Nosso objetivo no presente artigo é contextualizar as críticas de Rousseau àquilo que posteriormente será designado como ética socioambiental, a partir da qual se analisam as relações dos homens com o meio ambiente e como estas são determinadas e também determinantes de suas ações ético-políticas. Pretende-se ainda verificar em que medida o pensamento de Rousseau pode contribuir para o entendimento dos desastres socioambientais, na atualidade. This paper aims at contextualizing Rousseau's critiques of what would later be called the socio-environmental ethics, (...) which entails analysis not only of the relations of men with the environment and the way these relations are determined, but also of the way the environment determines men's ethical and political actions. We also intend to verify to what extent Rousseau's thought may contribute to the understanding of current socio-environmental disasters. (shrink)

ABSTRACTMetaphors frequently link negative affect with darkness and associations of this type have been established in several experimental paradigms. Given the ubiquity and strength of these associations, people who prefer dark to light may be more prone to negative emotional experiences and symptoms. A five study investigation couches these ideas in a new theoretical framework and then examines them. Across studies, 1 in 4 people preferred the perceptual concept of dark over the perceptual concept of light. These dark-preferring people scored (...) higher in neuroticism and experienced greater depressive feelings in daily life. Moreover, dark preferences shared a robust relationship with depressive symptoms as well as generalised anxiety symptoms. The results provide novel insights into negative affectivity and extend conceptual metaphor theory in a way that is capable of making individual difference predictions. (shrink)

The brand personality of nonprofit service organizations is a focal cue for individuals engaging in pro-social behavior. However, the positive effect of brand personality on donors’ intention to engage pro-socially may be affected in cases in which NPOs provide monetary incentives to those donors. Relying on social exchange theory, the authors examine how monetary incentives and brand personality commonly affect the intention to donate and whether this effect varies based on the perceived trustworthiness of the NPO. The results of two (...) experimental studies show that branding and incentivizing decisions should not be developed independently because monetary incentives do indeed undermine the positive effects of brand personality on the intention to donate. However, the effectiveness of incentives varies with the perceived level of trust in the NPO: highly trusted NPO services are harmed by monetary incentives, whereas less-trusted NPOs may even benefit. (shrink)

Este ensaio teórico tem por objetivo analisar criticamente os confrontos entre uma filosofia do uso ou da apropriação, das coisas e da vida, através da leitura da História da sexualidade II: O uso dos prazeres de Michel Foucault. Surgem possibilidades ético-políticas da potência do uso para constituir projetos-de-vida a partir da teorização do uso, que abarca a reflexão acerca do momento oportuno de uso, do comedimento ao uso e da sua relação com a liberdade e a verdade. Por necessidade, momento (...) ou status inserido em regras formais de uso, a autogestão da vida, por vezes, gera uma luta consigo mesmo para resolução de problemas e alcançar objetivos. Portanto, o planejamento da vida é concedente de liberdade e emancipação. (shrink)

This essay highlights a methodological weakness in Foucault’s genealogy of neoliberalism often mistaken for a biographical shift in his philosophy. Naissance de la biopolitique is sometimes interpreted as evidence for Foucault’s conversion to neoliberalism, whereas its lack of critical acuity stems rather from its methodological limitations. Through a discussion of the “neoliberal conversion”-thesis, I highlight those limitations. Though Foucault’s appreciative tone in his neoliberalism lectures is surprising, his aim is mainly to defamiliarize readers from the dominant mode of neoliberal rationality (...) so that they can affirm the creative potential to foster new conducts, new identities, and new rationalities. Foucault did not convert to neoliberalism, but sought to destabilise it by revealing its historical contingency. However, as Foucault’s surprisingly positive tone shows, this strategy is insufficient for combatting neoliberalism. There is an elective affinity between Foucault’s own politics of creative self-reinvention and neoliberalism’s promise of a non-invasive, post-disciplinary government by indirect economic incentives alone. Foucault’s libertine stance toward subjectivity hence seems easily integrated into a neoliberal conduct of conducts. I propose to supplement Foucault’s genealogical method as he deploys it in Naissance de la biopolitique with an immanent critique of neoliberalism from the perspective of the governed. Rather than investigating neoliberal rationality as a promising endeavour for the future, we can study the real-life implementations of neoliberalism and their effects on subjective conducts. Neoliberal rationality is involved in a permanent struggle to shape the conduct of conducts along entrepreneurial and competitive lines, but subjects are refractory living beings whose conducts are not so simply transformed. Neoliberalism has had to give up its post-disciplinary aspirations and turn to the power of discipline and abandonment to enforce neoliberal norms of conduct. Neoliberalism has transformed into a negative biopolitics that sacrifices the lives of unproductive subjects as collateral damage to the overall welfare of the population. Immanent critique thereby reveals how subjects are pushed beyond their limits until neoliberal norms of conduct become unbearable. This intolerability of neoliberalism cannot be directly deduced from the writings of Becker, Friedman, or Hayek.111 It becomes manifest in the confrontation between neoliberal rationality and the material living bodies of finite human beings unable to be stretched in the ways neoliberalism requires. (shrink)

