Nicola Gennaioli and Andrei Shleifer’s A Crisis of Beliefs is a rich, elaborate and ambitious book. It relies on more than twenty years of the authors’ work on fields as different as financial econ...

Taste as Experience puts the pleasure of food at the center of human experience. It shows how the sense of taste informs our preferences for and relationship to nature, pushes us toward ethical practices of consumption, and impresses upon us the importance of aesthetics. Eating is often dismissed as a necessary aspect of survival, and our personal enjoyment of food is considered a quirk. Nicola Perullo sees food as the only portion of the world we take in on a (...) daily basis, constituting our first and most significant encounter with the earth. Perullo has long observed people's food practices and has listened to their food experiences. He draws on years of research to explain the complex meanings behind our food choices and the thinking that accompanies our gustatory actions. He also considers our indifference toward food as a force influencing us as much as engagement. For Perullo, taste is value and wisdom. It cannot be reduced to mere chemical or cultural factors but embodies the quality and quantity of our earthly experience. (shrink)

Within contemporary penal philosophy, the view that punishment can only be justified if the offender is a moral agent who is responsible and hence blameworthy for their offence is one of the few areas on which a consensus prevails. In recent literature, this precept is associated with the retributive tradition, in the modern form of ‘just deserts’. Turning its back on the rehabilitative ideal, this tradition forges a strong association between the justification of punishment, the attribution of responsible agency in (...) relation to the offence, and the appropriateness of blame. By contrast, effective clinical treatment of disorders of agency employs a conceptual framework in which ideas of responsibility and blameworthiness are clearly separated from what we call ‘affective blame’: the range of hostile, negative attitudes and emotions that are typical human responses to criminal or immoral conduct. We argue that taking this clinical model of ‘responsibility without blame’ into the legal realm offers new possibilities. Theoretically, it allows for the reconciliation of the idea of ‘just deserts’ with a rehabilitative ideal in penal philosophy. Punishment can be reconceived as consequences—typically negative but occasionally not, so long as they are serious and appropriate to the crime and the context—imposed in response to, by reason of, and in proportion to responsibility and blameworthiness, but without the hard treatment and stigma typical of affective blame. Practically, it suggests how sentencing and punishment can better avoid affective blame and instead further rehabilitative and related ends, while yet serving the demands of justice. (shrink)

Technology always provides a new perception of the world. However, it is not clear when technology produces “mere” new informations and when it provides something more such as a production of new objects in our world which start to “live” around us. The aim of this paper is to study how technology shapes our surrounding world. The questions which we are going to answer are: Is it really adding new objects to our world? If yes, does every technology have this (...) potentiality? We are going to tackle the problem using a phenomenological and post-phenomenological approach focussing our attention on the perceptual level. Using Husserl’s philosophy we will study how technology are deeply involved in our perception and, thanks to post-phenomenology and its concept of “embodiment relations,” we will be able to determine which kind of technologies have the potentiality to change our surrounding world introducing and producing new objects in it. (shrink)

Moral and legal philosophy are too entangled: moral philosophy is prone to model interpersonal moral relationships on a juridical image, and legal philosophy often proceeds as if the criminal law is an institutional reflection of juridically imagined interpersonal moral relationships. This article challenges this alignment and in so doing argues that the function of the criminal law lies not fundamentally in moral blame, but in regulation of harmful conduct. The upshot is that, in contrast to interpersonal relationships, the criminal law (...) cannot lose its standing to blame through institutional analogues of hypocrisy, complicity, and meddling. Rather, certain forms of structural and severe historical and contemporary injustice point to the question of the overall legitimacy of state authority. (shrink)

In the present article I discuss, in confrontation with the most recent studies on Husserl’s phenomenology of acting and willing, the taxonomy of action that is collected in the volume ‘_Wille und Handlung_’ of the Husserliana edition _Studien zur Struktur des Bewussteins_. In so doing, I first present Husserl’s universal characterization of action (_Handlung_) as a volitional process (_willentlicher Vorgang_). Then, after clarifying what it means for a process to have a character of volitionality (_Willentlichkeit_), I illustrate the various types (...) of actions, which Husserl distinguishes as ‘straightforward’ (_schlicht_) or ‘deciding’ (_entscheidend_), ‘primary’ (_primär_) or ‘secondary’ (_sekundär_), ‘inner’ (_innere_) or ‘outer’ (_äußere_), ‘immediate’ (_unmittelbar_) or mediate (_mittelbar_), ‘simple’ (_einfach_) or ‘compound’ (_zusammengesetzt_). Finally, I consider Husserl’s discussion of the direction and foundation of action. (shrink)

