L’intento di questo contributo è accennare a come la considerazione dell’influenza esercitata da Spinoza sul pensiero di Sini rappresenti un punto di partenza privilegiato per intendere la concezione che quest’ultimo ha della pratica filosofica. A partire dalla lettura siniana dell’ Etica, per come è svolta all’interno di Archivio Spinoza. La verità e la vita, vengono toccati temi quali l’esercizio filosofico, il «limite» e la «logica del finito», il rapporto tra soggetto e oggetto e, soprattutto, il nucleo etico della filosofia.

The present article aims to provide an original interpretation of Jan Patočka’s philosophy of history starting from the consideration of the debt it holds with Heidegger’s thought, in particular with the existential analytic of Being and time. Of Heidegger’s analytics, in fact, Patočka grasps and assumes with great radicality and originality the peculiar ‘modal logic’, according to which the existential dimension of closure, inauthenticity and estrangement from oneself is not opposed ‘frontally’ to that of openness, authenticity and nearness to oneself (...) of existence, being rather co-owned by it in the form of a privative modalization. We have therefore aimed to show how such a scheme is the one by which Patočka, in his Heretical Essays, interprets the whole adventure of Western history starting from its ‘emersion’ in ancient Greece. In particular, thanks to such a reconstruction we were able to shed light on the position of the phenomenon of work in Patočka’s philosophy: the Patočkian conception of work, understood as an obstacle par excellence to authentic historical existence, represents not only the true stakes of the comparison of the phenomenological- existential line in which Patočka is inserted with a Marxist theory of alienation; starting from here, moreover, it is potentially a clearer framework of the Patočkian genealogy of Western civilization and its form of subjectivity in relation to the approach of other genealogical philosophies of the last century. (shrink)

Burnout is a well-documented entity in Care Workers population, affecting up to 50% of physicians, just as it is equally well established that managing an infectious disease outbreaks, such as confirmed in the COVID-19 pandemic, increases Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and the psychological burden. Mental health support, in the form of formal or remote sessions, has been shown to be helpful to health care staff, despite the organizational difficulties in an emergency. During the first emergence of COVID-19 in Italy, the Scientific (...) Institute for Research, Hospitalization and Health Care Istituto di Ricovero e Cura a Carattere Scientifico Policlinico San Matteo Foundation, the Italian hospital that treated “patient 1,” has activated an agreement with the Soleterre Foundation, an international Non-Governmental Organization that manages health emergency projects, to provide psychological support. A task force of psychologists was created with the aim of designing and administering a Therapeutic Mental Health Assessment for COVID-19 Care Workers to evaluate and support health care workers’ mental health. The assessment battery was developed to evaluate symptoms and behaviors associated with trauma and the corresponding maladaptive behaviors. Once the TMHA COVID-19 CWs had been developed, the team of psychologists regularly visited healthcare staff in the ward to administer it. One hundred seven care workers across Intensive Care Units, the emergency room and medical ward were administered the TMHA COVID-19 CWs. PTSD symptoms were reported as severe by 13% of the population. Depressive symptoms as severe for 7% and Anxiety symptoms as severe for 14%. Severe psychotic symptoms were experienced by 2% and severe suicidal thoughts by 1% of the population. The possibility of acting upon the results of the TMHA COVID-19 CWs allowed an early intervention through individual session beyond the cut-off level for PTSD in NSESSS. In fact, 280 individual support sessions were offered. Therefore, we considered our project a protective and support factor for healthcare workers’ mental well-being and we recommend implementing a mental health screening program in ward involved in COVID-19 patients’ care. (shrink)

