ethics consultation cannot count on a pre-given set of rules and principles to be applied to a specific situation, because such an approach would deny the existence of different and divergent backgrounds by imposing a dogmatic and transcultural morality. Clinical ethics support (CES) needs to overcome this lack of foundations and conjugate the respect for the difference at stake with the necessity to find shared and workable solutions for ethical issues encountered in clinical practice. We (...) argue that a pragmatist approach to CES, based on the philosophical theories of William James, John Dewey, and Charles Sanders Peirce, can help to achieve the goal of reaching practical solutions for moral problems in the context of today’s clinical environment, characterized by ethical pluralism. In this article, we outline a pragmatist theoretical framework for CES. Furthermore, we will show that moral case deliberation, making use of the dilemma method, can be regarded an example of a pragmatist approach to CES. (shrink)

Word co‐occurrence patterns in language corpora contain a surprising amount of conceptual knowledge. Large language models (LLMs), trained to predict words in context, leverage these patterns to achieve impressive performance on diverse semantic tasks requiring world knowledge. An important but understudied question about LLMs’ semantic abilities is whether they acquire generalized knowledge of common events. Here, we test whether five pretrained LLMs (from 2018's BERT to 2023's MPT) assign a higher likelihood to plausible descriptions of agent−patient interactions than to minimally (...) different implausible versions of the same event. Using three curated sets of minimal sentence pairs (total n = 1215), we found that pretrained LLMs possess substantial event knowledge, outperforming other distributional language models. In particular, they almost always assign a higher likelihood to possible versus impossible events (The teacher bought the laptop vs. The laptop bought the teacher). However, LLMs show less consistent preferences for likely versus unlikely events (The nanny tutored the boy vs. The boy tutored the nanny). In follow‐up analyses, we show that (i) LLM scores are driven by both plausibility and surface‐level sentence features, (ii) LLM scores generalize well across syntactic variants (active vs. passive constructions) but less well across semantic variants (synonymous sentences), (iii) some LLM errors mirror human judgment ambiguity, and (iv) sentence plausibility serves as an organizing dimension in internal LLM representations. Overall, our results show that important aspects of event knowledge naturally emerge from distributional linguistic patterns, but also highlight a gap between representations of possible/impossible and likely/unlikely events. (shrink)

Nel 2004, in occasione del secondo bicentenario della morte di Kant, i cartesiani tornarono nelle fila dell'interpretazione che Ferdinand Alquié aveva opposto a quella di Alexis Philolenko. È possibile indagare su “Descartes est en Kant” per il fatto che il filosofo di Konisberg, come Cartesio prima di lui, poneva l'essere al di là della conoscenza. Certamente il percorso seguito fu un altro: Kant lo fece ponendo la condizione dei limiti della conoscenza; Cartesio affermando il carattere incomprensibile dell'infinito. Inutile, tuttavia, cercare (...) citazioni da Cartesio in Kant Werke, ed è impossibile risalire a tesi o concetti di scrittura cartesiana che possano essere identificati come tali. Così, i cartesiani, nel 2004, cercavano ciò che c'è in “Descartes est en Kant” al di là del confronto tra dottrine isolate, poiché i testi non consentono di stabilire affiliazioni dirette (come volevano i neokantiani): l'affiliazione di Cartesio a Kant trova nella co-appartenenza dei due filosofi allo stesso orizzonte di problemi. Sulla scia di Alquié, l'obiettivo dei cartesiani era »finalement, de reconnaître dans quelle mesure Kant renouvelle le moment cartésien, en sorte que, lorsque Kant pense, Descartes s'avance encore, caché. Caché en Kant, agissant encore sous la figure de Kant». (shrink)

In this review essay of Michelle Montague’s The Given we focus on the central thesis in the book: the awareness of awareness thesis. On that thesis, a state of awareness constitutively involves an awareness of itself. In Section 2, we discuss what the awareness of awareness thesis amounts to, how it contrasts with the transparency of experience, and how it might be motivated. In Section 3, we discuss one of Montague’s two theoretical arguments for the awareness of awareness thesis. A (...) view that accepts the awareness of awareness thesis, Montague argues, is to be preferred over competing views because it outperforms them in accounting for the property attributions one makes in perceptual experience. We suggest that it is not clear that this argument for the awareness of awareness thesis is successful. Finally, in Section 4 we consider the relation between Montague’s view of color experience and what she calls Strawson’s datum, arguing that Montague may not be able to explain this datum as straightforwardly as she supposes. This, we suggest, threatens Montague’s second theoretical argument for the awareness of awareness thesis. (shrink)

Graphical AbstractUnderstanding epigenetic modifications to chromatin that regulate gene expression and cell-fate decisions is now possible in single cells thanks to recent technological advances. As interdisciplinary approaches are required to derive biological principles, this workshop brought together some of Europe's leading researchers in single-cell epigenetics to share technologies and biological insights.

