Ce volume qui rassemble les actes d’un colloque tenu à Gênes en 2008 se présente comme un véritable kaléidoscope, une série articulée de fragments se proposant d’analyser, selon différentes perspectives, les identités et les représentations de genre dans l’Italie des xixe et xxe siècles. Une telle problématique n’échappe pas à une tendance centrifuge en raison de l’extrême variété des thèmes abordés mais a le mérite d’exprimer la vitalité et l’originalité des études de genre en Italie. Famill...

The paper reconstructs an emblematic case of the relationship between scientific models and metaphors, showing how it is just a metaphor to shape the new image of the life promoted by Claude Bernard in the context of nineteenth-century biology. In fact, the scientist chooses to map a field that is still little known by transferring properties and relations taken from the domain of the art. Using this heuristic fiction, Bernard can claim the originality of biological science and its independence from (...) the physical and chemical sciences, without putting into question its deterministic system and its status as an experimental science. (shrink)

In this paper we question the hypothesis of bounded rationality against full rationality in the context of job changing behavior, via simple econometric explorations on microdata drawn from Worker Histories Italian Panel (WHIP) and Sample of Integrated Labor Market Biographies (SIAB). The identification strategy builds on a quasi-counterfactual experiment in which the performance of each voluntary mover is compared to the average performance of a peer-group of stayers of the same skill group, co-workers in the firm from which the movers’ (...) job switch originated. Voluntary movers are identifiable in the WHIP and SIAB datasets, while it is not possible to do the same among the stayers. Full rationality suggests that the performance of voluntary movers should be superior to the stayers’ (both voluntary and involuntary) as the involuntary stayers have a smaller decision set from which to choose. In this exploration we find a clear opposite result, which we take as evidence of bounded rationality of the movers. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Does genetic relatedness define who is a mother or father and who incurs obligations towards or entitlements over children? While once the answer to this question may have been obvious, advances in reproductive technologies have complicated our understanding of what makes a parent. In a recent publication Bayne and Kolers argue for a pluralistic account of parenthood on the basis that genetic derivation, gestation, extended custody and sometimes intention to parent are sufficient (but not necessary) grounds for parenthood.1 Bayne (...) and Kolers further suggest that definitions of parenthood are underpinned by the assumption that ‘being causally implicated in the creation of a child is the key basis for being its parent’.2 This paper examines the claim that genetic relatedness is sufficient grounds for parenthood based on a causal connection between genetic parents and their offspring. I argue that parental obligations are about moral responsibility and not causal responsibility because we are not morally accountable for every consequence to which we causally contribute. My account includes the conditions generally held to apply to moral responsibility, i.e. freedom and foreseeability. I argue that parental responsibilities are generated whenever the birth of a child is a reasonably foreseeable consequence of voluntary actions. I consider the implications of this account for third parties involved in reproductive technologies. I argue that under some conditions the obligations generated by freely and foreseeably causing a child to exist can be justifiably transferred to others. (shrink)

What is the place of materiality—the expression or condition of physical substance—in our visual age of rapidly changing materials and media? How is it fashioned in the arts or manifested in virtual forms? In Surface, cultural critic and theorist Giuliana Bruno deftly explores these questions, seeking to understand materiality in the contemporary world. Arguing that materiality is not a question of the materials themselves but rather the substance of material relations, Bruno investigates the space of those relations, examining how (...) they appear on the surface of different media—on film and video screens, in gallery installations, or on the skins of buildings and people. The object of visual studies, she contends, goes well beyond the image and engages the surface as a place of contact between people and art objects. As Bruno threads through these surface encounters, she unveils the fabrics of the visual—the textural qualities of works of art, whether manifested on canvas, wall, or screen. Illuminating the modern surface condition, she notes how façades are becoming virtual screens and the art of projection is reinvented on gallery walls. She traverses the light spaces of artists Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Tacita Dean, and Anthony McCall; touches on the textured surfaces of Isaac Julien’s and Wong Kar-wai’s filmic screens; and travels across the surface materiality in the architectural practices of Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Herzog & de Meuron to the art of Doris Salcedo and Rachel Whiteread, where the surface tension of media becomes concrete. In performing these critical operations on the surface, she articulates it as a site in which different forms of mediation, memory, and transformation can take place. Surveying object relations across art, architecture, fashion, design, film, and new media, Surface is a magisterial account of contemporary visual culture. (shrink)

