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)

Background Moral decision-making consists of a complex process requiring individuals to evaluate potential consequences of personal and social decisions, including applied organizational contexts.Methods This research aims to investigate the behavioral (offer responses and reaction times, RTs) and electrophysiological (EEG) correlates underlying moral decision-making during three different choice conditions (professional fit, company fit, and social fit) and offers (fair, unfair, and neutral).Results An increase of delta and theta frontal activity (related to emotional behavior and processes) and beta frontal and central activity (...) (linked to cognitive and attentional processes) was found. A left beta, delta, and theta frontal activity was observed for fair offers in professional fit conditions, while increased right frontal delta and theta activity was found in response to unfair offers in company fit conditions. Also, an increase of left delta and theta parietal activity for unfair offers in social fit condition was detected. Finally, higher accepted responses were found for fair and neutral offers in professional and social fit conditions, with increased RTs for unfair offers suggesting decisions’ cognitive load and complexity.Conclusions By revealing a greater involvement of left and right frontal areas in decision-making processes based on choices and offers, personal interest evaluations and emotional values, and of parietal areas in more prosocial and altruistic moral behavior, current findings provide information about the neural and behavioral correlates underlying company moral behavior. (shrink)

Kevin Vallier’s book, Liberal Politics and Public Faith. Beyond Separation, constitutes an essential reading for anyone interested in public reason liberalism and in the debate concerning the role of religion in contemporary democratic societies. Vallier argues for a strong version of convergence in public justification, aiming at defending an account of liberalism friendly towards religion and religious citizens. Against traditional forms of liberalism built on the idea of neutrality and embodied in a secularized view of social institutions, Vallier’s goal is (...) to reconcile public reason liberalism with religion by showing that his theory “realizes foundational liberal values while according religion a prominent and powerful role in public life” .The topic of Vallier’s book is clearly of fundamental importance. That of the supposedly needed separation between religion and the state is not only one of the most long-standing issues in political philosophy, but it is also extremely r .. (shrink)

The aim of this thesis is to show the relevance that Aquinas's theory of natural inclinations can play in the contemporary debate for the inquiry on human flourishing, which consists in the realisation of the proper end that human beings have as human beings. We will engage in dialogue with several authors, belonging to the analytic tradition (Elizabeth Anscombe, John Finnis, Ralph McInerny, Anthony Lisska) or, nevertheless, culturally close to it (Alasdair MacIntyre), who have reconsidered the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas (...) in the contemporary debate in order to inquire what enables human flourishing. We will argue that the proper consideration of natural inclinations leads, on the one hand, to overcome the problems posed by Hume's law by identifying human nature as a normative criterion common to all human beings, and, on the other hand, to recognise the role of the first-person perspective in identifying what enables the human flourishing of each agent. Natural inclinations do not express agents' psychological preferences, but consist in the fact that human beings naturally tend towards the realisation of their nature as a good to be realised. In order to flourish, human beings are required to act in accordance with their natural inclinations, since natural inclinations are tendencies that human beings have towards a set of goods that are grounded in human nature. Revisiting a recent proposal put forward by Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum in the field of analytic metaphysics, we will argue that agents develop a virtuous conduct if and only if they act in accordance with their natural inclinations; in doing so, they flourish as human beings, that is, they actualise the powers they have by virtue of their nature. However, human beings are not strictly necessitated to act in accordance with their natural inclinations. Indeed, in order to flourish, agents should also recognise, by virtue of their rational capacities, that acting in accordance with their natural inclinations is a reason for acting for them and they should act in accordance with these reasons. Furthermore, we will argue that there is no single way to flourish for all human beings, because, although flourishing requires that human beings act in accordance with their nature, nevertheless, the way in which agents can flourish varies according to their individual characteristics and according to the circumstances and contexts in which they act, that is, according to the practices in which they participate in their lived experience. In the last part of this thesis, we will test the theoretical proposal developed in the previous parts through a critical analysis of Alasdair MacIntyre's thought. (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)

The lexical–semantic organization of the mental lexicon is bound to change across the lifespan. Nevertheless, the effects of lexical–semantic factors on word processing are usually based on studies enrolling young adult cohorts. The current study aims to investigate to what extent age‐specific semantic organization predicts performance in referential word production over the lifespan, from school‐age children to older adults. In Study 1, we conducted a free semantic association task with participants from six age‐groups (ranging from 10 to 80 years old) (...) to compute measures that capture age‐specific properties of the mental lexicon across the lifespan. These measures relate to lifespan changes in the Available Richness of the mental lexicon and in the lexical–semantic Network Prototypicality of concrete words. In Study 2, we used the collected data to predict performance in a picture‐naming task on a new group of participants within the same age‐groups as for Study 1. The results show that age‐specific semantic Available Richness and Network Prototypicality affect word production speed while the semantic variables collected only in young adults do not. A richer and more prototypical semantic network across subjects from a given age‐group is associated with faster word production speed. The current results indicate that age‐specific semantic organization is crucial to predict lexical–semantic behaviors across the lifespan. Similarly, these results also provide cues to the understanding of the lexical–semantic properties of the mental lexicon and to lexical selection in referential tasks. (shrink)