We argue that in extensive decision problems (extensive games with a single player) with imperfect recall care must be taken in interpreting information sets and strategies. Alternative interpretations allow for different kinds of analysis. We address the following issues: 1. randomization at information sets; 2. consistent beliefs; 3. time consistency of optimal plans; 4. the multiselves approach to decision making. We illustrate our discussion through an example that we call the ‘‘paradox of the absentminded driver.’’ Journal of Economic Literature Classification (...) Numbers: C7, D0. 1997 Academic Press. (shrink)

After three proceedings in which neuroscience was a relevant factor for the final verdict in Italian courts, for the first time a recent case puts in question the legal relevance of neuroscientific evidence. This decision deserves international attention in its underlining that the uncertainty still affecting neuroscientific knowledge can have a significant impact on the law. It urges the consideration of such uncertainty and the development of a shared management of it.

Most guidelines and proposalsfor Internet research ethics are based onregulations for human subjects research. In therelated research, Internet material is viewedas animate and described as people. Humanitiesresearchers have rarely been a part of thedebate about Internet research ethics and thepractices of these scholars have not been takeninto consideration when drafting most of theguidelines. This threatens to limit the kindsof Internet research that can be performed – critical strategies are particularlydiscouraged – and the ways that researchers andother users understand the Internet.Researchers (...) who use human subjects models havenot fully acknowledged computer mediation, theconstructed aspects of Internetrepresentations, and the screen. If we viewInternet material as cultural production thenthe models for Internet research would be ArtHistory and Visual Culture, English andLiterary Studies, Film and Media Studies, Musicand Sound Studies, and Theatre and PerformanceStudies. A more complete integration of theseapproaches into Internet Studies – either as asole investigatory strategy or in tandem withother forms of inquiry – would changeresearchers' ethical questions. It would alsoshow instances in which human subjectsguidelines do not apply to complex Internetmaterial. It is imperative to demonstrate thatInternet material is not people because thisconception makes highly constructed words andimages seem natural and stereotypedrepresentations appear to be real. (shrink)

Alongside significant gains in our understanding of the human mind, research in Cognitive Science has produced substantial evidence that the details of cognitive processes vary across cultures, contexts, and individuals. In order to arrive at a more nuanced account of the workings of the human mind, in this letter we argue that one challenge for the future of Cognitive Science is the integration of this evidence of variation with findings which can be generalized.

This article explores how we use social media to construe identities and align with others into communities of shared values. The focus is on how ‘users of language perform their identities within uses of language’: How do personae using the microblogging service Twitter perform relational identities as they enact discourse fellowships? Addressing this question means understanding how personae enter into ambient affiliation. Such affiliation is ambient in the sense that social media users may not be interacting directly, but instead participating (...) in mass performances of hashtagging or contributing to iterations of Internet memes. This article will consider three key bonds using both a 100 million-word corpus of posts and a smaller specialized corpus collected by capturing the entire Twitter stream of a particular user. (shrink)