We administered suggestions to see a gray-scale pattern as colored and a colored pattern in shades of gray to 30 high suggestible and eight low suggestible students. The suggestions were administered twice, once following the induction of hypnosis and once without an induction. Besides rating the degree of color they saw in the stimuli differently, participants also rated their states of consciousness as normal, relaxed, hypnotized, or deeply hypnotized. Reports of being hypnotized were limited to highly suggestible participants and only (...) after the hypnotic induction had been administered. Reports of altered color perception were also limited to high suggestibles, but were roughly comparable regardless of whether hypnosis had been induced. These data indicate that suggestible individuals do not slip into a hypnotic state when given imaginative suggestions without the induction of hypnosis, but nevertheless report experiencing difficult suggestions for profound perceptual alterations that are pheonomenologically similar to what they report in hypnosis. (shrink)

Background: International developments suggest that providing clinical ethics services to help clinicians negotiate ethical issues that arise in clinical practice is beneficial and reflects best practice in promoting high ethical standards and patient-centered care. The aim of this study was to explore the needs and experiences of clinical staff members to inform the development of future clinical ethics support. Methods: Health professionals at a large regional health service completed an online survey containing questions about the frequency of ethical and legal (...) issues encountered in clinical practice, the type of situations that gave rise to the ethical and/or legal uncertainty or concern, how clinicians currently address these issues, and what support would be welcome. Results: The survey was completed by 369 staff members, including 61% with more than 10 years in the profession and 51% in nursing/midwifery. Two-thirds (66%) indicated they often considered ethical implications of their clinical decisions, and half (49%) often considered the legal implications. More than half (58%) were often/occasionally concerned about the ethically right thing to do. Patient requests for borderline treatment (47%), staff disagreements about patient care (48%), and patients declining recommended treatment (54%) were the most frequent reasons given for ethical or legal uncertainty. Sixty-nine percent of respondents indicated that the way their department addressed ethical issues could be improved and 85% agreed that there is a need for more discussion on ethical issues. The majority (82%) of respondents had encountered ethically challenging clinical situations where additional support would have helped. Common approaches to issues were discussion with colleagues/supervisor (91.1%), discussion at handover/group forums (50.8%), and consultation with guidelines/protocols (60.9%). Conclusions: A majority of clinical staff members surveyed have encountered ethically/legally challenging cases daily for which they have often sought additional advice. This study indicates that many clinical staff members would welcome some form of additional clinical ethics support including advice and education. (shrink)

Drawing on interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives, this book critically examines intercultural theory and its interrelations with globalisation, education and dialogue in multicultural societies. Applying the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, the author repositions intercultural communication within a new paradigm that challenges static interpretations of self and other, and suggests future directions for the development of a post-methodological framework based on the decentring of the researcher. This innovative work will provide researchers and language teachers with the critical tools needed to challenge instrumentalist approaches (...) to communication in a diverse global context, characterised by conflict and fear of the other and fresh insights to scholars of education, applied linguistics and sociology. (shrink)

Giuliana Carugati - The Metaphysics of Dante's Comedy - Journal of the History of Philosophy 44:3 Journal of the History of Philosophy 44.3 474-475 Christian Moevs. The Metaphysics of Dante's Comedy. American Academy of Religion, Reflection and Theory in the Study of Religion Series. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. xii + 308. Cloth, $49.95 Having for a long time insisted on a newly "mystical," as well as a radically contemporary, reading of Dante's Commedia, this reviewer cannot but (...) deeply appreciate Moev's intelligent and well-written book, which addresses the question of the "truth" of the poem, and solves it by pointing in the direction of "self-knowledge, the self-experience of what is" . In other words, the poem represents "how . . . the human soul or intelligence.. (shrink)

How should families be constructed? Does it matter if we choose to ignore ‘blood ties’ and raise children without their genetic parents? The debate over a recent court ruling allowing single and lesbian women access to assisted reproductive technologies (ART’s) illustrates two possible answers to this question. Many of those opposed to the ruling argue that the traditional biological family is the natural family unit and the ideal family form, which should be preserved. Amongst those in favour it is argued (...) that families are not defined by nature but culturally constructed, that the traditional biological family is just one possible family form and that the way families are arranged is a matter of personal preference. This paper argues that questions about the importance of preserving the biological family rest largely on the value we attribute to genetic relatedness and not on whether the family is a natural or cultural construct. I argue against the claim that genetic relatedness and biological families are so important to children’s welfare that lesbian and single women should be denied access to ARTs. (shrink)

After a brief outline of Enoch’s defense of robust realism in his Taking Morality Seriously, I focus on Enoch’s taking-morality-seriously thought by making explicit the assumptions I see involved in it. Enoch’s argument from impartiality is then reconstructed to show how these assumptions are at work. Next, I explain the reasons why Enoch does not succeed in converting these assumptions into a positive argument for the thesis implied by robust realism that there is a moral objectivity. Finally, I conclude that (...) the critical analysis provided casts a shadow on the reliability of the taking-morality-seriously thought as a basis of a theoretical inquiry into the nature of morality. (shrink)