Being the most intuitive and yet perhaps most contestable of all, the correspondence theory remains an axis around which the philosophical debate on truth incessantly spins, with indefiniteness remaining as its main propelling force. The following work presents one more interpretative attempt; it will be argued that each classical contemporary version of the theory incorporates an idea of translation process. For this purpose, initially one was specified what notion of translation should be applied here by enumerating its key features. Next, (...) three classical models were examined—those proposed by Russell, Moore and Austin—in such a way as to expose the place of translation in each analysis. Consequently, the research both provide an element which unifies them and highlight the significance of translation for the philosophical inquiry into the concept of truth. (shrink)

Karl Heinrich Gros nunca ha sido considerado hasta ahora como una posible fuente en el desarrollo de la teoría de la imputación y la acción de Hegel. Este trabajo demuestra la influencia de su ensayo Über die Ideen der Alten vom Schicksal (1795) en la comprensión de Hegel de la dialéctica entre imputación, destino y castigo con especial referencia a la historia de Edipo. Tras presentar a Gros y su papel en el siglo XVIII en Alemania y después de reconstruir (...) los principales argumentos de su ensayo (1.), la segunda parte del trabajo se centra en la comprensión de Hegel del Edipo Rey, subrayando las diferencias y similitudes con la lectura de Gros (2). Esto mostrará su relevancia dentro del proyecto más amplio de la teoría de la imputación de Hegel en su Filosofía del Derecho. (shrink)

Perhaps no meteorological phenomenon has enjoyed more interest than the wind. Both mutable and ambiguous, it has been interpreted in many ways over the centuries. This is particularly evident in the graphic arts, which have employed different strategies of representation. Taking the neo-phenomenological interpretation of the wind as a _‘_quasi-thing_’_, this paper explores the most common ways of representing this particular phenomenon within the European iconographic tradition, with the aim of identifying those that can best depict it in its quasi-thingly (...) nature. More specifically, this work aims to show that – under certain conditions – painting is not only able to express the particular meteorological and affective nature of the wind, but can also be a useful tool for shedding light on the so-called theory of atmospheres, which are themselves grounded in the thesis of the spatiality of feelings. With the help of a few examples from modern and contemporary painting, in which the wind finds its place as an aesthetic phenomenon, this paper outlines the possible characteristics of an atmospheric art in which the phenomenon is represented in all its affective power. Such art discloses or emphasizes the affective influence that phenomena such as the wind can exert on us, radically altering our sensory relationship with the world. (shrink)

In his incarnation as ‘Morus’ in Utopia, Thomas More asserts his profound disagreement with his fictional character, Raphael Hythlodaeus. Whereas Hythlodaeus extols the merits of commonality and the moral value of pleasure, Morus dismisses the whole project as absurdity, or hopeless wishful thinking. This divergence has been variously interpreted, but mostly played down. This paper argues that the civilized, amicable, and yet genuine discord between Raphael Hythlodaeus and Morus is the key to Utopia. We can appreciate its importance only if (...) we understand who Hythlodaeus is, and what the purpose of the dialogue is. We also have to do justice to Thomas More’s politics, which were grounded on the authority of the Christian tradition, in the Old and the New Testament. Over the years, Thomas More maintained a very clear and consistent line of thought on the legitimacy of worldly wealth, the responsibilities inherent in its management, the imperative to curb their enjoyment, the temptation of ‘business’ and greed, the duty of charity, and the value of penance, remorse, prayer, and other kinds of self-inflicted suffering. In A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation, Anthony, the wiser character, conveys Thomas More’s relentless praise of pain. Anthony has the last word. So, too, does Morus. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 11, November 2019, Page 71-73.