In this article, I aim to analyse the way in which Jan Patočka explores the being of the dead in his text “Phenomenology of life after death.” I wish to show that this seminal text offers the solution to three main difficulties regarding the being of the dead: those difficulties concern their form of being, their possibility to transform themselves and their ability to act. Following this analysis, I propose a three‑folded thesis: firstly, the being of the dead can be (...) grasped not only through privation but also through more positive forms; secondly, the dead persons can continue to transform themselves when being construed by the living; and thirdly, their action can be prolonged even though they cannot act. (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)

The benefits of full ectogenesis, that is, the gestation of human fetuses outside the maternal womb, for women ground many contemporary authors’ arguments on the ethical desirability of this practice. In this paper, I present and assess two sets of arguments advanced in favour of ectogenesis: arguments stressing ectogenesis’ equality-promoting potential and arguments stressing its freedom-promoting potential. I argue that although successfully grounding a positive case for ectogenesis, these arguments have limitations in terms of their reach and scope. Concerning their (...) limited reach, I contend that ectogenesis will likely benefit a small subset of women and, arguably, not the group who most need to achieve equality and freedom. Concerning their limited scope, I contend that these defences do not pay sufficient attention to the context in which ectogenesis would be developed and that, as a result, they risk leaving the status quo unchanged. After providing examples of these limitations, I move to my proposal concerning the role of ectogenesis in promoting women’s equality and freedom. This proposal builds on Silvia Federici’s, Mariarosa Dalla Costa’s and Selma James’ readings of the international feminist campaign ‘Wages for Housework’. It maintains that the political perspective and provocation that ectogenesis can advance should be considered and defended. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that lesbian couples who wish to have children who are genetically related to both of them should be allowed access to mitochondrial replacement techniques (MRTs). First, we provide a brief explanation of mitochondrial diseases and MRTs. We then present the reasons why MRTs are not, by nature, therapeutic. The upshot of the view that MRTs are non-therapeutic techniques is that their therapeutic potential cannot be invoked for restricting their use only to those cases where a (...) mitochondrial DNA disease could be ‘cured’. We then argue that a positive case for MRTs is justified by an appeal to reproductive freedom, and that the criteria to access these techniques should hence be extended to include lesbian couples who wish to share genetic parenthood. Finally, we consider a potential objection to our argument: that the desire to have genetically related kin is not a morally sufficient reason to allow lesbian couples to access MRTs. (shrink)

Responses to the COVID-19 pandemic globally disrupted lives and contributed to the exacerbation of pre-existing inequalities. Women in research were also affected. The prominent role that women played in professional and personal care duties had a detrimental effect on their research outputs, potentially hindering their career progression. Moreover, the challenges faced by women academics during the pandemic, including job loss, increased mental health issues, and the intersection of gender with other socio-demographic traits exacerbated existing gender disparities within academia. By systematically (...) scoping the qualitative literature on the experiences of women researchers during the pandemic, this study sought to explore how women experienced and reacted to the challenges generated by the COVID-19 pandemic. A qualitative meta synthesis of the included studies revealed three themes: gendered professional expectations, colliding identities and coping strategies. These themes show how gendered roles such as teaching and professional care work, associated with the hierarchical and gendered division of tasks both at home and in the workplace, made women feel unsupported and alienated as relevant agents in the academic context. The study reveals the importance of pastoral care, teaching and service work as the essential backbone of the academic infrastructure, especially in times of crises. It also exposes how productivity-focused researcher assessment criteria, rewarding mainly individual results and unrewarding of care and service work, can be viewed as perpetuating structural inequalities based on gender, parenting situations, contractual situations and background. In conclusion, this study exposes the need to proactively address the gendered practices and implicit biases which reproduce inequalities within academia and highlights how paying attention to the experiences and needs of women researchers is essential for improving the resilience and crises preparedness of academic the system. (shrink)