Some philosophers believe that entities have essences. What are we to make of the view that essences are themselves entities? E.J. Lowe has put forward an infinite regress argument against it. In this paper I challenge that argument. First, drawing on work by J.W. Wieland, I give a general condition for the obtaining of a vicious infinite regress. I then argue that in Lowe’s case the condition is not met. In making my case, I mainly (but not exclusively) consider definitionalist (...) accounts of essence. I make a re￾quirement to which definitionalists such as Lowe are committed and which, I venture, should also be palatable to non-naïve modalists. I call it the Relevance Principle. The defence trades on it, as well as on the distinction, due to K. Fine, between mediate and immediate essence. (shrink)

Digital technologies are pervasively used, and they are becoming part of our everyday actions by being designed to be connected to every aspect of our private life like emotions. However, it is not very clear how they are going to change who we are through their tight intertwinement. Especially in relation to emotions, it is not clear at all what happens when they become digitalized and visualized through these digital devices. Usually, the research focusses on the effect on the privacy (...) of the intrusion of digital devices in our lives as if this process of digitalization leaves the meanings human beings give to their emotions untouched. This article does not focus on the privacy related to the personal information captured by the devices, but it aims to open an analysis of the effects of this digitalization on the emotions in order to highlight the fact the introduction of these digital technologies change what emotions are. (shrink)

Scholastic hylomorphism conceives prime matter and substantial form as metaphysical parts of every physical substance. During the early modern period, both hylomorphic constituents faced significant criticism as scientists and philosophers sought to replace Aristotelianism with physical explanations for the workings of the universe. This paper focuses specifically on prime matter and delves into the arguments put forth by four 16th-century scholastic philosophers – Toledo, Fonseca, Góis, and Suárez – in their attempts to establish the existence of prime matter. Firstly, I (...) analyse a set of arguments rooted in substantial change, which emphasize the crucial role of a persistent, common substrate in the processes of generation and corruption. Secondly, I explore a set of ex-nihilo arguments and, thirdly, I examine a series of demonstrations based on the interplay between accidental and substantial change. Although these three sets of arguments converge on the necessity of a common substrate for substantial change to occur, they fall short of demonstrating that this substrate is both prime and shared by all natural entities. Fourthly, I turn to a set of arguments centred on the impossibility of infinite regress, designed to complement those related to natural change, and I assess additional arguments that do not primarily focus on substantial change. Lastly, I draw my conclusions on these argumentative strategies to demonstrate the existence of prime matter. (shrink)

The aim of this work is to analyze the constitution of a new collective subject thanks to wearable computers. Wearable computers are emerging technologies which are supposed to become pervasively used in the near future. They are devices designed to be on us every single moment of our life and to capture every experience we have. Therefore, we need to be prepared to such intrusive devices and to analyze potential effect they will have on us and our society. Thanks to (...) a phenomenological and postphenomenological analysis, we will show how these technologies are able to generate a new collective subject with its different collective needs and appetites by merging the living body of many subjects into one. The world becomes dwelled by these new collective subjects, and we will feed their own peculiar needs. (shrink)

Has the time come to put to bed the concept of a harm threshold when discussing the ethics of reproductive decision making and the legal limits that should be placed upon it? In this commentary, we defend the claim that there exist good moral reasons, despite the conclusions of the non-identity problem, based on the interests of those we might create, to refrain from bringing to birth individuals whose lives are often described in the philosophical literature as ‘less than worth (...) living’. (shrink)

In 2005, IOS Press published the first issue of applied Ontology. At the time, we argued that, at the core of the journal, there was “a desire to understand the nature of reality and how people construe their world”. We declared that ontology was both “fundamental to human thought” and “to translating our thoughts into computational artifacts” (Guarino & Musen,2005). With an editorial board of distinguished scholars representing the fields of computer science, informatics, information science, philosophy, linguistics, psychology, and social (...) science, we had the firm belief that applied Ontologywould fulfill an important academic niche, becoming an essential forum for discussion on topics such as ontological analysis, conceptual modeling, and the role of domain models in building and managing information systems. The facts now show that we were correct. (shrink)

We present a generalisation of the type-theoretic interpretation of constructive set theory into Martin-Löf type theory. The original interpretation treated logic in Martin-Löf type theory via the propositions-as-types interpretation. The generalisation involves replacing Martin-Löf type theory with a new type theory in which logic is treated as primitive. The primitive treatment of logic in type theories allows us to study reinterpretations of logic, such as the double-negation translation.