In spite of a large and diverse body of research on the topic, the relationship between Christianity and modernity is still an open question and a nodal point for our understanding of Western civilization. This paper aims at providing an original contribution to this debate by bringing into play the impact of gender-related views and practices. In particular, it focuses on Catholic Modernism, and analyzes this phenomenon and its repression by the Vatican hierarchy from the understudied perspective of female historiography (...) by way of an exemplary case study: the life and work of Maude Petre. Maude Petre (1863–1942) was a British Roman Catholic, member of a female religious community, a leading figure of Catholic Modernism, and one of its first historians. Because of the long-term patterns of gender imbalance which shaped the Catholic establishment and milieu, Petre's position as an active female modernist intellectual gave her a truly unique perspective on the confrontation between tradition and change within Western Christianity. Her work offers an outstanding opportunity to revise existing definitions of Catholic Modernism, while also opening new avenues to interpret the religious entanglements of the Western intellectual tradition at large. (shrink)

Teaching responsible conduct of research (RCR) to PhD students is crucial for fostering responsible research practice. In this paper, we show how the use of Moral Case Deliberation—a case reflection method used in the Amsterdam UMC RCR PhD course—is particularity valuable to address three goals of RCR education: (1) making students aware of, and internalize, RCR principles and values, (2) supporting reflection on good conduct in personal daily practice, and (3) developing students’ dialogical attitude and skills so that they can (...) deliberate on RCR issues when they arise. What makes this method relevant for RCR education is the focus on values and personal motivations, the structured reflection on real experiences and dilemmas and the cultivation of participants’ dialogical skills. During these structured conversations, students reflect on the personal motives that drive them to adhere to the principles of good science, thereby building connections between those principles and their personal values and motives. Moreover, by exploring personal questions and dilemmas related to RCR, they learn how to address these with colleagues and supervisors. The reflection on personal experiences with RCR issues and questions combined with the study of relevant normative frameworks, support students to act responsibly and to pursue RCR in their day-to-day research practice in spite of difficulties and external constraints. (shrink)

Let me begin by thanking the Journal of Medical Ethics editors and the four commentators for taking time to read, reflect and offer thoughtful comments on my paper. The issues they raise warrant careful attention. Regrettably, I am only able to address some of their key concerns due to space constraints. In my paper, ‘Gestation, Equality and Freedom: Ectogenesis as a Political Perspective’, I outline two sets of critiques of liberal defences of ectogenesis and contend that these defences are limited (...) in their reach and scope. Building on Federici’s,1 and Dalla Costa’s and James’2 readings of the of the international feminist campaign ‘Wages for Housework’, I argue that the value of ectogenesis is to similarly advance a political perspective and a provocation. Framing ectogenesis in these terms enables to critically engage with the physical and social burdens of pregnancy, childbirth and childrearing, which all too often are borne by women. It also allows to demand for better medical and social services for mothers and women more generally, as well as better working and living conditions for these and other disadvantaged groups. Lisa Campo-Engelstein thoughtfully broadens my reading of liberal defences of ectogenesis and contextualises them within the history of ‘reproductive advancements and technologies’.3 She illustrates that …. (shrink)

The asymptotic safety program strives for a consistent description of gravity as a non-perturbatively renormalizable quantum field theory. In this framework the gravitational interactions are encoded in a renormalization group flow connecting the quantum gravity regime at trans-Planckian scales to observable low-energy physics. Our proceedings reviews the key elements underlying the predictive power of the construction and summarizes the state-of-the-art in determining its free parameters. The explicit construction of a realistic renormalization group trajectory describing our world shows that the flow (...) possesses two characteristic scales. The Planck scale where Newton’s coupling G becomes constant is generated dynamically. The freeze-out of the cosmological constant \ occurs at a terrestrial scale fixed by the observed value of the dimensionless product \. We also review the perspectives of determining the free parameters of the theory through cosmologicalobservations. (shrink)

Reference is a basic feature of human language. A much debated question in the scholarship on animal communication and language evolution is whether traces of the human capacity for reference can be found in animals too. Do animals refer to things with their signals in the manner that humans do? Or is reference something that is unique to human communication? Answers to these questions have shifted significantly over the years and remain contentious. In this paper, I start by reconstructing and (...) critically analysing three influential discussions of the ways in which animal signals refer: the theory of functional reference (Marler, Evans and Hauser, 1992), Wheeler and Fischer (2012)’s meaning attribution framework, and Scarantino (2013)’s revised definition of functional reference. I show that functional reference, both in its traditional and revised version, as well as the meaning attribution framework, fail to adequately characterise animal reference as an evolutionary precursor of linguistic reference. This is because they all overlook at least some aspects of the psychology of signal production. Nonetheless, drawing on Crockford et al. (2012, 2017), I show that we can plausibly interpret chimpanzees’ alert hoos as a case of intentional, human-like animal reference. (shrink)

