Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben presents an account of the political upheavals that ensued as the COVID-19 pandemic brought his country—and with it his countrymen's personal liberties—to a crashing halt. While controversial, Agamben’s reflections on the transformation of Western democracies hold implications far beyond any present crisis.

A partire dagli anni '60, György Lukács intraprende una ricerca volta a recuperare e sviluppare l'ontologia sociale racchiusa negli scritti di Marx nel tentativo di rinnovare la riflessione marxista dopo l'effetto inibitorio provocato dallo Stalinismo. Lo scopo di questo articolo è di indagare la concezione lukácsiana dell'ideologia come funzione sociale, mettendola in relazione con il regime di complessità descritto da Lukács nella sua ultima opera, Ontologia dell'essere sociale. Recuperando il riferimento goethiano implicito nell'idea di lavoro come “fenomeno originario” dell'azione sociale, (...) tenteremo di riconcettualizzare la teoria del rispecchiamento adottata nell'Ontologia al fine di mostrare il ruolo che viene ad assumere l'ideologia all'interno di una società volta alla produzione del futuro. (shrink)

A key question in the theory of migration and in public debates on immigration policies is when migration can be said to be voluntary and when, conversely, it should be seen as nonvoluntary. In a previous article, we tried to answer this crucial question by providing a list of conditions we view as sufficient for migration to be considered nonvoluntary. According to our account, one condition that makes migration nonvoluntary is when people migrate because they lack acceptable alternatives to doing (...) so. In this article, we take the opportunity to further explore and clarify this crucial condition. More specifically, we focus on two main sets of questions. First, we ask whether migration is always voluntary when it serves goals that are voluntarily chosen, and whether those who decide to migrate voluntarily but only have the option of choosing among a limited set of dangerous, harmful, or illegal means for doing so, can be said to be forced to choose those means. Second, we ask whether what counts as “nonacceptable” alternatives should also include cases in which people could have their needs and fundamental rights met, but at the cost of betraying their moral principles or conceptions of the good. (shrink)

In Aristotle and Menander on the Ethics of Understanding , Valeria Cinaglia offers a parallel study of Menander’s New Comedy and Aristotle’s philosophy and she explores the depth and implications of their analogies in subjects ranging from epistemology and psychology to ethics.

This introduction aims to familiarize readers with basic dimensions of variation among pictorial and diagrammatic representations, as we understand them, in order to serve as a backdrop to the articles in this volume. Instead of trying to canvas the vast range of representational kinds, we focus on a few important axes of difference, and a small handful of illustrative examples. We begin in Section 1 with background: the distinction between pictures and diagrams, the concept of systems of representation, and that (...) of the properties of usage associated with signs. In Section 2 we illustrate these ideas with a case study of diagrammatic representation: the evolution from Euler diagrams to Venn diagrams. Section 3 is correspondingly devoted to pictorial representation, illustrated by the comparison between parallel and linear perspective drawing. We conclude with open questions, and then briefly summarize the articles to follow. (shrink)

In this article, I will discuss the relationship between mathematical intuition and mathematical visualization. I will argue that in order to investigate this relationship, it is necessary to consider mathematical activity as a complex phenomenon, which involves many different cognitive resources. I will focus on two kinds of danger in recurring to visualization and I will show that they are not a good reason to conclude that visualization is not reliable, if we consider its use in mathematical practice. Then, I (...) will give an example of mathematical reasoning with a figure, and show that both visualization and intuition are involved. I claim that mathematical intuition depends on background knowledge and expertise, and that it allows to see the generality of the conclusions obtained by means of visualization. (shrink)

Authentic human life is the open-ended dialogue. Life by its very nature is dialogic. To live means to participate in dialogue: to ask questions, to head, to respond, to agree, and so forth. In this dialogue a person participates wholly and throughout his whole life: with his eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit, with his whole body and deeds. He invests his entire self in discourse, and this discourse enters into the dialogic fabric of human life, into the world symposium. (Bahktin, (...) 1984, p. 283)... (shrink)

In the first part of the paper, previous work about embodied mathematics and the practice of topology will be presented. According to the proposed view, in order to become experts, topologists have to learn how to use manipulative imagination: representations are cognitive tools whose functioning depends from pre-existing cognitive abilities and from specific training. In the second part of the paper, the notion of imagination as “make-believe” is discussed to give an account of cognitive tools in mathematics as props; to (...) better specify the claim, the notion of “affordance” is explored in its possible extension from concrete objects to representations. (shrink)

Equal respect for persons is often appealed to as the grounding principle of democratic rule. I argue here that if it needs to account for the specific content of democratic political rights, it must be understood as respect for people as competent political decision-makers. However, the claim that respect is due to people as a response to their actual equal competence leads to a conflation of democratic legitimacy and substantive justice, resting on implausible factual assumptions and making it impossible to (...) advocate the effective equalization of political capabilities. Therefore, I suggest that the principle of equal respect should be decoupled from such a claim and be rephrased as simply prescribing that people be treated or publicly recognized as equally competent. I defend this interpretation against the publicity objection, according to which this take on the principle implies insincerity and therefore cannot serve as a public justification for democratic authority. (shrink)