As innovations in the field of vascular composite allotransplantation (VCA) progress, whole-eye transplantation (WET) is poised to transition from non-human mammalian models to living human recipients. Present treatment options for vision loss are generally considered suboptimal, and attendant concerns ranging from aesthetics and prosthesis maintenance to social stigma may be mitigated by WET. Potential benefits to WET recipients may also include partial vision restoration, psychosocial benefits related to identity and social integration, improvements in physical comfort and function, and reduced surgical (...) risk associated with a biologic eye compared to a prosthesis. Perioperative and postoperative risks of WET are expected to be comparable to those of facial transplantation (FT), and may be similarly mitigated by immunosuppressive protocols, adequate psychosocial support, and a thorough selection process for both the recipient and donor. To minimize the risks associated with immunosuppressive medications, the first attempts in human recipients will likely be performed in conjunction with a FT. If first-in-human attempts at combined FT-WET prove successful and the biologic eye survives, this opens the door for further advancement in the field of vision restoration by means of a viable surgical option. This analysis integrates recent innovations in WET research with the existing discourse on the ethics of surgical innovation and offers preliminary guidance to VCA programs considering undertaking WET in human recipients. (shrink)

Carey’s (2009) account of bootstrapping in developmental psychology has been criticized out of a lack of theoretical precision and because of its alleged circularity (Rips et al. 2013, Cognition 128 (3): 320–330; Fodor 2010, Times Literary Supplement, 7–8; Rey 2014, Mind & Language 29 (2): 109–132). In this paper, we respond to these criticisms by connecting the debate on bootstrapping with recent accounts of conceptual creativity in philosophy of science. Specifically, we build on Nersessian’s (2010) hybrid-models-based theory of scientific conceptual (...) change to develop a refined model of bootstrapping. The key explanatory feature of this model, which we will call hybrid bootstrapping, is the iterated hybridization of different representational domains. We show how hybrid bootstrapping can answer two major critiques that have been leveled against Carey’s account: the circularity challenge and the specification challenge. (shrink)

The grounding of symbols in computational models of linguistic abilities is one of the fundamental properties of psychologically plausible cognitive models. In this article, we present an embodied model for the grounding of language in action based on epigenetic robots. Epigenetic robotics is one of the new cognitive modeling approaches to modeling autonomous mental development. The robot model is based on an integrative vision of language in which linguistic abilities are strictly dependent on and grounded in other behaviors and skills. (...) It uses simulated robots that learn through imitation the names of basic actions. Robots also learn higher order action concepts through the process of grounding transfer. The simulation demonstrates how new, higher order behavioral abilities can be autonomously built on previously grounded basic action categories following linguistic interaction with human users. (shrink)

Recent theories on cognitive science have stressed the significance of moral intuition as a counter to and complementary part of moral reasoning in decision making. Thus, the aim of this paper is to create an integrated framework that can account for both intuitive and reflective cognitive processes, in order to explore the antecedents of ethical decision making. To do that, we build on Scholasticism, an important medieval school of thought from which descends the main pillars of the modern Catholic social (...) doctrine. Particularly, the focus will be on the scholastic concept of synderesis, which is an innate human faculty that constantly inclines decision makers toward universal moral principles. Managerial implications are discussed, stressing how a rediscovery of decision makers’ intuitive moral judgments could be relevant in the reflective thinking practice of managers’ ethical reasoning, thus saving them from rational insensitivity to ethical dilemmas. (shrink)

In this short paper, we analyse whether assuming that mathematical objects are “thin” in Linnebo's sense simplifies the epistemology of mathematics. Towards this end, we introduce the notion of transparency and show that not all thin objects are transparent. We end by arguing that, far from being a weakness of thin objects, the lack of transparency of some thin objects is a fruitful characteristic mark of abstract mathematics.