Recent studies have shed light on how the COVID-19 pandemic changed our lives, and most of them have documented its detrimental effect on eating habits. Until now, the effects of this global crisis on negative body image and its association with disordered eating behaviors remain largely understudied. This study aimed to investigate changes in frequency of disordered eating behaviors and negative body image among a community sample of women during the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, we explored the possible relation between body (...) image-related variables and changes in the frequency of disordered eating behaviors in the context of the pandemic. A total of 161 self-identified female participants enrolled in an online-based survey. Descriptive statistics showed that women did not report clinically significant levels of weight and body shape concerns, but participants reported being dissatisfied with their body. One sample Wilcoxon Signed Rank tests revealed a tendency toward an increasing of the frequency of all disordered eating behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic. Multinomial logistic regressions showed that weight concerns predicted an overall increase in the frequency of restrictive eating behaviors, whereas higher body dissatisfaction was associated with a moderate self-perceived increase in the frequency of emotional eating. These results shed light on a risk pattern of phenomena in a non-clinical sample of women, as they represent the key risk factors for the development of eating disorders. Findings could have implications for designing and implementing prevention programs. (shrink)

In this paper I would like to propose the notion of “affective artifact”, building on an analogy with theories of cognitive artifacts and referring to the development of a situated affective science. Affective artifacts are tentatively defined as objects that have the capacity to alter the affective condition of an agent, and that in some cases play an important role in defining that agent’s self. The notion of affective artifacts will be presented by means of examples supported by empirical findings, (...) by discussing a tentative definition and classification, and by considering several related but differing notions. Within the framework of situated affectivity, the notion of affective artifacts will represent a further step in the enterprise of understanding how the environment helps us scaffold our affective processes. I will conclude that affective artifacts play a key role in the philosophy of cognitive science, the philosophy of technology and in the debate about the self. (shrink)

According to the parallel architecture, syntactic and semantic information processing are two separate streams that interact selectively during language comprehension. While considerable effort is put into psycho- and neurolinguistics to understand the interchange of processing mechanisms in human comprehension, the nature of this interaction in recent neural Large Language Models remains elusive. In this article, we revisit influential linguistic and behavioral experiments and evaluate the ability of a large language model, GPT-3, to perform these tasks. The model can solve semantic (...) tasks autonomously from syntactic realization in a manner that resembles human behavior. However, the outcomes present a complex and variegated picture, leaving open the question of how Language Models could learn structured conceptual representations. (shrink)

In their book Healthy Eating Policy and Political Philosophy: A Public Reason Approach, Matteo Bonotti and Anne Barnhill defend a conception of public reason centred on the notion of accessibility and advance an ethical toolkit public health policy makers can use to ensure they are reasoning publicly when designing healthy eating policies. Finally, they propose to institutionalise the process of public reasoning informed by their ethics framework by designing certain procedures of consultation and deliberation. This article focuses on their institutionalisation (...) and raises some doubts and concerns by arguing that the procedures designed by Bonotti and Barnhill may be counterproductive to some of their aims, in particular with respect to citizens’ control, epistemic injustice, and the conception of citizens as free and equal. (shrink)

In this chapter, I discuss the possibility of using genome editing technologies in the context of assisted reproduction. I present the most prominent arguments in favour of and against this use of genome editing technologies, and explore two strategies used in bioethics in the event of moral disagreement to analyse the questions at hand and to develop morally sound policies. These strategies are: the clarification of the facts regarding a new technology and the formulation of the best philosophical argument. I (...) contend that both approaches are theoretically flawed and might result in states of affairs that fail to promote peoples’ well-being. I then argue that we should focus instead on finding at least some common ground in order to move forward in the debate on genome editing, building a regulatory framework that lightens “the burden of human existence”, whilst still accommodating opposing views as much as possible. Furthermore, I argue that insights from moral psychology and democratic governance can assist us in these challenges. (shrink)