BackgroundThis article explores the reasons in favour of revising and extending the current 14-day statutory limit to maintaining human embryos in culture. This limit is enshrined in law in over a dozen countries, including the United Kingdom. In two recently published studies, scientists have shown that embryos can be sustained in vitro for about 13 days after fertilisation. Positive reactions to these results have gone hand in hand with calls for revising the 14-day rule, which only allows embryo research until (...) the 14th day after fertilisation.Main textThe article explores the most prominent arguments in favour of and against the extension of the 14-day limit for conducting research on human embryos. It situates these arguments within the history of the 14-day limit. I start by discussing the history of the 14-day limit in the United Kingdom and the reasons behind the decision to opt for a compromise between competing moral views. I then analyse the arguments that those who are generally in favour of embryo research put forward in support of extending the 14-day rule, namely the argument of the beneficence of research and the argument of technical feasibility. I then show how these two arguments played a role in the recent approval of two novel techniques for the replacement of faulty mitochondrial DNA in the United Kingdom. Despite the popularity and widespread use of these arguments, I argue that they are ultimately problematic and should not be straightforwardly accepted. I end by making a case for respecting value pluralism in the context of embryo research, and I present two reasons in favour of respecting value pluralism: the argument of public trust and the argument of democracy.ConclusionI argue that 14-day limit for embryo research is not a valuable tool despite being a solution of compromise, but rather because of it. The importance of respecting value pluralism needs to be considered in any evaluation concerning a potential change to the 14-day rule. (shrink)

Many take the lesson of the paradoxes to be that we ought to impose some form of logical revision. It is argued here that this kind of move should not be taken lightly.

In this paper, an integrated, cognitive view of different mechanisms, reasons and pathways to norm compliance is presented. After a short introduction, theories of norm compliance are reviewed, and found to group in four main typologies: the rational choice model of norm compliance; theories based on conditional preferences to conformity, theories of thoughtless conformity, and theories of norm internalization. In the third section of the paper, the normative architecture EMIL-A is presented. Previous work discussed the epistemic module of this normative (...) architecture, allowing for the generation of normative beliefs being formed. The fourth and fifth sections present the pragmatic modules of EMIL-A, i.e. norm adoption—leading to normative goals—and norm compliance—leading to their execution. Not only are several alternative reasons for norm adoption shown, but also several pathways to norm compliance are identified. Finally, a summary and ideas for future works conclude the paper. (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)

Information on the origins of the Accademia del Cimento is extremely limited. Almost all of the surviving correspondence relating to the year before the Academy began its activities variously concerns print culture. Lists of books (read, studied, purchased, and researched), handwritten notes on old or new publications, vernacular translations of edited passages, and inquiries about new works punctuate the archive. The study of these lists and of the relationship between reading practices and ones related to annotation and knowledge production leads (...) to a reinterpretation of certain aspects of the Accademia del Cimento, suggesting the pursuit of a more flexible agenda.Through the analysis of some book lists, this contribution aims to shed light on the presence in Florence of interconnected groups of scholars, common epistemic practices, and a kind of methodological unity centred on the sharing of materials and agreement concerning the need to subject theories to experimental verification. (shrink)

The World Health Organization defined COVID-19 as a pandemic on March 11, due to the spread of the new SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus in all continents. Italy had already witnessed a very fast spread that brought the Government to place the entire country under quarantine on March 11, reaching more than 30,700 fatalities in 2 months. We hypothesized that the pandemic and related compulsory quarantine would lead to an increase of anxiety state and protective behaviors to avoid infections. We aimed to investigate (...) whether protective behaviors might have been enhanced or limited by anxiety and emotional reactions to previous experience of stressful conditions. We collected data from 618 Italian participants, by means of an online survey. Participants were asked to rate their level of worry for the pandemic, and to complete two questionnaires measuring the anxiety level: the state-trait anxiety inventory and the Pre-traumatic stress reaction checklist. Finally, the respondents were also asked to report about their compliance with protective behaviors suggested to avoid the spread of the virus. Results show that respondents with higher levels of worry reported higher levels of anxiety and pre-traumatic reactions, with positive correlations among the three measurements, and that higher frequency of the three protective behaviors were put in place by respondents with higher levels of worry. Moreover, regression analysis showed that worry for COVID-19 was most predicted by age, anxiety levels, and Pre-traumatic stress. These results could be interpreted in an evolutionary framework, in which the level of worry leads persons to become more cautious maximizing long-term survival at the cost of short-term dysregulation. (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)

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 Th e Order of Public Reason, Gerald Gaus defends an innovative and sophisticated convergence version of public reason liberalism. Th e crucial concept of his argumentative framework is that of “social morality”, intended as the set of rules apt to organize how individuals can make moral demands over each other. I claim that Gaus’s characterization of social morality and its rules is unstable because it rests on a rejection of the distinction between the normative and the descriptive. I argue (...) that such rejection is motivated by certain practical aims Gaus wishes his theory to achieve. His method and his idea that morality needs to be understood both as the dictate of impartial reasoning and as a social and historical fact come from the need for his theory to perform the task of settling the problem of order. I discuss Gaus’s philosophical attitude and, finally, distinguishing between “therapeutic” and “evaluative” approaches, I present some points of discussion for understanding the role and scope of political philosophy in general. (shrink)