In three experiments, we found that after a subtle suggestion, subjects falsely recognized words from their own dreams and thought they had been presented during the waking state. The procedure used in these studies involved three phases. Subjects studied a list of words on Day 1. On Day 2, they received a false suggestion that some words from their previously reported dreams had been presented on the list. On Day 3, they tried to recall only what had occurred on the (...) initial list. Subjects falsely recognized their dream words at a very high rate—sometimes as often as they accurately recognized true words. They reported that they genuinely “remembered” the dream words, as opposed to simply “knowing” that they had been previously presented. These findings, which suggest that dreams can sometimes be mistaken for reality, have significant implications for the practice of psychotherapy. (shrink)

This paper analyses the features of the 2021 software for the creation of ultrarealistic digital characters “MetaHuman Creator” and reflects on the causes of such perceived effect of realism to understand if the faces produced with such software represent an actual novelty from an academic standpoint. Such realism is first of all defined as the result of semio-cognitive processes which trigger interpretative habits specifically related to faces. These habits are then related to the main properties of any realistic face: being (...) face-looking, face-meaning and face-acting. These properties, in turn, are put in relation with our interactions with faces in terms of face detection, face recognition, face reading and face agency. Within this theoretical framework, we relate the characteristics of these artificial faces with such interpretative habits. To do so, we first of all make an examination of the technological features behind both the software and the digital faces it produces. This analysis highlights four main points of interest: the mathematical accuracy, the scanned database, the high level of details and the transformative capacities of these artificial faces. We then relate these characteristics with the cultural and cognitive aspects involved in recognizing and granting meaning to faces. This reveals how metahuman faces differs from previous artificial faces in terms of indexicality, intersubjectivity, informativity and irreducibility. But it also reveals some limits of such effect of reality in terms of intentionality and historical context. This examination consequently brings us to conclude that metahuman faces are qualitatively different from previous artificial faces and, in the light of their potentials and limits, to highlight four main lines of future research based on our findings. (shrink)

This article argues that two distinctive varieties of antifascism took shape in the 1930s and endured through the late 1970s. These two varieties—Popular Front antifascism and anti-imperial antifascism—were in dialogue but in opposition to one another, and both were transnational mobilizing ideologies. Investigating these two antifascist movements allows us to place Europe in the wider world and demonstrate how anti-imperial activists of color simultaneously “provincialized” Europe and situated it within a global framework. The effort also highlights the need to rethink (...) the history of the European Left through the framework of antifascism. (shrink)

This paper discusses Max Scheler’s early works, written between 1899 and 1906 in a neo-Kantian context. The very little attention the literature paid to them was almost always guided by the only aim to single the themes out which can be used as signs of Scheler’s future „conversion“ to phenomenology. In consequence of this predominant approach, the neo- Kantianism that characterizes Scheler’s early works has been treated as a vague notion and never examined as such. The paper specifies this notion (...) through an examination of Scheler’s early works which shows their most significant theoretical debts (to R. Eucken, W. Windelband and particularly to H. Cohen) and the questions they deal with, i.e. the relation between knowledge and morality as different kinds of objective forms of experience; the methodological problem in philosophy; the development of a transcendental logic as general science of objectivity. (shrink)

In his critique of Modernity and the modern Gnosis, the prominent Italian Catholic philosopher Augusto Del Noce was particularly influenced by Eric Voegelin’s use of the two concepts in his political theory. The aim of this article is to present the various aspects of the idea of history proposed by Voegelin followed by Del Noce’s response and interpretation of them in order to show the similarities and differences between their views. More specifically, the comparison between Voegelin and Del Noce centers (...) on the question of the eidos or “form” of history and on the difference, important for Del Noce, between ancient and modern Gnosis. (shrink)

O estudo discute o temor como reação de heróis à presença epifânica dos deuses, analisando três cenas de encontros do tipo que encontramos em várias obras da poesia grega antiga, em variados contextos e circunstâncias – e com variadas consequências. Tais cenas são as seguintes: na epopeia, na Ilíada, o encontro entre Helena e Afrodite no canto III, no qual o disfarce de serva anciã conhecida da espartana logo se desfaz no reconhecimento da real identidade do deus. No Hino homérico (...) a Afrodite, a revelação de Afrodite a Anquises, após a sedução dele pela deusa. E na mélica de Baquílides, no Ditirambo 17, o encontro entre o jovem Teseu e as Nereidas, que se dá no saguão da casa de Posêidon. Nessas cenas, busco pensar o que causa temor, como essa reação emerge, e o impacto para o mortal (Helena, Anquises, Teseu) – e para o andamento da obra em que ocorrem. (shrink)