Public health is a scientific domain with significant population impact. Any irregularities or discrepancies affect all patients that depend on its normal function, therefore explaining the reason why public attention is always vastly invested in it. With a balanced health status in the population as primary goal, the domain of public health with its adopted policies stands at the frontlines. Public Health Policies can be resumed to three main aspects, based on the health system performance concept developed by the World (...) Health Organization: population health status, citizen satisfaction with healthcare and the extent to which the system provides financial protection. Nowadays, with cardiovascular disease becoming the leading cause of death worldwide, the field of cardiovascular public health has gained significant general interest. The present article aims to address the importance of health policies from a determinants’ perspective while taking into consideration the influence of population illness on health policy development. (shrink)

Vehement resentment and indignation are rife in societies emerging from dictatorship or civil conflict. How should institutions deal with these emotions? Arguing for the need to recognize and constructively engage negative public emotions, Mihaela Mihai contributes theoretically to the growing field of transitional justice. Drawing on an extensive philosophical literature and case studies of democratic transitions in South Africa, South America, and Eastern Europe, her book rescues negative emotions from their bad reputation and highlights the obstacles and the opportunities (...) such emotions create for democracy. By valorizing negative emotions, either through the judicial review of transitional justice bills or the criminal trials of victimizers, institutions realize the value of respect and concern for all while contributing to a public culture hospitable to democracy. (shrink)

Mihaela Miroiu, The road towards autonomy. Feminist Political Theories Polirom, Iasi, 2004.

Mihaela Mihai on the tension between some public art and the commitments of a liberal democracy.

Apology An apology is the act of declaring one’s regret, remorse, or sorrow for having insulted, failed, injured, harmed or wronged another. Some apologies are interpersonal (between individuals, that is, between friends, family members, colleagues, lovers, neighbours, or strangers). Other apologies are collective (by one group to another group or by a group to an […].

With this nuanced and interdisciplinary work, political theorist Mihaela Mihai tackles several interrelated questions: How do societies remember histories of systemic violence? Who is excluded from such histories' cast of characters? And what are the political costs of selective remembering in the present? Building on insights from political theory, social epistemology, and feminist and critical race theory, Mihai argues that a double erasure often structures hegemonic narratives of complex violence: of widespread, heterogeneous complicity and of "impure" resistances, not easily (...) subsumed to exceptionalist heroic models. In dialogue with care ethicists and philosophers of art, she then suggests that such narrative reductionism can be disrupted aesthetically through practices of "mnemonic care," that is, through the hermeneutical labor that critical artists deliver—thematically and formally—within communities' space of meaning. Empirically, the book examines both consecrated and marginalized artists who tackled the memory of Vichy France, communist Romania, and apartheid South Africa. Despite their specificities, these contexts present us with an opportunity to analyze similar mnemonic dynamics and to recognize the political impact of dissenting artistic production. Crossing disciplinary boundaries, the book intervenes in debates over collective responsibility, historical injustice, and the aesthetics of violence within political theory, memory studies, social epistemology, and transitional justice. (shrink)

So-called predatory journals threaten to diminish the quality of papers and of scientific research. This paper defines what constitutes a predatory journal, and provides a short literature overview. The aim of the research is to explore researchers’ and librarians’ awareness of predatory journals, using the example of Croatia, an EU country. Several institutions control the quality of Croatian scientific journals, so there are no predatory journals in Croatia. However, Croatian scientists publish their papers in foreign journals and thus have to (...) be aware of all the threats of predatory journals. An online questionnaire was sent to researchers and librarians in order to find out if they understand what predatory journals are, if the researchers publish in those journals, and if the librarians educate their users about those journals. Results show that almost 90% of researchers are not sure what constitutes a predatory journal. Almost 50% of librarians are familiar with the term, but only less than 10% of librarians provide education on the topic. Raising awareness about predatory journals among scientists could prevent negative consequences such as the loss of scientific integrity and the risk of minimizing the visibility of research results. Libraries should play an important role in providing user education. (shrink)

