In § 37 of his "Elements of First Practical Philosophy", Baumgarten provides important qualifications to the controversial notion of ‘objective morality’, which had long been at the centre of the dispute between realists like Wolff and his adversaries. The chapter shall examine how he construes his view of morality in §§ 36-38 with a specific focus on the central § 37. I shall analyse that section, first considering how Baumgarten understands the key notion of ‘objective morality’ and how he argues (...) for it, focusing both on its relational character and its connection with God’s will. Then I will examine the last, and arguably most surprising of the implications that he draws per negativum from the main claim, namely that affirming objective morality does not amount to rule out what Baumgarten calls ‘subjective morality’. Finally, I will briefly consider how Baumgarten’s distinctive way to take side in the Wolffian camp in that dispute reflects, through the close dialogue with the "Elements" in Kant’s private notes and lectures, on the development of Kant’s own views in practical philosophy. (shrink)

Digital technologies hold promise to modernize healthcare. Such opportunity should be leveraged also to address the needs of rapidly ageing populations. Against this backdrop, this paper examines the use of wearable devices for promoting healthy ageing. Previous work has assessed the prospects of digital technologies for health promotion and disease prevention in older adults. However, to our knowledge, ours is one of the first attempts to specifically address the use of wearables for healthy ageing, and to offer ethical insights for (...) assessing the prospects of leveraging wearable devices in this context. We provide an analysis of the considerable opportunities associated with the use of wearables for healthy ageing, with a focus on the five domains of intrinsic capacity: locomotion, sensory functions, psychological aspects, cognition, and vitality. We then highlight current limitations and ethical challenges of such approach to healthy ageing, including issues related to access, inclusion, privacy, surveillance, autonomy, and regulation. We conclude by discussing the implications of our analysis in light of current debates on the ethics of digital health, and suggest measures to address the identified challenges. (shrink)

In several places of his work, Kant distinguishes between two senses of self-consciousness: a pure one and an empirical one. The aim of this work is to analyze these two senses of consciousness and show that, for Kant, self-consciousness does not occur unrestrictedly: a relation with something other than consciousness is needed for it to become conscious of itself. I carry out these objectives throughout six sections. In the first one I lay out the Kantian principle of pure apperception. In (...) the second one, I present the limits of pure apperception through Kant’s critique of rational psychology. Then, in the third section, I set the basis to understand the relationship that Kant establishes between the I think and the I exist. In the fourth one I show that pure apperception, despite being pure, is not possible without the opportunity of perception. Next, in the fifth one, I introduce the notion of empirical apperception, establish its relationship with pure apperception, and elucidate its meaning. Finally, in the last section, I explain the way in which empirical self-consciousness is determined, in relation to the knowledge of objects of the external sense. (shrink)

Wearable devices are increasingly present in the health context, as tools for biomedical research and clinical care. In this context, wearables are considered key tools for a more digital, personalised, preventive medicine. At the same time, wearables have also been associated with issues and risks, such as those connected to privacy and data sharing. Yet, discussions in the literature have mostly focused on either technical or ethical considerations, framing these as largely separate areas of discussion, and the contribution of wearables (...) to the collection, development, application of biomedical knowledge has only partially been discussed. To fill in these gaps, in this article we provide an epistemic (knowledgerelated) overview of the main functions of wearable technology for health: monitoring, screening, detection, and prediction. On this basis, we identify 4 areas of concern in the application of wearables for these functions: data quality, balanced estimations, health equity, and fairness. To move the field forward in an effective and beneficial direction, we present recommendations for the 4 areas: local standards of quality, interoperability, access, and representativity. (shrink)

A disaster is an occurrence disrupting a community’s normal functioning and existence. The disruption may render it impossible to comply with principles and to respect, protect, and fulfill rights as it happens in ordinary times; it may induce an overwhelming shortage of resources and make tragic decisions unavoidable. From its very beginning, the COVID-19 pandemic evoked the scenario of disaster medicine, where triage is likely to imply not simply postponing a treatment but letting someone die. However, it is not only (...) the health care system that faces disruption risks. Lockdown measures and other restrictions were imposed to curb the pandemic, impinging upon individual freedom as well as economic activities. The proposal of mandatory vaccination implied a suspension of the principle of autonomy, which is a fundamental pillar of modern medicine. Out of the ordinary balancing efforts may be required, and two questions arise. Do such exceptional circumstances suggest reconsidering the criteria to apply, especially when essential, life-saving treatments are at stake? Who should decide? Science offers the premises to build on, but the last word does not belong to science. It remains the province of ethics and politics. (shrink)