When it comes to empty names, we seem to have reached very little consensus. Still, we all seem to agree, first, that our semantics should assign truth to negative singular existence statements in which an empty name occurs and, second, that names are used in such statements. The purpose of this paper is to show that ruling out that the names are mentioned is harder than it has been thought. I will present a new metalinguistic account for negative singular existence (...) statements in which an empty name occurs, and I will show that the account can deal both with the objections to the traditional metalinguistic account and with other objections that seem to target my new proposal. (shrink)

Three main motivations can explain compliance with social norms: fear of peer punishment, the desire for others' esteem and the desire to meet others' expectations. Though all play a role, only the desire to meet others' expectations can sustain compliance when neither public nor private monitoring is possible. Theoretical models have shown that such desire can indeed sustain social norms, but empirical evidence is lacking. Moreover it is unclear whether this desire ranges over others' “empirical” or “normative” expectations. We propose (...) a new experimental design to isolate this motivation and to investigate what kind of expectations people are inclined to meet. Results indicate that, when nobody can assign either material or immaterial sanctions, the perceived legitimacy of others' normative expectations can motivate a significant number of people to comply with costly social norms. (shrink)

This paper explores the ethics of introducing genome-editing technologies as a new reproductive option. In particular, it focuses on whether genome editing can be considered a morally valuable alternative to preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). Two arguments against the use of genome editing in reproduction are analysed, namely safety concerns and germline modification. These arguments are then contrasted with arguments in favour of genome editing, in particular with the argument of the child’s welfare and the argument of parental reproductive autonomy. In (...) addition to these two arguments, genome editing could be considered as a worthy alternative to PGD as it may not be subjected to some of the moral critiques moved against this technology. Even if these arguments offer sound reasons in favour of introducing genome editing as a new reproductive option, I conclude that these benefits should be balanced against other considerations. More specifically, I maintain that concerns regarding the equality of access to assisted reproduction and the allocation of scarce resources should be addressed prior to the adoption of genome editing as a new reproductive option. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAccording to Zalabardo, Wittgenstein in TLP solves the metaphysical problem of the unity of facts by holding that facts are the only ultimate items of Tractarian ontology. With his intrigui...

ABSTRACTMany recent studies either assert that the concept of virtue in eighteenth-century Italian intellectual culture is a polysemous term without really explaining its meaning, or concentrate on just one of its many facets. However, so far no study has explored the shades of meaning ascribed to ‘virtue’ to their full extent. This study is an attempt to reconstruct the eighteenth-century Italian intellectual perspective on virtue and to reveal its geographical complexities, its semantic evolutionary curve, and its interconnections in different fields. (...) The aim is not to create a simple ‘map’, but rather to focus on the limits of the intellectual debate in defining and communicating virtue, and to envisage the understanding of the political functions of virtue through more popular and widespread media such as poetic texts. Despite its ever-changing meaning, virtue remains not only a keyword of political discourse over the century, but also stands as one of the very pillars on which powerful imageries of political communication were constructed. Therefore, this article provides a first step towards an analysis of political communication in eighteenth-century Italy, which, in subsequent studies, will take into account poetic sources, which at that time were regarded as an effective instrument to overcome the aforementioned intellectual limits and better exploit the possibilities of a rhetoric of virtue. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the notion of the diagram and, more precisely, on diagrammatic images, whether they are produced in the sciences or in the arts. I will examine Charles Sanders Peirce, Gilles Deleuze and Nelson Goodman perspectives of the notion of diagram, in order to identify the constitutive characteristics of this notion. Among these constitutive features, my objective is to describe the gesture, in its diferent declinations: the gesture of reasoning and that of artistic production.

L’articolo presenta e discute gli scarni dati biografici disponibili su Rorgone Fretello, autore di una fortunata topografia della Terra Santa della prima metà del XII secolo (Descriptio de locis sanctis), e offre un quadro relativo alle due redazioni note dell’opera, inquadrando i principali aspetti legati alla loro tradizione manoscritta, alla ricezione e alla storia editoriale. Mentre la prima redazione, dedicata al vescovo boemo Enrico Sdyck, conta sei codici, la seconda, che è destinata al conte spagnolo Rodrigo di Toledo e di (...) cui in questa sede viene discussa e confermata la paternità fretelliana, godette di maggiore successo: essa è trasmessa da quarantadue testimoni e costituisce la fonte di successive opere geografiche sulla Terra Santa. In appendice si fornisce un confronto tra i testi critici dei due prologhi, allo scopo di offrire un saggio delle modifiche messe in atto nel passaggio dalla prima alla seconda redazione della Descriptio. (shrink)