The concept of cultural capital has been increasingly used in American sociology to study the impact of cultural reproduction on social reproduction. However, much confusion surrounds this concept. In this essay, we disentangle Bourdieu and Passeron's original work on cultural capital, specifying the theoretical roles cultural capital plays in their model, and the various types of high status signals they are concerned with. We expand on their work by proposing a new definition of cultural capital which focuses on cultural and (...) social exclusion. We note a number of theoretical ambiguities and gaps in the original model, as well as specific methodological problems. In the second section, we shift our attention to the American literature on cultural capital. We discuss its assumptions and compare it with the original work. We also propose a research agenda which focuses on social and cultural selection and decouples cultural capital from the French context in which it was originally conceived to take into consideration the distinctive features of American culture. This agenda consists in 1) assessing the relevance of the concept of legitimate culture in the U.S.; 2) documenting the distinctive American repertoire of high status cultural signals; and 3) analyzing how cultural capital is turned into profits in America. (shrink)

Leandra Medine indicates that she wants the Man Repeller multi-author blog to ‘serve as an open forum for women to draw their own conclusions’ instead of making ‘any sort of feministic statement’. Medine renders feminism as amorphous and an individual choice but she has been widely lauded for offering a feminist engagement in fashion. Her practices and position, as I argue throughout this article, allow her to fashion feminism, including associating feminism with the man repeller style and replacing aspects of (...) second wave and rights-based feminisms with the purportedly more equitable and liberating website ethos of choice and equality feminism. Yet in replacing ‘feministic’ critiques with promises of stylish cultural change and clothing that reportedly repels men, Medine and other Man Repeller authors elide how systemic oppression functions. This ambivalent relationship to feminism, and dearth of intersectional advocacy, prompted a backlash in 2020. Critics interrogated Medine's facile statement about #BlackLivesMatter, the company's lack of diversity and the unsuccessful restructuring of the blog. As a means of analysing Man Repeller, I employ textual analysis, feminist and queer literature and media theory. I define fashioning feminism as a collaborative and ongoing process of producing feminist positions and thinking, including the negation of certain forms of feminism. I assert that attending to the fashioning of feminism can foreground central and developing feminist theories; the appeal, unstylishness and effacement of feminism; and the connection between style and politics. This includes readers’ interrogations of Man Repeller's politics, which are occurring along with contemporary examinations of racism. Since fashioning feminism is a collaborative and ongoing process of producing feminist positions and thought, engaging with its concepts and debates can further the critical study of feminism, nurture feminist conversations and advocate for social change. (shrink)

Tradition has it that first-person thought is somehow special. It is also commonplace to maintain that the first-person concept obeys a rule of reference to the effect that any token first-person thought is about the thinker of that thought. Following Annalisa Coliva and, more recently, Santiago Echeverri, I take the specialness claim to be the claim that thinking a first-person thought comes with a certain guarantee of its pattern of reference. Echeverri maintains that such a guarantee is explained by a (...) fairly flatfooted interpretation of the thinker-reflexive rule. I argue, however, that the explanatory aspirations of the thinker-reflexive rule are fulfilled only if we accept an epistemically loaded gloss on the notion of a thinker of a thought featuring the rule. That gloss is unpacked in terms of the subject’s ability to be acquainted with the phenomenal character of their thoughts. (shrink)

There are three elements in this paper. One is what we shall call ‘the Hungarian project’. This is the collected work of Andréka, Madarász, Németi, Székely and others. The second is Molinini’s philosophical work on the nature of mathematical explanations in science. The third is my pluralist approach to mathematics. The theses of this paper are that the Hungarian project gives genuine mathematical explanations for physical phenomena. A pluralist account of mathematical explanation can help us with appreciating the significance of (...) the Hungarian project. The significance consists in the fruitfulness and spread of the project. The spread is wide because the explanations are written in the very familiar language of first-order logic with identity. For this reason, the explanation is understandable to many mathematicians. Because of the methodology adopted in the Hungarian project, the explanations are fruitful in another sense. In the Hungarian project certain questions are asked that would not be asked with a more usual methodology. The Hungarians are distinguished from other scientists in asking logical and mathematical questions, and these both deepen our understanding of the physical theories and induce further spread to mathematics and philosophy. (shrink)