Caregiving dyads work as an interdependent emotional system, whereby it is assumed that what happens to one member of the dyad essentially happens to the other. For example, both members of the dyad are involved in care giving and care receiving experiences and therefore major life events, such as a serious illness affect the dyad and not only the individual. Consequently, informal caregiving may be considered an example of dyadic interdependence, which is “the process by which interacting people influence one (...) another’s experience.” This systematic review aimed to synthesize studies of dyadic interdependence, specifically in non-spousal caregiving dyads. Electronic databases were systematically searched for dyadic studies reporting on interdependence in the emotional and relational wellbeing of non-spousal caregiving dyads. A total of 239 full-text studies were reviewed, of which 14 quantitative and qualitative studies met the inclusion criteria with a majority of dyads consisting of adult daughters caring for their older mothers. A narrative synthesis suggested mutual influences between non-spousal caregiving dyad members based on: associations between intrapersonal and interpersonal variables and emotional and relational wellbeing of the dyad; associations between care context variables and emotional and relational wellbeing of the dyad; and patterns of covariation between caregivers’ and care recipients’ wellbeing. Evidence supporting dyadic interdependence among non-spousal caregiving dyads shed light on the ways dyad members influence each other’s wellbeing while providing and receiving care. Future studies investigating mutual influences in dyads, should differentiate subsamples of caregivers based on relationship type, and adopt dyadic and longitudinal designs.Systematic Review Registration[https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/#recordDetails], identifier [CRD42021213147]. (shrink)

The Minimalist Program in generative linguistics is predicated on the idea that simplicity is a defining property of the human language faculty, on the one hand; on the other, a central aim of linguistic theorising. Worryingly, however, justifications for either claim are hard to come by in the literature. We sketch a proposal that would allow for both shortcomings to be addressed, and that furthermore honours the program’s declared commitment to naturalism. We begin by teasing apart and clarifying the different (...) conceptions of simplicity underlying generative inquiry, in both ontological and theoretical capacities. We then trace a path towards a more robust justification for each type of simplicity principle, drawing on recent work in cognitive science and in philosophy of science, respectively. The resulting proposal hinges on the idea that simplicity is an evolved, virtuous cognitive bias—one that is a condition of our scientific understanding and, ultimately, of successful scientific practice. Finally, we make a case for why minimalists should take this proposal seriously, on the one hand; and for why generative linguistics would make for an interesting case study for philosophy of science, on the other. (shrink)

Vittorio Hösle is internationally highly regarded for his attempt to revive objective idealism – the philosophical line along which he situates the positions of Plato, Aristotle, most medieval philosophers, Spinoza, Leibniz, Schelling, Hegel, but also Peirce and Whitehead – as a philosophical system capable of holding together the transcendental dimension of synthetic a priori judgments with the intelligibility and objectivity of being. In this interview, he discusses his work over the past decades, starting from the “Philosophische Lehrjahre” (“years of philosophical (...) apprenticeship”) between Regensburg, Tübingen, Bochum and Freiburg and from the meetings with masters and significant interlocutors (such as Tóth, Thieme, Wandschneider, Beierwaldes, Lohr, Böckenförde, without forgetting Apel and Jonas). Multiple themes dot the path of thought retraced in this dialogue: from the rethematization of Hegel’s (and Vico’s) objective idealism through transcendental pragmatics to the delineation of the relationship between ethics and politics via a theory of the social and the intent of a normative foundation; from the need for a thought that faces the ecological crisis to the reinterpretation of sociobiology; and finally, from the project of an intersubjectively valid understanding to the importance of a theory of comedy. What emerges is the philosophical self-portrait of a cosmopolitan intellectual who was able to grasp the best from inherited and acquired cultural traditions: German culture, inherited from his father; Italian culture, inherited from his mother; and American culture, acquired by moving to the USA. The interview was realised on 17 April 2024 at the University of Trento, as part of the second series of lectures “Voices from Contemporary Philosophy”. (shrink)

This article highlights the importance of new research on women philosophers and addresses some methodological issues to be taken in consideration. The thesis presented here is that through this new line of research it is possible to analyse the close connection between philosophy, politics and institutions. The paper opens with a critique of the assumption that philosophy has until recently been the exclusive property of men, giving the example of some forgotten women philosophers who lived in Hegel's time. After considering (...) the risk of ghettoization inherent in Women's Studies, the author closes by showing how the reconsideration of women philosophers can help to question the methodology and the status of philosophy in general, and in particular to question the philosophical canon. The text serves as an introduction to a special issue of theHegel Bulletindedicated to women philosophers in Hegel's time. (shrink)