While most educational practices today place an excessive amount of attention on discourse, this article attaches great importance to the reciprocity between speech and silence by drawing from the writings of Plato's Socrates, Augustine, and Paul Gauguin for whom this reciprocity is of the essence in learning. These three figures teach that we learn to speak, listen, and act in relation with the silence of our thoughts. This article claims that Socrates' dialectic is nothing but inward or silent dialogue, which (...) reappears in or is advanced by Augustine, and which is also shared by Paul Gauguin. Yet its manifestation differs one from the other: in Socrates, it manifests itself as silence of thought; in Augustine, as inner vision or contemplation; and in Gauguin, as creative thought or activity. By neglecting or separating speech from silence, today's educational methods do not prepare students to respond to life's questions; neither do they enable students to infuse their conversation with an appreciation of life's beauty. (shrink)

This paper investigates the nature of emotional experience in relation to the senses, and it defends the thesis that emotional experience is partly non-sensory. In §1 I introduce my reader to the debate. I reconstruct a position I call ‘restrictivism’ and motivate it as part of a reductive approach to mind’s place in nature. Drawing on intuitive but insightful remarks on the nature of sensation from Plato, I map out the conditions under which the restrictivist thesis is both substantive and (...) plausible. I then present two arguments against it. The first argument, which I lay out in §2, draws on recent empirical results in emotion research to show that restrictivism cannot be reconciled with the possibility of knowledge of one’s own emotional state by acquaintance. The second argument, which I present in §3, individuates a claim on which most contemporary theories of emotional valence converge and uses it to demonstrate that restrictivism has a false implication: it must deny that valence is experientially felt. (shrink)

Teil 1: Entwicklungsgeschichtliche und -- Systematische Aspekte.

Here I distinguish two things jurisprudence might take itself to explain. A theory of law can be either concept-first or practice-first. Concept-first theories investigate the concept we implicitly deploy to label some things as law and not others. Practice-first theories investigate directly, and uncover interesting features of, a particular social practice. That practice could be, for instance, the practice of lawyers and officials which prevails in the United States. I identify Hershovitz's Law Is a Moral Practice with a practice-first approach. (...) Then I elaborate on the distinction and show that a practice-first approach is more defensible than many assume. Finally, I argue a practice-first approach rules out predictive theories of law. (shrink)

Recently, Bohr’s complementarity principle was assessed in setups involving delayed choices. These works argued in favor of a reformulation of the aforementioned principle so as to account for situations in which a quantum system would simultaneously behave as wave and particle. Here we defend a framework that, supported by well-known experimental results and consistent with the decoherence paradigm, allows us to interpret complementarity in terms of correlations between the system and an informer. Our proposal offers formal definition and operational interpretation (...) for the dual behavior in terms of both nonlocal resources and the couple work-information. Most importantly, our results provide a generalized information-based trade-off for the wave–particle duality and a causal interpretation for delayed-choice experiments. (shrink)

This symposium includes a selection of articles on the origins and evolution of language. These are extended version of selected papers presented at “EVOLANG6: The Sixth International Conference on the Evolution of Language” that was held in Rome in April 2006. This selection of papers provides a multi-methodological view of different approaches to, and theoretical explanations of, the evolution of language.

This article provides a sociological explanation for urban “greening,” the normative practice of using everyday signifiers of nature to fix problems with urbanism. Although greening is commonly understood as a reaction against the pathologies of the industrial metropolis, such explanations cannot account for greening’s recurrence across varied social and historical contexts. Through a study of greening in Germany’s Ruhr region, a polycentric urban region that has repeatedly greened in the absence of a traditional city, I argue that greening is made (...) possible by a social imaginary of nature as an indirect or moral good, which I call urbanized nature, that is an outcome of, and subsequently becomes a variable in, urbanization. I draw on processual accounts of urbanization and the sociology of morality to explain urbanized nature’s emergence in the Ruhr at the beginning of the twentieth century, and its use to fulfill two competing visions of urban democracy in the postwar period. I find that rather than an ideological reaction against cities, greening is an aspirational practice that can be mobilized by a range of actors in a variety of places and times. By showing how a new social imaginary made new forms of moral action possible and how those ideals were then materialized in urban space, this article draws attention to the role of cultural imaginaries in urban change and to the material consequences of moral beliefs. (shrink)