Modelling and simulations have gained a leading position in contemporary attempts to describe, explain, and quantitatively predict the human brain's operations. Computer models are highly sophisticated tools developed to achieve an integrated knowledge of the brain with the aim of overcoming the actual fragmentation resulting from different neuroscientific approaches. In this paper we investigate plausibility of simulation technologies for emulation of consciousness and the potential clinical impact of large-scale brain simulation on the assessment and care of disorders of consciousness, e.g. (...) Coma, Vegetative State/Unresponsive Wakefulness Syndrome, Minimally Conscious State.Notwithstanding their technical limitations, we suggest that simulation technologies may offer new solutions to old practical problems, particularly in clinical contexts. We take DOCs as an illustrative case, arguing that the simulation of neural correlates of consciousness is potentially useful for improving treatments of patients with DOCs. (shrink)

Marginal structural models can be used to estimate the causal effect of a potentially time-varying treatment in the presence of time-dependent confounding via weighted regression. The standard approach of using inverse probability of treatment weighting can be sensitive to model misspecification and lead to high-variance estimates due to extreme weights. Various methods have been proposed to partially address this, including covariate balancing propensity score to mitigate treatment model misspecification, and truncation and stabilized-IPTW to temper extreme weights. In this article, we (...) present kernel optimal weighting, a convex-optimization-based approach that finds weights for fitting the MSMs that flexibly balance time-dependent confounders while simultaneously penalizing extreme weights, directly addressing the above limitations. We further extend KOW to control for informative censoring. We evaluate the performance of KOW in a simulation study, comparing it with IPTW, sIPTW, and CBPS. We demonstrate the use of KOW in studying the effect of treatment initiation on time-to-death among people living with human immunodeficiency virus and the effect of negative advertising on elections in the United States. (shrink)

The domains of religious doctrine and practice provide ground for double bind analysis, particularly as applied to race, religion, and bioethics. In these spheres, reconciling church doctrine with social or medical practice is often challenging; the demands from each sphere are unique and sometimes irreconcilable. This chapter uses double bind theory as a framework to engage in a dialogue concerning race, religion, and bioethics. It offers a dialogue that scrutinizes conservative religious thought in what is colloquially known as the “black (...) church” regarding the challenges of medical ethics and race. (shrink)

In this article, we describe an ontology aimed at the representation of the relevant entities and relations in the philosophical world. We will guide the reader through our modeling choices, so to highlight the ontology’s practical purpose: to enable an annotation of philosophical resources which is capable of supporting pedagogical navigation mechanisms. The ontology covers all the aspects of philosophy, thus including characterizations of entities such as people, events, documents, and ideas. In particular, here we will present a detailed exposition (...) of the entities belonging to the idea branch of the ontology, for they have a crucial role in the world of philosophy. Moreover, as an example of the type of applications made possible by the ontology we will introduce PhiloSurfical, a prototype tool we created to navigate contextually a classic work in twentieth century philosophy, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. We discuss the potential usage of such navigation mechanisms in educational and scholarly contexts, which aim to enhance the learning process through the serendipitous discovery of relevant resources. (shrink)

El objeto de la presente investigación se coloca en el contexto caracterizado por la crisis económica global iniciada en 2008. La finalidad principal consiste en analizar el problema del condicionamiento financiero de las políticas sociales redistributivas y del trabajo en el ordenamiento de la Unión Europea: sus efectos en la justiciabilidad de los derechos sociales frente a la Corte de justicia de la Unión Europea y los fundamentos filosóficos de la metamorfosis producida.

__Neurotechnology and Direct Brain Communication__ focuses on recent neuroscientific investigations of infant brains and of patients with disorders of consciousness, both of which are at the forefront of contemporary neuroscience. The prospective use of neurotechnology to access mental states in these subjects, including neuroimaging, brain simulation and brain computer interfaces, offers new opportunities for clinicians and researchers, but has also received specific attention from philosophical, scientific, ethical and legal points of view. This book offers the first systematic assessment of these (...) issues, investigating the tools neurotechnology offers to care for verbally non-communicative subjects and suggesting a multidisciplinary approach to the ethical and legal implications of ordinary and experimental practices. The book is divided into three parts: the first and second focus on the scientific and clinical implications of neurological tools for DOC patient and infant care. With reference to these developments, the third and final part presents the case for re-evaluating classical ethical and legal concepts, such as authority, informed consent and privacy. Neurotechnology and Direct Brain Communication will appeal to researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of cognitive science, medical ethics, medical technology, and the philosophy of the mind. With implications for patient care, it will also be a useful resource for clinicians, medical centres and health practitioners. (shrink)