Starting from the discussion on the original set of criteria advanced by Clark and Chalmers (1998) meant to avoid the overextension of the mind, or the so-called “cognitive bloat”, we will sketch our solution to the problem of criteria evaluation, by connecting it to the search for a mark of the mental. Our proposal is to argue for a “weak conscientialist” mark of the mental based on transparent access, which vindicates the role of consciousness in defining what is mental without, (...) however, identifying the mental with the conscious. This renovated link between mind and consciousness, spelled out through the concept of transparency, further develops some of our previous work on the topic (Di Francesco 2007; Di Francesco and Piredda 2012) and is partially inspired by Horgan and Kriegel (2008). (shrink)

This paper reviews and synthesizes emerging multi-disciplinary evidence toward understanding the development of social and political organization in the Last Glacial. Evidence for the prevalence and scope of political egalitarianism is reviewed and the biological, social, and environmental influences on this mode of human organization are further explored. Viewing social and political organization in the Last Glacial in a much wider, multi-disciplinary context provides the footing for coherent theory building and hypothesis testing by which to further explore human political systems. (...) We aim to overcome the claim that our ancestors’ form of social organization is untestable, as well as counter a degree of exaggeration regarding possibilities for sedentism, population densities, and hierarchical structures prior to the Holocene with crucial advances from disparate disciplines. (shrink)

Cross-sector partnerships (CSPs) can play a prominent role in tackling wicked sustainability problems. In particular, cities are critical venues for testing the potential of CSPs as agents of systemic change. However, the effectiveness of CSPs in orchestrating resources to drive systemic change in urban contexts is still not fully understood. We fill this gap through the longitudinal study of an action research case of a CSP offering urban food assistance. Our process model synthesizes how the resource orchestration activities put in (...) place by the CSP spur phases of systemic change in the urban food system through different yet interrelated lifecycle stages of the initiative. Our results extend the literature on CSPs and systemic change showing the relationship between resource orchestration and the delivery of systemic change in urban contexts by CSPs, with significant implications for the design and management of CSPs dealing with wicked sustainability problems in cities. (shrink)

It is easy to fall for a conceptual beauty and simplicity of the coherence theory of truth. But the texts in which its foundations were for the first time explicitly developed are rich in subtleties, defying a consistent interpretation and inviting various forms of criticism. That is why the following study will take one more look at the writings of Harold H. Joachim and Brand Blanshard, in order to prove that in the analyses which they proposed there is an additional, (...) so far unrecognised element – namely the process of translation – which plays a crucial role in making their accounts valid and complete. Initially then, the article will specify how the notion of translation should be here understood. Next, key postulates of both theories will be recalled, with an indication of several potential inconsistencies which they might entail. Finally, the analysis exposes translative ground of each reconstructed model. What will be thereby underscored, is not only the interpretative depth of Joachim’s and Blanshard’s legacy, but also significance of translation for the philosophical enquiry into the nature of truth. (shrink)

Infertility constitutes an essential source of stress in the individual and couple’s life. The Infertility-Related Stress Scale is of clinical interest for exploring infertility-related stress affecting the intrapersonal and interpersonal domains of infertile individuals’ lives. In the present study, the IRSS was translated into Brazilian–Portuguese, and its factor structure, reliability, and relations to sociodemographic and infertility-related characteristics and depression were examined. A sample of 553 Brazilian infertile individuals completed the Brazilian–Portuguese IRSS, and a subsample of 222 participants also completed the (...) BDI-II. A sample of 526 Italian infertile individuals was used to test for the IRSS measurement invariance across Brazil and Italy. Results of exploratory structural equation modeling indicated that a bifactor solution best represented the structure underlying the IRSS-BP. Both the general and the two specific intrapersonal and interpersonal IRSS-BP factors showed satisfactory levels of composite reliability. The bifactor ESEM solution replicated well across countries. As evidence of relations to other variables, female gender, a longer duration of infertility, and higher depression were associated with higher scores in global and domain-specific infertility-related stress. The findings offer initial evidence of validity and reliability of the IRSS-BP, which could be used by fertility clinic staff to rapidly identify patients who need support to deal with the stressful impact of infertility in the intrapersonal and interpersonal life domains, as recommended by international guidelines for routine psychosocial care in infertility settings. (shrink)