Nel presente paper, propongo un argomento kantiano per giustificare la necessità della coltivazione dell’empatia e il ruolo moralmente rilevante che essa può svolgere per l’agente una volta coltivata. Infatti, riferendosi al testo kantiano, è possibile mostrare che l’empatia è un sentimento insito nella natura umana e che orienta l’agente nel processo di deliberazione morale. Nonostante ciò, essa non può determinare direttamente la volontà dell’agente, ma deve essere vagliata criticamente dalla ragion pratica. Quest’ultima però non si limita a vagliare il sentimento; (...) essa può, e deve, coltivare l’empatia. L’empatia coltivata dalla ragion pratica svolge due ruoli moralmente rilevanti per la moralità dell’azione e la costituzione di un carattere morale: un ruolo motivazionale e uno epistemico. Infine, mostro come la concezione del processo di critica e coltivazione del sentimento proposta da Kant possa arricchire il dibattito non solo sulla necessità della regolazione delle emozioni, ma anche sulle tecniche di regolazione impiegabili. (shrink)

I propose an approach that expands philosophical views of scientific change, on the basis of an analysis of contemporary biomedical research and recent developments in the philosophy of scientific change. Focusing on the establishment of the exposome in epidemiology as a case study and the role of data as a context for contrasting views on change, I discuss change at conceptual, methodological, material, and social levels of biomedical epistemology. Available models of change provide key resources to discuss this type of (...) change, but I present the need for an approach that models transfer, alignment, and influence as key processes of change. I develop this as a pragmatic approach to scientific change, where processes might change substantially depending on specific circumstances, thus contributing to and complementing the debate on a crucial epistemological issue. (shrink)

In many countries, life expectancy has increased considerably in past years, and the importance of finding ways to ensure good levels of wellbeing through aging has become more important than ever. Arts based interventions are promising in this respect, and the literature suggests that musical activities can reduce isolation and anxiety and foster feelings of achievement and self-confidence. The present study examined the effects of group music making programs on the health and wellbeing of nursing home residents in Southern Switzerland. (...) A team of professional and student musicians delivered 10 weekly music sessions in four nursing homes, focusing on singing, rhythm-based activities with percussion instruments, and listening to short, live performances. 22 participants (16 women and 6 men, aged 72-95 years, mean 83.6, SD ± 6.9) were recruited to take part in the study and were interviewed after the last music session. The data were analyzed with thematic analysis to investigate how residents experienced group music making and its effects. The findings show that the music programs were beneficial for residents’ wellbeing. Music plays an important role in their lives, both in their pasts and presently, and being involved in musical activities offers engagement and novelty in daily life, providing learning opportunities and facilitating interpersonal relationships. Moreover, these results were due to interactions with the musicians involved. Residents particularly appreciated the opportunity to listen to live performances as part of the sessions. This study suggests that nursing home residents value music and that music based interventions play an important and direct role in enhancing their wellbeing. (shrink)

This book offers innovative historical scholarship on Feyerabend’s take on topics such as realism, empiricism, pluralism, materialism, and incommensurability. In addition to discussing certain debates in the philosophy of physics, it also considers the ways in which Feyerabend’s thought can contribute to contemporary debates in science and public policy. It does so by including questions about the nature of scientific methodology, the role of science in society, the public understanding of science, scientism, and the role of expertise in public policy. (...) The chapters provide readers with a comprehensive overview of the topics that Feyerabend engaged with throughout his career, showing both the breadth and the depth of his thought. Though of great value to academics in philosophy of science, it is also accessible and appealing to non-academic audiences with a general interest in science. (shrink)

In this essay, I will engage with the controversy that has sprung up between the proponents of the sharp separation thesis and those of the entanglement thesis. What I will be defending is a variant of the entanglement thesis. By drawing on contemporary action theory and on epistemic conceptualism, I will argue that, while objective facts and practical norms are indeed distinct categories of thought, that distinction does not amount to a conceptual gap—a dichotomy or unbridgeable divide. Their relation, in (...) other words, is not one of logical dualism but one of mere (analytical) distinction between interdependent categories of thinking. Hence the entanglement view on which distinction does not entail dichotomy. (shrink)