Νέα ανάγνωση των επιγραφών που αφορούν τις ιερές αγροικίες του Απόλλωνα στη Δήλο και τη Ρήνεια. Α. Το είδος των επιγραφών επιβάλλει περιορισμούς στην ερμηνεία τους : δεν μπορούν να μας πληροφορήσουν ούτε για τη θέση των αγροικιών αλλά ούτε και για τη μορφή τους. Το γεγονός ότι υπάρχουν δεν πρέπει να μας κάνει να υποτιμήσουμε την σπουδαιότητα των ιδιωτικών αγροκτημάτων για τα οποία δεν διαθέτουμε κανένα παρόμοιο αρχείο. Β. Το έδαφος της Δήλου δεν ήταν λιγότερο πλούσιο από αυτό της (...) Ρήνειας και δεν είχε αποκλειστικό προορισμό την κτηνοτροφία : η αποκατάσταση της ID 452, 16-32 σε σχέση με την ID 467 βεβαιώνει την ύπαρξη ενός αμπελώνα στα Επισθένεια. Η έλλειψη μυλώνα στις αγροικίες της Δήλου δεν αποδεικνύει με κανένα τρόπο την απουσία καλλιέργειας δημητριακών αλλά πρέπει να συσχετισθεί με τον αριθμό των ατόμων που ζούσαν στις αγροικίες. Ενα μικρό ομοιογενές σύνολο κιστοφόρων τετραδράχμων της εποχής των Ατταλιδών είχε αποδοθεί, σε ένα πρόσφατα δημοσιευμένο corpus, στις Σάρδεις και τα Σύνναδα. Προσπαθούμε να αποδείξουμε ότι θα έπρεπε να ακολουθήσουμε ένα διαφορετικό συλλογισμό και τα νομίσματα αυτά να αποδοθούν σε τέσσερεις διαφορετικές πόλεις. Οι πόλεις αυτές θα μπορούσαν να είναι η Διονυσούπολις, η Βλαύνδος, η Λυσιάς ή τα Συννάδα και μία τέταρτη της οποίας η ταυτότητα παραμένει αβέβαιη. Βρισκόμαστε στη Φρυγία και προβληματιζόμαστε για τους λόγους ύπαρξης αυτών των σύντομων νομισματοκοπών. (shrink)

This paper supports the personal data platform cooperative as a means of bringing about John Rawls’s favoured institutional realisation of a just society, the property-owning democracy. It describes personal data platform cooperatives and applies Rawls’s political philosophy to analyse the institutional forms of a just society in relation to the economic power deriving from aggregating personal data. It argues that a society involving a significant number of personal data platform cooperatives will be more suitable to realising Rawls’s principle of fair (...) equality of opportunity. (shrink)

The intriguing issue of pain and suffering in patients with disorders of consciousness (DOCs), particularly in Unresponsive Wakefulness Syndrome/Vegetative State (UWS/VS) and Minimally Conscious State (MCS), is assessed from a theoretical point of view, through an overview of recent neuroscientific literature, in order to sketch an ethical analysis. In conclusion, from a legal and ethical point of view, formal guidelines and a situationist ethics are proposed in order to best manage the critical scientific uncertainty about pain and suffering in DOCs (...) and ensure the best possible care for the patient. (shrink)

Here, we provide an ethical analysis of discrimination in private insurance to guide the application of non-discriminatory algorithms for risk prediction in the insurance context. This addresses the need for ethical guidance of data-science experts, business managers, and regulators, proposing a framework of moral reasoning behind the choice of fairness goals for prediction-based decisions in the insurance domain. The reference to private insurance as a business practice is essential in our approach, because the consequences of discrimination and predictive inaccuracy in (...) underwriting are different from those of using predictive algorithms in other sectors. Here we focus on the trade-off in the extent to which one can pursue indirect non-discrimination versus predictive accuracy. The moral assessment of this trade-off is related to the context of application—to the consequences of inaccurate risk predictions in the insurance domain. (shrink)