Background: Mentalizing, the mental capacity to understand oneself and others in terms of mental states, has been found to be reduced in several mental disorders. Some studies have suggested that eating disorders may also be associated with impairments in mentalizing. The aim of this work is to investigate the possible presence of mentalizing subtypes in a sample of patients with EDs.Method: A sample of patients with eating disorders completed a battery of measures assessing mentalization and related variables, including the Reflective (...) Functioning Questionnaire, the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Strategies, the Interpersonal Reactivity Index. Clinicians rated patients in relation to imbalances in different dimensions of mentalization to prementalizing modes and attachment style by using the Mentalization Imbalances Scale, the Modes of Mentalization Scale, and the Adult Attachment Questionnaire. A latent profile analysis was conducted to test the possible presence of different subgroups. MANOVA was used to test the possible differences between the four mentalizing profiles in relation to emotion dysregulation, empathy, and adequate and impairments in mentalizing.Results: The latent profile analysis suggested the presence of four different profiles in relation to impairments in the dimensions of mentalization: affective/self/automatic imbalances, external imbalance, cognitive/self/automatic imbalances, and cognitive/other/automatic imbalances. Patients belonging to profile 1 are characterized by the prevalence of affective mentalization that overwhelms the capacity to reflect on mental states with an imbalance on the self-dimension; profile 2 patients are excessively focused on the external cues of mentalization; profile 3 patients are characterized by an over-involvement on the cognitive and self-facets of mentalization, with an impairment in adopting the other mind perspective; and profile 4 patients have similar impairments compared to profile 3 patients but with an excessive focus on others and deficits in self-reflection. These profiles were heterogeneous in terms of EDs represented in each group and presented significant differences on various variables such as attachment style, emotion dysregulation, empathy, interpersonal reactivity, and reflective function. This study represents, so far, the first work that confirms the presence of different mentalizing patterns in ED patients.Conclusions: ED patients can be classified in relation to impairments in different dimensions of mentalization above and beyond ED diagnosis. (shrink)

We introduce the notion of infinitary preorder and use it to obtain a predicative presentation of sup-lattices by generators and relations. The method is uniform in that it extends in a modular way to obtain a presentation of quantales, as “sup-lattices on monoids”, by using the notion of pretopology.Our presentation is then applied to frames, the link with Johnstone’s presentation of frames is spelled out, and his theorem on freely generated frames becomes a special case of our results on quantales.The (...) main motivation of this paper is to contribute to the development of formal topology. That is why all our definitions and proofs can be expressed within an intuitionistic and predicative foundation, like constructive type theory. (shrink)

Ce livre met le doigt sur l'un des paradoxes les plus profonds parce que les plus anciens de la culture occidentale : dans un même mouvement, les femmes se trouvent exclues de la rationalité, et l'âme n'est pensée qu'à l'aide de métaphores féminines. Cette lecture des textes classiques est un voyage au coeur de la culture occidentale où s'enracine un questionnement de la différence des sexes.

The aim of this paper is to show that if and only if agents are motivated to act by good reasons for acting, they flourish, since, in so doing, they consciously act in accordance with their nature through virtuous actions. I offer an account of what good reasons for acting consist of reconsidering Aquinas’ natural inclinations. Based on a critical analysis of Anjum and Mumford’s work on dispositions in analytic metaphysics, I argue, contra Hume’s law, that Aquinas’ natural inclinations show (...) that metaphysics is foundational for ethics. I claim that agents flourish as human beings if and only if they consciously act in accordance with natural inclinations. Natural inclinations naturally tend towards goods that depend on the metaphysical structure of human nature, by virtue of which agents have some powers that they should actualise in order to flourish. Intellect and will are the rational powers that distinguish human beings from other living beings. The will naturally desires what is good. If the will, through the input of the intellect, desires what is genuinely good for human beings according to their nature, it also directs the other powers to their own actualisation. Natural inclinations do not strictly necessitate agents to act in accordance with them, because, by virtue of their rational powers, agents should also recognise that they have a reason for acting in accordance with them. Thus, I will suggest that we can best appreciate the importance of natural inclinations from the first-person perspective. (shrink)

This paper develops and defends the view that substantively normative uses of words like “good”, “right” and “ought” are irresolvably indeterminate: any single case of application is like a borderline case for a vague or indeterminate term, in that the meaning-fixing facts, together with the non-linguistic facts, fail to determine a truth-value for the target sentence in context. Normative claims, like vague or indeterminate borderline claims, are not meaningless, though. By making them, the speaker communicates information about the precisifications that (...) s/he accepts. The analogy with vague/indeterminate language, I argue, lays out a new and interesting foundation for a subjectivist approach to normativity. (shrink)