Social robots are increasingly developed for the companionship of children. In this article we explore the moral implications of children-robot friendships using the Aristotelian framework of virtue ethics. We adopt a moderate position and argue that, although robots cannot be virtue friends, they can nonetheless enable children to exercise ethical and intellectual virtues. The Aristotelian requirements for true friendship apply only partly to children: unlike adults, children relate to friendship as an educational play of exploration, which is constitutive of the (...) way they acquire and develop virtues. We highlight that there is a relevant difference between the way we evaluate adult-robot friendship compared to children-robot friendship, which is rooted in the difference in moral agency and moral responsibility that generate the asymmetries in the moral status ascribed to adults versus children. We look into the role played by imaginary companions (IC) and personified objects (PO) in children’s moral development and claim that robots, understood as Personified Robotic Objects (PROs), play a similar role with such fictional entities, enabling children to exercise affection, moral imagination and reasoning, thus contributing to their development as virtuous adults. Nonetheless, we argue that adequate use of robots for children’s moral development is conditioned by several requirements related to design, technology and moral responsibility. (shrink)

Publication date: 26 January 2017 Source: Author: Mihaela Mocanu The instrument of knowledge and communication of religious essence, the religious language is based upon the recognition of a world of sacredness, which is defined by reference to the religious dimension of the human being. From the semantic perspective, the religious language is rooted in a preexisting extra-linguistic referent, which eludes historic space-time categories, in an attempt to build a world of transcendental essence and establish a relationship between man and (...) the sacred. In this view, the word is invested with magical powers, playing the role of a mediator between the human being living in the world of the profane and the sacred world of the Divinity. Since the word embraces the essence of the named element with the power to shape reality, the religious man pays special attention to the verbal expression not only from the desire to adapt to reality, but especially out of the care not to cause adverse changes amidst it. We propose in this paper to review the main religious taboos specific to the religious language and the description of the pragmatic valences that the euphemistic expression manifests in the religious communication. (shrink)

During the last decade there has been burgeoning research concerning the ways in which we should think of and apply the concept of responsibility for Artificial Intelligence. Despite this conceptual richness, there is still a lack of consensus regarding what Responsible AI entails on both conceptual and practical levels. The aim of this paper is to connect the ethical dimension of responsibility in Responsible AI with Aristotelian virtue ethics, where notions of context and dianoetic virtues play a grounding role for (...) the concept of moral responsibility. The paper starts by highlighting the important difficulties in assigning responsibility to either technologies themselves or to their developers. Top-down and bottom-up approaches to moral responsibility are then contrasted, as we explore how they could inform debates about Responsible AI. We highlight the limits of the former ethical approaches and build the case for classical Aristotelian virtue ethics. We show that two building blocks of Aristotle’s ethics, dianoetic virtues and the context of actions, although largely ignored in the literature, can shed light on how we could think of moral responsibility for both AI and humans. We end by exploring the practical implications of this particular understanding of moral responsibility along the triadic dimensions of ethics by design, ethics in design and ethics for designers. (shrink)

The book aims to provide both theoretical perspectives and practical approaches for teachers interested in transforming the future. Through the approaches of theoretical background but also through the studies of practical application nature, the book can serve as bibliographic support for early education programs.

The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 4, Page 540-541, July 2012.

“Philosophy in Action” in the Texts and Practices of Peter Worley. If philosophy for children (P4C) aims to become a “reconstruction of philosophy” itself (Lipman, 1997:13), the PhiE (Philosophical Enquiry), an approach proposed by Peter Worley, represents a thorough reconstruction of the classical P4C. In my article, I intend to emphasize the differences between Peter Worley’s approach and the classical version offered by Matthew Lipman and his followers. My thesis is that Worley’s approach manages both to stimulate to a greater (...) extent children abilities of critical thinking, and to constitute a genuine representation of “doing philosophy” from early ages. In other words, Peter Worley’s distinct version of P4C represents both literally and metaphorically “philosophy in action”. (shrink)

This article examines the difference between two concepts of critical importance to the philosophical frameworks of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze–pleasure and desire–through the troubling and troubled figure of suicide. My contention is that, in the work of both thinkers, suicide makes legible an affirmative impulsion and a mode or tekhnē (in both senses of the term: practice and art) of encountering an unforeseeable virtuality (the Outside). Of aesthetic and ethical significance, this mode is experimental and dangerous, a frequency of (...) passion, situated between pleasure and desire. Souci de soi (the care of the self) and a line of flight, I suggest, coincide in suicide, “an art that it takes a lifetime to learn.”. (shrink)

Moshe Idel, Ascension on High in Jewish Mysticism: Pillars, Lines, Ladders Budapest:Central European University Press, 2005.