Nicola Guarino is widely recognized as one of the founders of applied ontology. His deep interest in the subtlest details of theoretical analysis and his vision of ontology as the Rosetta Stone for semantic interoperability guided the development and understanding of this domain. His motivations in research stem from the conviction that all science must be for the benefit of society at large, and his motto has always been that ontologies are not just for making information systems interoperable, but – (...) more importantly – for ensuring that systems’ users understand each other. He was among the first to recognize that applied ontology must be an interdisciplinary enterprise if it is to capture the intended meaning of the terms used by an information system. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the connections between meta-ontological and meta-philosophical issues in two of Nāgārjuna’s primary works, the Mūlamadhyamakārikā and the Vigrahavyāvartanī. I argue for an interpretative framework that places Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka as a meta- and ultimately non-philosophical evaluation of philosophy. The paper’s primary argument is that an interpretative framework which makes explicit the meta-ontological and meta-philosophical links in Nāgārjuna’s thought is both viable and informative. Following Nāgārjuna, I start my analysis by looking at the positions that exist within (...) the ontological debate and show that the Mādhyamika should be understood as an ontological deflationist who aims to discredit ontological questions altogether. I argue, however, that the Mādhyamika does not wish to engage in meta-ontological debates either and that Nāgārjuna’s ontological deflationist arguments necessarily lead to a position of philosophical deflationism: the rejection of all philosophical and meta-philosophical debates. Further on, I provide a sketch of denegation, the language operator in Madhyamaka that allows Nāgārjuna to make seemingly philosophical claims while not having the commitments that traditional philosophical claims do. I conclude with a defense of my interpretation of Madhyamaka as weak philosophical deflationism compared to other deflationist construals, an explicit discussion of the ways in which my understanding differs from contemporary western interpretations that prima facie resemble weak philosophical deflationism, and an identification of weak philosophical deflationism with dequitism, a variant of quetism. (shrink)

Despite his well‐known deductivism, in his early (unpublished) writings, Popper held an inductivist position. Up to 1929 epistemology entered Popper's reflections only as far as the problem was that of the justification of the scientific character of these fields of research. However, in that year, while surveying the history of non‐Euclidean geometries, Popper explicitly discussed the cognitive status of geometry without referring to psycho‐pedagogical aspects, thus turning from cognitive psychology to the logic and methodology of science. As a consequence of (...) his reflections on the problematic relationship between geometrical‐mathematical constructions and physical reality Popper was able to get over a too direct notion of such a relationship, cast doubts on inductive inference and started conceiving in a new (strictly non‐inductivist) manner the relationship between theoretical and observational propositions. (shrink)

Page's “localist” code, a population code with occasional, maximally firing elements, does not seem to us usefully or testably different from sparse population coding. Some of the evidence adduced by Page for his proposal is not actually evidence for it, and coding by maximal firing is challenged by lower firing observed in neuronal responses to natural stimuli.

Leibniz's treatment of the concept of res should be considered in the context of his semantic-ontological reflections on the relationship of language, thought and reality, profoundly shaped by a no...

We introduce a logic for a class of probabilistic Kripke structures that we call type structures, as they are inspired by Harsanyi type spaces. The latter structures are used in theoretical economics and game theory. A strong completeness theorem for an associated infinitary propositional logic with probabilistic operators was proved by Meier. By simplifying Meier’s proof, we prove that our logic is strongly complete with respect to the class of type structures. In order to do that, we define a canonical (...) model (in the sense of modal logics), which turns out to be a terminal object in a suitable category. Furthermore, we extend some standard model-theoretic constructions to type structures and we prove analogues of first-order results for those constructions. (shrink)

Forest Ecosystem Services are widely recognised by the society nowadays. However, no study in the literature has analysed a ranking of FES after the pandemic. This paper investigated civil society’s perception and knowledge toward these services; in addition, the presence of attitudinal or behavioural patterns regarding individual’s preference, was assessed. A choice experiment was conducted using the Best-Worst Scaling method on a sample of 479 individuals intercepted in the Argentera Valley, in the Western Italian Alps. Results, showed a strong interest (...) in biodiversity, aesthetic landscape quality and psychophysical health and a lower interest in provisioning services. Based on the individual preferences, civil society was clustered into five groups for FES, named “Hedonistic,” “Individualist with cultural and health interests,” “Sensitive to regulatory and utilitarian functions,” “Climate change sensitive” and “Livelihood and hedonistic wellbeing.” In general, there was a growing appreciation by civil society for the intangible services offered by the forest, driven by modern lifestyles and an interest in learning more about the provided services. Based on these elements, we believe that similar research should be extended to other mountain contexts to validate the results or to find new insights, and that it is now necessary to study how to involve civil society in decision-making processes of forest planning and management at a local level. (shrink)

One way to conceptualize human life is to describe it as a process through which the biological body is progressively transformed into a psychological one through its mentalization and symbolization. This process occurs through the relational field, which begins with caregiver-infant proto-conversations and develops through adolescence into the ongoing complex interpersonal relational network we call society and culture. The essence and the problems of adolescents are intricately tied to the social and cultural contexts in which they experience life. Therefore, adolescence (...) cannot be understood if all the levels that it expresses are not taken into consideration. We identify three psycho-historical phases through which adolescence has changed in the past century: Oedipal; Narcissistic; and Post-narcissistic. In this last phase due to the psychological and historical failure of the narcissistic ideals, the ideal is mingling with the real in a wholly new way. This process has overturned Erikson's paradigm: identity, opposed and defined by a dichotomic otherness, must be transformed into a fluid integration of similarities and differences negotiated and developed through empirical interpersonal intersubjective experiences. This, in our perspective, is a possible key to understand the rapid change in the nature of consciousness, selfhood, and gendering in today's western world, together with some important psychopathological disorders which describe the new creative challenges of today's adolescents. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article:Science and Scepticism. By John W.N. Watkins.