In this essay, I examine Arthur C. Danto s highly influential thesis that Andy Warhols Brillo Box ends art by obviating the need for art object to differ sensually from ordinary object. Coining the term Co-aesthesis, I demonstrate that it is only by improperly applying Extensionalism that anyone is able to make the claim that the Brillo Box is substantively equivalent to a Brillo Box in the first place: if we just work harder to coordinate the various visual, tactile and (...) contextual data striking our sensorium, we can arrive at a very different spot than the place from which we witness art ending — especially when we consider the revelations about multi-dimensionality in the realm of physics. To help make my point, I use Italian philosopher Tiziana Andina’s recent book Arthur Danto: Philosopher of Pop and her interpretation that, after Danto, a sensual Aesthetics parts company from a conceptual and sensually inert Philosophy of Art. (shrink)

The essay shows some relationships between Theology and Metaphysics in Thomas Aquinas.

This article returns to an old but not hitherto satisfactorily solved question, and aims at putting forward a new approach to the study of the sources and authorship of two contemporary treatises on agriculture: the Nabatean Agriculture and the Geoponica. Each of them embodies a long tradition reaching from Antiquity to the 10th century in two different cultural provinces expressed in Greek / Latin and Arabic languages. But there is another common feature of these works. Both of them survived in (...) a significant number of manuscripts, and constitute a kind of revision of previous compilations which drew their contents from more ancient treatises brought to light between the 3rd and 6th centuries AD, and to some extent could be qualified as the outcome of an effort for systematising the corpus of agronomical science. Texts and translations from Greek to Latin, from Greek to Syriac or to Arabic, and from Arabic to Armenian attest to this cultural intercommunication. (shrink)

The ostensive-inferential model is a model of communication, an alternative to the code model of communication, based on pragmatic competence: it explains human communication in terms of expression and recognition of informative and communicative intentions, founding comprehension on the distinction between literal meaning and the speaker’s meaning. Through informative intentions we try to make evident the content of a message to a receiver, or to make evident what we want to communicate to him/her: communicative intentions are used to make evident (...) the very fact that we intend to communicate. One hypothesis is that ostensive-inferential communication is what makes human language possible. Since an extensive literature has highlighted the role of the Theory of Mind in ostensive-inferential communication, this hypothesis fits with the idea that a mechanism for mentalizing underlies human communication. The aim of the present paper is to stress the role of lower-level mechanisms, specifically of motor simulation, in the recognition of informative and communicative intentions, in order to outline an embodied account of ostensive communication. Specifically, the hypothesis is that this process is involved in language acquisition during development, and that it plays a role in the associative learning process involved in language acquisition during childhood. To this aim, in future research it may be useful to test the involvement of motor simulation (specifically, phono-articulatory and semantic) in the recognition of informative and communicative intentions in toddlers. Since some models of language evolution focus on the role of motor simulation, a supplementary goal is to deepen its role in the biological evolution of language, focusing on the specific link between motor simulation and intentions in the framework of ostensive-inferential model. (shrink)

In this work, we illustrate applications of a semantic framework for non-congruential modal logic based on hyperintensional models. We start by discussing some philosophical ideas behind the approach; in particular, the difference between the set of possible worlds in which a formula is true (its intension) and the semantic content of a formula (its hyperintension), which is captured in a rigorous way in hyperintensional models. Next, we rigorously specify the approach and provide a fundamental completeness theorem. Moreover, we analyse examples (...) of non-congruential systems that can be semantically characterized within this framework in an elegant and modular way. Finally, we compare the proposed framework with some alternatives available in the literature. In the light of the results obtained, we argue that hyperintensional models constitute a basic, general and unifying semantic framework for (non-congruential) modal logic. (shrink)