Kant’s early work The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures is typically considered a narrow, technical work still embedded in the tradition of Wolffian logic. I argue instead that it needs to be considered in light of Kant’s developing theory of cognition and his corresponding criticism of the Wolffian single faculty theory. Whereas the mature Kant criticizes the rationalists for misrepresenting the nature of sensibility, the urgent task facing him at this stage seems to have been a proper determination (...) of the nature of the understanding. On the Wolffian framework, the latter is defined in a merely nominal manner, in terms of a generic cognitive task: the distinct representation of the possible. On Kant’s view, however, distinctness entails a capacity to relate representations, which only happens in the act of judgment. Thus, the stated aim of the False Subtlety notwithstanding, the work attempts to reorganize the logical operations around the capacity to judge. In turn, by defining the higher faculty of cognition in terms of an act of relating representations, Kant wants to show that this faculty cannot stem from a power of representation that we share with non-rational animals and must instead rest on a different fundamental power, which at the time he alternatively calls “inner sense” or “consciousness”. (shrink)

This study explored the influence of healthcare ageism on nurses’ moral distress. Episodic interviews were conducted on 25 Romanian nurses in 2020. Thematic analysis revealed that all moral distress sources reported reflected macro-, meso- and micro-level ageism, benevolent and hostile, self- or other-directed, including stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination of older patients. The COVID-19 pandemic-related ageist measures increased healthcare ageism and transformed nurses’ representations of older patients accordingly. Nurses felt moral conflict both when passively witnessing ageist acts and when perpetrating them (...) to adhere to group norms, highlighting the need to combat ageism for both patients’ and nurses’ well-being. (shrink)

Deep learning AI systems have proven a wide capacity to take over human-related activities such as car driving, medical diagnosing, or elderly care, often displaying behaviour with unpredictable consequences, including negative ones. This has raised the question whether highly autonomous AI may qualify as morally responsible agents. In this article, we develop a set of four conditions that an entity needs to meet in order to be ascribed moral responsibility, by drawing on Aristotelian ethics and contemporary philosophical research. We encode (...) these conditions and generate a flowchart that we call the Moral Responsibility Test. This test can be used as a tool both to evaluate whether an entity is a morally responsible agent and to inform human moral decision-making over the influencing variables of the context of action. We apply the test to the case of Artificial Moral Advisors and conclude that this form of AI cannot qualify as morally responsible agents. We further discuss the implications for the use of AMAs as moral enhancement and show that using AMAs to offload human responsibility is inadequate. We argue instead that AMAs could morally enhance users if they are interpreted as enablers for moral knowledge of the contextual variables surrounding human moral decision-making, with the implication that such a use might actually enlarge human moral responsibility. (shrink)

The main purpose of this article is to explore, from an ethical perspective, one particular branch of what is today called “spiritual medicine”: namely, prayer therapy. Several landmark studies in the literature will be thoroughly examined, respectively the classical study of Byrd (1988), the replica of Harris et al. (1999), and the controversial study of Leibovici (2001). Beginning with these studies and the related controversies surrounding them, the religious features and ethical consequences of prayer therapy are investigated. The ethical aspects (...) of prayer therapy – the informed consent issue, the issue of respecting bioethical principles, and the issue of medical competence in offering such techniques – are thoroughly addressed. Finally, an alternative way of framing the prayer therapy discussion is offered, in the context of public-private dichotomy. (shrink)

Ever wonder if it is possible to construct a numeric scale for environmental variables, like one does for the temperature? This paper is an attempt to construct one. There are two main parts: section “Statistical Analysis of Variations” presents a general statistical strategy for environmental factor selection. Section “Nonlinear Analytical Geometric Model of Variations” develops an analytical geometric representation of system variations in response to environmental changes. The model is used to quantify the effects of environmental interactions. The paper treats (...) only one-dimensional case, however, the derivation of the case of multiple independent factors follows immediately. The general method developed in this paper may prove applicable to many different fields, such as extensions beyond classical physics, economics, and other sciences. Section “Conclusion” provides an illustration of applications, examples and implications of the results. (shrink)

Jules et Jim by François Truffaut or the Unbearable Lightness of the Feminine. Truffaut’s movie Jules et Jim (« Jules and Jim ») is an intimist movie but also a fresco of Europe throughout the first half of the 20th century, as it was torn apart by the two world wars and Nazism. At the same time, the film tells the story of the friendship that began during the Belle Epoque between two intellectuals, a French (Jim) and a German (Jules), (...) both madly in love with an English teacher (Catherine). In the insular tradition of the Elizabethan theatre, this is a story about love, treason, jealousy, hate, and finally murder and suicide. In its structure, it is a mix of farce, sentimental drama turned into tragedy, and which in the end reveals itself as a comedy of errors, with, nevertheless, very serious themes: love and war, desire and drives, femininity, maternity and semblance, competition between men for a woman etc. This movie brilliantly represents the Nouvelle vague and is a proof that Freud and Lacan were right when they established once and for all that the unconscious is a fundamental and necessary scene. Human destiny is set and its mysterious scripts are played out - from sexuality to death, from Eros to Thanatos - as the subject’s fantasy, the window through which he or she tackles reality. (shrink)