This article aims to study the articulation of Oswald Külpe’s critical realism, with particular stress on the subject of categories doctrine and on the role that it takes on in opposing to objective idealism and, more broadly, to the overcoming of Kantian transcendentalism and the phenomenalism strictly related to it. Starting from an exploration concerning the Aristotelian conception of categories and the comparison that Heidegger makes with Külpe’s thought, an analysis of the whole Külpean Kategorienlehre has been done by taking (...) into consideration the principle of category differentiation, the criterion of their application and their fundamentally gnoseological function. The essay points out too as the Külpean layout is not able to provide a suitable solution to the problems it deals with, as the distance from a genuine notion of ontology shows the metaphysical naivety remaining in the philosophical and categorical project of Külpe. (shrink)

In introducing the present issue, we make clear that the concept of the other is susceptible to so multifarious declinations that it actually forms a conceptual galaxy. It is precisely this galaxy that the ten essays in the issue aim to shed light on. We then account for the basic ideas of each essay, and we stress the remarkable fact that they help to clarify how the concept of the other represents a useful means to undermine the purported divide between (...) continental and analytic philosophy. (shrink)

This special issue of Social Epistemology is devoted to critical comments on Fuller's study of the philosophy of Thomas S. Kuhn and its context.

This paper discusses a passage from the Second Day of Galileo’s Dialogue in which explicit reference is made to the game of tennis and, more specifically, to spinning balls. This often overlooked passage forms part and parcel of the tightly-knit argumentative structure of the work, and provides key arguments against Aristotelian physics. Furthermore, Galileo’s choice of terms shows how careful he was in his use of analogies as effective tools to reconcile the new physics that he was struggling to introduce, (...) with common sense. Finally, and most interestingly, by comparing this passage with a similar one from Galileo’s unpublished writings, this paper shows the extent to which Galileo was interested in the physics of spinning balls and how he planned to include a discussion of it in a work that he began shortly after the publication of the Sidereus Nuncius, but never managed to finish. (shrink)

This paper presents the first complete edition of Thomas Seget’s album amicorum, held at the Vatican Library (Cod. Vat. Lat. 9385). A friend of Galileo and Kepler, Seget was a background figure who played an important role within the learned world of the late Renaissance. Largely invisible in modern scholarship, figures like Seget played significant functions as cultural intermediaries and international political agents, thus occupying a new and critical position within the learned world of early modern Europe. Seget’s album amicorum (...) offers a unique collection of autograph notes (including Galileo, Sarpi, Lips, Ortels, Pinelli, Welser, De Put, Querenghi, Fabri de Peiresc, Pignoria and Possevino, to mention but a few) which allows us to reconstruct the web of connections Seget managed to weave on his way from Leuven to Padua, as well as during the years he spent in Italy within Pinelli’s circle. Although the album stops at the end of 1600, Seget’s networking activity continued, with ups and downs, throughout his life, and is reconstructed here by way of published and unpublished documents. The paper comprises an Introduction, with a biography of Seget; a Note to the text, providing key elements to understand the role of the album amicorum in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as presenting the criteria of the present edition; a critical edition of Seget’s album; and three appendixes: a chronological table of the entries in the album; the transcription of entries by Seget in some of his friends’ albums; and the transcription of a few hitherto unpublished manuscript documents with information about Seget’s life and whereabouts. (shrink)

Some of Kepler's works seem very different in character. His youthful Mysterium cosmographicum (1596) argues for heliocentrism on the basis of metaphysical, astronomical, astrological, numerological and architectonic principles. By contrast, Astronomia nova (1609) is far more tightly argued on the basis of only a few dynamical principles. In the eyes of many, such a contrast embodies a transition from Renaissance to early modern science. I suggest that Karl Popper's fallibilist and piecemeal approach, and especially his theory of errors, might prove (...) extremely helpful in resolving such alleged tension. By abandoning the perspective of the inductivist philosophy of science, which is forced by its own standards to portray Kepler as a "sleepwalker", I focus on the method he followed: he never hesitated to discuss his own intellectual journey, offering a rational reconstruction of the series of false starts, blind alleys and failures he encountered. The critical dialogue he managed to establish in private correspondence with fellow astronomers he later transplanted into his printed works, whose structure closely resembles that of a dialogue, however implicit. (shrink)