The 20th century produced overwhelming advances in biomedicine with the 1990s introducing 148,000 patents as part of the mapping and sequencing of the human genome. Bioethical realities and debates of prenatal genetic testing, new reproductive technologies, stem cell research, human cloning and DNA data banks have obscured the less provocative public and social issues of gun control, immunization, employee leave programs to assist care for dying relatives, emergency room use as primary care sites by the uninsured, and medical care provision (...) to the homeless. With the events of September 11, the focus has shifted to bioterrorism: an international and global concern that portends broad environmental consequences while requiring a local, community response of which the business enterprise is a part. The tension that results from a required local and global response to bioterrorism and biotechnology by the business community forms a dialectic and provides a venue for addressing business ethics in an international forum. This paper explores the relationship of events and its meaning for business. Part I provides the background of biotechnology and bioterrorism and how the two form a dialectic reality that shapes ethical debate. Part II presents provocations and questions for an emerging ethic based on the integrative response from the public health, medical, business and religious communities. Four areas for business contribution in shaping emerging ethics in the age of biotechnology—bioterrorism are suggested. (shrink)

In English, deictic verbs of motion, such ascomecan encode the perspective of the speaker, or another individual, such as the addressee or a narrative protagonist, at a salient reference time and location, in the form of an indexical presupposition. By contrast, Spanish has been claimed to have stricter requirements on licensing conditions forvenir(“to come”), only allowing speaker perspective. An open question is how a bilingual learner acquiring both English and Spanish reconciles these diverging language-specific restrictions. We face this question head (...) on by investigating narrative productions of young Spanish-English bilingual heritage speakers of Spanish, in comparison to English monolingual and Spanish dominant adults and children. We find that the young heritage speakers producevenirin linguistic contexts where most Spanish adult speakersdo not, but where English monolingual speakersdo, and also resemble those of young monolingual Spanish speakers of at least one other Spanish dialect, leading us to generate two mutually-exclusive hypotheses: (a) the encoding of speaker perspective in the young heritage children is cross-linguistically influenced by the more flexible and dominant language (English), resulting in a wider range of productions by these malleable young speakers than the Spanish grammar actually allows, or (b) the young Spanish speakers are exhibiting productions that are in fact licensed in the grammar, but which are pruned away in the adult productions, being supplanted by other forms as the lexicon is enriched. Given independent evidence of the heritage speakers' robust Spanish linguistic competence, we turn to systematically-collected acceptability judgments of three dialectal varieties of monolingual adult Spanish speakers of the distribution of perspective-taking verbs, to assess their competence and adjudicate between (a) and (b). We find that adultsaccept venirin contexts in which they do notproduceit, leading us to argue that (a)venirisnotobligatorily speaker-oriented in Spanish, as has been claimed, (b) adults may not producevenirin these contexts because they instead select more specific motion verbs, and (c) for heritage bilingual children, the more dominant language (English) may support the grammatically licensed but lexically-constrained productions in Spanish. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill's crisis of 1826 has received a great deal of attention from scholars. This attention results from reflection on the importance of the crisis to Mill's mature thought. Did the crisis signal rejection or revision of Benthamism? Or did it have little or no effect on Mill's view of his intellectual inheritance? Ultimately, an interpretation of the cause and resolution of the crisis is integral to an understanding of the nature of Mill's moral and social philosophy. Scholars, in (...) their zeal to understand Mill's crisis, have suggested various reasons for both the onset of the crisis and the recovery. Yet Mill's own perception of his crisis has often been overlooked or rejected. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 7, Page 937-955, September 2022. Reasonableness is a complex notion recently developed by legal and political theorists. John Rawls’s famous proposal of ‘reasonableness as reciprocity’ requires careful testing in the light of several criteria arising from legal doctrine and adjudication. I enquire into this variety of concepts in search of a common thread that makes sense of the use of the same concept in diverse contexts. I assume the normative thrust of reasonableness as (...) an institutional and an individual virtue the basic core of which derives from Aristotelian phronesis. However, this double aspect of reasonableness betrays its major complexity that I try to shape through the help of two categories: subjective agency and objective context. The upshot of my enquiry will be that of showing that we can use another model, alternative to Rawls’s and better able to make sense of the variety of legal and ethical uses: Von Wright’s reasonableness as ‘the right way of living’. (shrink)