This article highlights how Internet and new media are experienced by Romanian Seventh-Day Adventist pastors in their ministry. What is the acceptance of Web 2.0 services for neo-Protestant pastors of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, what uses of these technologies they make in their work, what is their mobilization for the appropriation of an innovative culture in the daily pastoral work, how these uses allow them to manage their religious activity, these are the main questions of a survey we conducted in (...) 2016 to shed light on uses of digital technologies by Romanian Seventh-Day Adventist pastors. (shrink)

Many voices and stories have been systematically silenced in interpersonal conversations, political deliberations and historical narratives. Recalcitrant and interrelated patterns of epistemic, political, cultural and economic marginalisation exclude individuals as knowers, citizens, agents. Two questions lie at the centre of this article, which focuses on the epistemically – but also politically, culturally and economically – dominant: How can we sabotage the dominant’s investment in their own ignorance of unjust silencing? How can they be seduced to become acute perceivers of others’ (...) experiences of oppression and reckon with their own participation in it? Situated at the intersection between political theory, aesthetics and epistemology, this article contributes a so-far-unexplored suggestion: that certain literary works create epistemic friction between shared, entrenched prejudices on the one hand, and representations of epistemic exclusion or authority, on the other. Their power to illuminate ideational, moral and experiential limitations makes them valuable tools in problematising, rendering visible and dislocating epistemic injustice, as well as other marginalisations it intersects with. To advance this argument, the article relies on insights from aesthetics, unpacking fiction’s multidimensional epistemic potential. Audre Lorde exemplifies literary works’ ability to seductively sabotage bias and provide audiences with prosthetic visions of unfamiliar experiences of marginalisation. (shrink)

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In this paper, a special type of polysemantic words, that is, words with multiple meanings for the same part of speech, are analyzed under the name of neutrosophic words. These words represent the most dif cult cases for the disambiguation algorithms as they represent the most ambiguous natural language utterances. For approximate their meanings, we developed a semantic representation framework made by means of concepts from neutrosophic theory and entropy measure in which we incorporate sense related data. We show the (...) advantages of the proposed framework in a sentiment classification task. (shrink)

This paper aims to offer an account of state apologies that discloses their potential function as catalysing political acts within broader processes of democratic change. While lots of ink has been spilled on analysing the relationship between apologies and processes of recognising the victims and their descendants, more needs to be said about how apologies can challenge the presence of self-congratulatory, distorted visions of history within the public sphere of liberal democracies. My account will be delineated through a critical engagement (...) with one very frequent objection to public apologies, namely that they unnecessarily taint the self-image of the community. Insights from the philosophy of judgment will be used to show how, in the form of an exemplary judgment, an official “sorry” can inspire societal reflection about an unsavoury past. (shrink)

Silence features prominently in both political and academic debates about resistance and complicity with repressive orders. On the one hand, the dictum ‘silence is complicity’ is frequently taken for granted. On the other hand, heroes are thought to be those who ‘speak up’ or ‘break the silence’, contest the regime and its henchmen, agitate and take up arms. This paper troubles these assumptions about silence as complicity and speech as resistance. It argues that silence provides an interesting and productive angle (...) for criticising the idealised, temporally static, voluntarist, act-centred and virtuous vision view of heroes that usually dominates national-myth making. The many ways in which resisters deployed silence selectively, strategically, sometimes courageously, sometimes cowardly is erased from redemptive, idealising national narratives of heroism. It is by looking at these silences theoretically and historically that I hope to decentre this hegemonic heroic understanding of resistance. The work of Nobel Laureate Herta Müller serves as an illuminating example. (shrink)

In this article, multiculturalism and feminism are dis- cussed at the crossroad of their diverse meanings: as po- litical ideologies, as social movements, as philosophical trends and as academic disciplines. In order to provide a solid conceptual analysis, the two terms are examined in relation with several key concepts of contemporary cul- tural discourse, such as postmodernism, pluralism, rela- tivism, globalization and postcolonialism.