Does domination make us unfree? Republicans argue that it does. Thus, they contend that the liberal conception of freedom is inadequate as it is not (wholly) able to account for domination. I provide a new approach to this controversy. The liberal conception of freedom has the potential to account for domination, but we must adjust the scope of our analysis: claims about domination are best understood not as claims about quantities of liberal freedom, but as claims about the value of (...) liberal freedom. Even if the master is benevolent and indeed does not interfere much with the slave’s choices and actions, the relation of domination affects the quality of the slave’s liberal freedom. To argue for this point, I provide a taxonomy of the value of freedom and then, on this basis, point to several ways in which freedom under domination lacks value. (shrink)

Attention is often dichotomized into controlled vs. automatic processing, where controlled processing is slow, flexible, and intentional, and automatic processing is fast, inflexible, and unintentional. In contrast to this strict dichotomy, there is mounting evidence for context-specific processes that are engaged rapidly yet are also flexible. In the present study we extend this idea to the domain of implicit learning to examine whether flexibility in automatic processes can be implemented through the reliance on contextual features. Across three experiments we show (...) that participants can learn implicitly two complementary sequences that are associated with distinct contexts, and that transfer of learning when the two contexts are randomly intermixed depends on the distinctiveness of the two contexts. Our results point to the role of context-specific processes in the acquisition and expression of implicit sequence knowledge, and also suggest that episodic details can be represented in sequence knowledge. (shrink)

We propose a novel, ontological approach to studying mathematical propositions and proofs. By “ontological approach” we refer to the study of the categories of beings or concepts that, in their practice, mathematicians isolate as fruitful for the advancement of their scientific activity (like discovering and proving theorems, formulating conjectures, and providing explanations). We do so by developing what we call a “formal ontology” of proofs using semantic modeling tools (like RDF and OWL) developed by the computer science community. In this (...) article, (i) we describe this new approach and, (ii) to provide an example, we apply it to the problem of the identity of proofs. We also describe open issues and further applications of this approach (for example, the study of purity of methods). We lay some foundations to investigate rigorously and at large scale intellectual moves and attitudes that underpin the advancement of mathematics through cognitive means (carving out investigationally valuable concepts and techniques) and social means (like communication, collaboration, revision, and criticism of specific categories, inferential patterns, and levels of analysis). Our approach complements other types of analysis of proofs such as reconstruction in a deductive system and examination through a proof-assistant. (shrink)

Arts, Real-Time Video and Interactivity for Sustainability is an ongoing collaborative research project investigating how real-time video, DIY surveillance technologies and sensor data can be used as a tool for environmental awareness, activism and artistic explorations. The project consists of a series of digital contexts for aesthetic contemplation of nature and civic engagement, aiming to foster awareness and empowerment of local populations through DIY surveillance. At the core of the ARTIVIS efforts are a series of interactive installations, that make use (...) of surveillance technologies and real-time video as raw material to promote environmental awareness through the emotion generated by real-time connections with nature. Throughout the project development, the surveillance concept has been shifting from the use of surveillance technology in a centralized platform, to the idea of veillance with distributed peer-to-peer networks that can be used for science and environmental monitoring. In this paper we present the history of the ARTiVIS project, related and inspiring work, describe ongoing research work and explore the present and future challenges of appropriating surveillance technology for artistic, educational and civic engagement purposes. (shrink)

Book Symposium on Michael Thompson's "Life and Action" -/- (downlodable here: http://fqp.luiss.it/category/numero/ns-supplementary-volume-2015-life-and-action) -/- Table of Contents: -/- Paolo Costa, "Where does our understanding of life come from? The riddle about recognizing living things" -/- Constantine Sandis, "He buttered the toast while baking a fresh loaf" -/- Matteo Bianchin, "Intentions and Intentionality" -/- Arto Laitinen, "Practices as ‘actual’ sources of goodness of actions" -/- Italo Testa, "Some consequences of Thompson’s Life and Action for social philosophy" -/- Ingrid Salvatore, "Thompson on (...) Rawls and Practices". (shrink)