In a number of papers, Kit Fine introduced a theory of embodiment which distinguishes between rigid and variable embodiments, and has been successfully applied to clarify the ontological nature of entities whose parts may or may not vary in time. In particular, he has applied this theory to describe a process such as the erosion of a cliff, which would be a variable embodiment whose manifestations are the different states of erosion of the cliff. We find this theory very powerful, (...) and especially appropriate to capture the intuition that the same process may go on at different times. However, its formal principles have been subject to some criticisms, mainly concerning the mereological structure of a variable embodiment. Moreover, since the notion of variable embodiment is very general, simply saying that processes are variable embodiments is not enough to understand their ontological nature. To address these concerns, in this paper we proceed in two phases: first, we propose a revised version of Fine’s original theory adapted to the case of processes, which adopts a classical mereology instead of Fine’s hylomorphic mereology, and a temporalized constitution relation in place of Fine’s function of variable embodiment; second, we go deeper into the ontological nature of processes by revisiting the notions of homogeneity, intentionality, and telicity discussed in the literature, and propose an account based on ontological principles and not on semantic properties of predicates. This allows us to organize processes into a novel taxonomy based exclusively on their unity and individuation principles. (shrink)

This article contributes to the emerging discussion on responsible leadership by providing an analysis of the inner theatre of a responsible leader. I use a narrative approach for analyzing the biography of Anita Roddick as a widely acknowledged prototype of a responsible leader. With clinical and normative lenses I explore the relationship between responsible leadership behavior and the underlying motivational systems. I begin the article with an introduction outlining the current state of responsible leadership research and explaining the kind of (...) magnifying glasses used to examine the case. I continue with a brief summary of Anita Roddick’s development from childhood to adulthood, which provides the biographical background for exploring her motivational systems as a leader. Against this backdrop, I analyze the relationship between motivational drivers and a responsible leadership identity as revealed by Roddick in different behavioral leadership roles. I conclude the article by providing a number of lessons learned for responsible leadership and the development of future global leaders. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to analyse teledildonics from a phenomenological perspective in order to show the possible effects they will have on ourselves and on our society. The new way of using digital technologies is to merge digital activities with our everyday praxes, and there are already devices which enable subjects to be digitally connected in every moment of their lives. Even the most intimate ones are becoming mediated by devices such as teledildonics which digitally provide a tactual (...) stimulation allowing users to have sexual intercourse through them. The efforts made in order to provide such an intertwinement of our everyday lives and digital technologies are evident, but the effects produced by them are not clear at all. This paper will analyse these technologies from a phenomenological perspective in order to understand their effects on the constitution of the subjects and on our society at the intimate level. (shrink)

BackgroundObtaining consent has become a standard way of respecting the patient’s rights and autonomy in clinical research. Ethical guidelines recommend that the child’s parent/s or authorised legal guardian provides informed consent for their child’s participation. However, obtaining informed consent in paediatric research is challenging. Parents become vulnerable because of stress related to their child’s illness. Understanding the views held by guardians and researchers about the consent process in Malawi, where there are limitations in health care access and research literacy will (...) assist in developing appropriate consent guidelines.MethodsWe conducted 20 in-depth interviews with guardians of children and research staff who had participated in paediatric clinical trial and observational studies in acute and non-acute settings in the Southern Region of Malawi. Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and thematically analysed. Interviews were compared across studies and settings to identify differences and similarities in participants’ views about informed consent processes. Data analysis was facilitated by NVIVO 11 software.ResultsAll participants across study types and settings reported that they associated participating in research with therapeutic benefits. Substantial differences were noted in the decision-making process across study settings. Guardians from acute studies felt that the role of their spouses was neglected during consenting, while staff reported that they had problems obtaining consent from guardians when their partners were not present. Across all study types and settings, research staff reported that they emphasised the benefits more than the risks of the study to participants, due to pressure to recruit. Participants from non-acute settings were more likely to recall information shared during the consent process than participants in the acute setting.ConclusionThe health care context, culture and research process influenced participants’ understanding of study information across study types and settings. We advise research managers or principal investigators to define minimum requirements that would not compromise the consent process and conduct study specific training for staff. The use of one size fits all consent process may not be ideal. More guidance is needed on how these differences can be incorporated during the consent process to improve understanding and delivery of consent.Trial registration Not applicable. (shrink)

The volume collects twenty-eight original essays by colleagues and friends of Michela Pereira offered on the occasion of her seventieth birthday. As a pioneer of the re-evaluation of fundamental areas of the Western philosophical and scientific tradition, starting with alchemy, Michela Pereira has dedicated important studies to Hildegard of Bingen, Roger Bacon, Ramon Llull, in addition to being one of the most authoritative interpreters of the feminist movement in the modern world. «Seeing in the shadow», the title of this volume, (...) recalls a suggestive image coined by Hildegard to establish a connection between the work of creation, human nature and prophetic knowledge, three contexts around which the interests of Michela Pereira turn. The essays of the volume interpret these topics in many thought-provoking ways. Covering a wide temporal arc, from late Antiquity to Early Modern Times, and ranging from alchemy and medicine to spirituality, prophecy and myth, from the body-soul relation to performative arts, such as theatre and music, they also include brief editions of unedited medieval texts and an updated bibliography of Michela Pereira’s publications. (shrink)

This work focuses on augmented reality glasses and its aim is to analyse the knock-on effects on our everyday world and ourselves yielded by this kind of technology. Augmented reality is going to be the most diffused technology in our everyday life in the near future, especially augmented reality mounted on glasses. This near future is not only possible, but it seems inevitable following the vertiginous development of AR. There are numerous kinds of different prototypes that are going to come (...) out next year. Therefore, a study on how these modifications yield knock-on effects on the constitution of the object and subject is mandatory. This work tackles the topic starting from a phenomenological and post-phenomenological point of view and it analyses the modification yielded by such technology from a perceptual point of view using the analysis of the horizons of the object made by Husserl. We need this analysis because it is not only the hypothetical future that may never come, but it is the likely future very close to us that is putting pressure on us. (shrink)

The Turing Test is best regarded as a model to test for intelligence, where an entity’s intelligence is inferred from its ability to be attributed with ‘human-likeness’ during a text-based conversation. The problem with this model, however, is that it does not care if or how well an entity produces a meaningful conversation, as long as its interactions are humanlike enough. As a consequence, the TT attracts projects that concentrate on how best to fool the judges. In light of this, (...) I propose a new version of the TT: the Questioning Turing Test. Here, the entity has to produce an enquiry rather than a conversation; and it is parametrised along two further dimensions in addition to ‘human-likeness’: ‘correctness’, evaluating if the entity accomplishes the enquiry; and ‘strategicness’, evaluating how well the entity accomplishes the enquiry, in terms of the number of questions asked. (shrink)

This paper sheds light on the shift that is taking place from the practice of ‘coding’, namely developing programs as conventional in the software community, to the practice of ‘curing’, an activity that has emerged in the last few years in Deep Learning (DL) and that amounts to curing the data regime to which a DL model is exposed during training. Initially, the curing paradigm is illustrated by means of a study-case on autonomous vehicles. Subsequently, the shift from coding to (...) curing is analysed taking into consideration the epistemological notions, central in the philosophy of computer science, of function, implementation, and correctness. First, it is illustrated how, in the curing paradigm, the functions performed by the trained model depend much more on dataset curation rather than on the model algorithms which, in contrast with the coding paradigm, do not comply with requested specifications. Second, it is highlighted how DL models cannot be considered implementations according to any of the available definitions of implementation that follow an intentional theory of functions. Finally, it is argued that DL models cannot be evaluated in terms of their correctness but rather in their experimental computational validity. (shrink)

This article is a critical and appreciative interaction with Christopher Southgate's theodicy and theology of glory. I critique in particular his rejection of all dualist moves in theodicy. I question why Southgate can ascribe evil to some human actions, many of which are automatic and unconscious, but not to any other level or form of consciousness. I argue that he may rely too heavily on rational scientific categories, which are not sufficient in themselves to carry the weight of key theological (...) concepts. His use of poetry is powerful and suggestive, but in the end, he may not give it enough epistemic weight. (shrink)

Intellectual property has traditionally been a matter for the legal professions, but with the shift to evidence-based policy, the global economic upheaval, and the advent of the digital age, intellectual property is increasingly informed by economic perspectives. This book provides a clear and practical guide to economic approaches to intellectual property, written for a legal audience. It introduces basic concepts in economics and finance that inform the law of intellectual property. Topics discussed offer additional perspectives include the economics of innovation, (...) development, crime, law, industrial organisation and welfare. Next, it considers the economics of specific intellectual property rights, including copyright, patents, trademarks, trade secrets, geographical indicator and design rights, as well as a section on competition. Finally, a section on applied approaches to the valuation of IP will help readers to understand the use of these topics in practice.This practical text offers readers a better understanding of economic debates in intellectual property, as well as tools to enhance their ability to critique evidence-based policy. (shrink)

La déesse Hécate est une déesse intimement liée aux lieux de passage. Son caractère liminal, qui se traduit par un lien étroit avec les carrefours et les portes, se manifeste en une grande variété de formes cultuelles. Le présent article analyse cette relation à la lumière des témoignages littéraires qui attestent une série de rituels accomplis en son honneur aux carrefours : de l’offrande de nourriture durant la nuit de la nouvelle lune (les « repas d’Hécate ») jusqu’aux sacrifices de (...) chiens à la déesse, en passant par le dépôt des débris provenant de rites de purification. En outre, Hécate se situe souvent aux entrées : déesse apotropaïque, elle protège la maison de dangereuses influences provenant de l’extérieur. En résumé, cette contribution vise à offrir un parcours diachronique et exhaustif des sources littéraires attestant le lien de la déesse avec les lieux de passages. (shrink)

Background: Compassion fatigue is recognized as impacting the health and effectiveness of healthcare providers, and consequently, patient care. Compassion fatigue is distinct from “burnout.” Reliable measurement tools, such as the Professional Quality of Life scale, have been developed to measure the prevalence, and predict risk of compassion fatigue. This study reviews the prevalence of compassion fatigue among healthcare practitioners, and relationships to demographic variables. Methods: A systematic review was conducted using key words in MEDLINE, PubMed, and Ovid databases. Data were (...) extracted from a total of 71 articles meeting inclusion criteria, from studies measuring compassion fatigue in healthcare providers using a validated instrument. Quantitative and qualitative data were extracted and compiled by three independent reviewers into an evidence table that included basic study characteristics, study strength and quality determination, measurements of compassion fatigue, and general findings. Meta-analysis, where data allowed, was stratified by Professional Quality of Life version, heterogeneity was quantified, and pooled means were reported with 95% confidence interval. A table of major study characteristics and results was created. Ethical consideration: This paper contains no primary data obtained directly from research participants. Data obtained from previously published resources have been acknowledged within references. Psychological distress, particularly compassion fatigue, can be insidious, no health profession is immune, and may significantly impact the ability to provide care. Results: A total of 71 studies were included. Compassion fatigue was reported across all practitioner groups studied. Relationships to most demographic variables such as years of experience and specialty were either not statistically significant or unclear. Variability in reporting of Professional Quality of Life results was found. Interpretation: Compassion fatigue exists across diverse practitioner groups. Prevalence is highly variable, and its relationship with demographic, personal, and/or professional variables is inconsistent. Questions are raised about how to mitigate compassion fatigue. (shrink)

This symposium contributes to the broader discussion about humanism in management and organizational well-being. Dignity plays a crucial role as both a fundamental value and as an end state in the process of humanizing organizational cultures, workplaces and relationships. However, despite its significance, it has yet to be addressed properly in the growing discourse on humanistic capitalism and management, and indeed in business ethics as a whole. This symposium seeks to inform and inspire emerging research and approaches towards human dignity (...) through the lens of artistic expression and explores how arts may promote human dignity in organizational life. (shrink)

In its formlessness and potentiality, prime matter is a problematic entity of medieval metaphysics and its ontological limitations drastically affect human possibility of conceiving it. In this article, I analyse three influential strategies elaborated to justify an epistemic access to prime matter. They are incidental perception, negative abstraction, and analogy. Through a systematic and historical analysis of these procedures, the article shows the richness of interpretations and theoretical stakes implied by the conundrum of how prime matter can be known by (...) human beings. In particular, the reasons behind the later medieval acceptance of analogy as the main way to unveil prime matter become clearer by pointing out the correlation between the ontological and epistemological levels of the medieval examination of prime matter. (shrink)

In recent years, the question of whether prospective parents might have a moral obligation to select against disability in their offspring has piqued the attention of many prominent philosophers and bioethicists, and a large literature has emerged surrounding this question. Rather than looking to the most common arguments given in support of a positive response to the abovementioned question, such as those focusing on the harms disability may impose on the child created, duties and role-specific obligations, and impersonal ‘harms’, a (...) less commonly made set of arguments is focused upon which looks to the harms that a decision not to select against disability may impose on others. Three different possible arguments supporting a limited duty of disability avoidance are thus identified and subsequently explored: harms to parents themselves, harms to existing family members, and harms to other existing members of society. (shrink)