In their everyday work, scholars constantly acquire and transfer knowledge. Many of these knowledge flows are difficult to observe, not least because scholars are often not aware of them. This may be the reason why the attention to knowledge flows is very unevenly distributed across science studies, with bibliometric citation-based studies contributing the most research. Starting from the premise that bibliometric methods can be more readily exploited in the study of knowledge flows, this review explores the potential of bibliometric methods (...) for the investigation of knowledge flows. Bibliometrics provides a portfolio of data and methods that can be used alone or in combination with qualitative methods to study knowledge flows. We organise contributions to the study of knowledge flows according to their object of study—formal, informal, or tacit knowledge—and according to the mode of flow—impersonal or interpersonal knowledge flow. The review shows that bibliometrics is strongly focused on the use of citation data for the investigation of impersonal flows of formal knowledge and has recently turned to the impersonal flow of informal knowledge via social media. In contrast, there are only few bibliometric studies that address interpersonal flows of knowledge. The review identifies an under-utilised potential of bibliometric methods and suggests some directions for future methodological development. (shrink)

Demographic growth has in recent years been one of the determining characteristics of African development, and if projections are correct, the continent is set to become a population superpower. Its proportion of the world population, especially relative to the “old continent”, is increasing in a historically unprecedented manner, and its inhabitants are younger than ever. Although it is still difficult to assess whether this trend should be regarded as an opportunity or as a potential risk factor, it is already possible (...) to discern the first definitive signs of how this evolving new distribution of demographic power is shifting Africa’s geopolitical and economic position in today’s polycentric world. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the work of A. Bely in the development of Russian culture in the late 19th - early 20th centuries. Attention is paid to the motives of the creative path of the philosopher-poet, who created the basis of Russian symbolism. By analyzing the cultural and historical manifestations of the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, reflection in the works of art and science workers, an assessment of the severity (...) of symbolism for the development of Russian philosophy and the field of art in general. In the process of the formation of symbolism in Bely's work, neo-Kantian motives are clearly revealed in the formulation of the problem of the difference between subjective perception and the essence of the object of perception in itself, that is, distinguishing between the symbol and the signified. By comparing Bely's views with the concept of sophiology and anthroposophy, distinct Kantian positions of the philosopher-poet stand out. These include the schematism of space and time, an attempt to apply the categories of natural science to the field of philosophy of art, as well as the demarcation of the immanent and the transcendent. Despite the fact that the ideas of the philosopher-poet in their form have similar positions with the anthroposophy of R. Steiner and with the ideas of V. Solovyov, however, the key content is the neo-Kantian methodology of "critical deepening" of thought and its rationalization. The actualization of Bely's creativity and the issue of his neo-Kantian motives is carried out by attracting research from related branches of knowledge on the principles of interdisciplinary consideration and implementation of an integrated approach. (shrink)

Pour déterminer la cognoscibilité du Premier principe, Avicenne emprunte dans sa Métaphysique trois voies: la connaissance scientifique par démonstration, l’intuition intellective et la connaissance à travers le discours prophétique. Dans le cadre de la réception de l’Éthique aristotélicienne, les maîtres ès arts de Paris empruntent deux de ces voies au milieu du XIIIe siècle. Même si beaucoup d’éléments sont semblables dans les deux cas, les artiens ne sortiront pas de leur spécificité professionnelle: le discours philosophique.

This article discusses the ethics and drivers of philanthropic foundations in emerging markets. A foundation organizes assets to invest in philanthropic initiatives. Previous scholarship has largely focused on developed countries, especially the United States, and has questioned the ethics behind the activities of foundations, particularly for strategic motives that served wider corporate purposes. We argue that philanthropic foundations in emerging markets have distinctive characteristics that merit separate examination. We scrutinize the ethics behind the longitudinal activity of such foundations using 70 (...) oral history interviews with business leaders in 18 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. We find that 55 out of 70 foundations associated with these leaders have been used as vehicles for a specific type of philanthropic ethics defined as “spiritual philanthropy”. These foundations often embodied personal or family traditions, culture, and religious values, which emphasized charitable giving and social responsibility. As in the case of many of the industrial foundations in Europe, these foundations also carried founding family names and provided a structure to maintain family control and enhance corporate reputation. We argue that, as business leaders in emerging markets are more directly exposed to dire social, educational and health deprivation than their counterparts in developed countries, they are less inclined toward grandiose world-making, and their foundations are more focused on delivering immediate benefits to communities in their home countries, motivated by implicit or explicit spirituality. (shrink)

Although there is much confusion about it in everyday language, the distinction between public and common goods is clear enough within Economics. While the former involves the fact of being open to all and state management, the latter requires common but still limited management. The different kind of administration can also be explored through the reference to a different kind of agent meant as the one who makes use of the different goods: if in the case of public goods, we (...) have individuals, as an aggregate, in that of commons we necessarily need to assume the existence of a plural form of subject, who can in fact act in concert in the management of the good itself. Exploring this distinction in its details and consequences, the paper sets out to apply it to a typical public good – green areas in cities – and to show the theoretical advantages that such a consideration of the commons can have, including through a concrete case such as community gardens. (shrink)

O presente artigo descreve a capacitação a distância de funcionários do Sistema “S” sobre recursos didáticos de quatro cursos distintos, realizada com 294 profissionais distribuídos em 25 estados brasileiros de uma das instituições que compõem o Sistema “S”. Os resultados mostram que a capacitação obteve sucesso e foram mensurados em termos quantitativos pelo índice de aproveitamento nos cursos e, qualitativamente, expressos nas avaliações dos participantes, endossados pelo índice de evasão que ficou dentro do percentual que a literatura referencia.

The link between force, violence and events in the philosophy of Jacques Derrida is explored, arguing that this relationship is at the very heart of the problem of meaning and its performativity. This thesis is based on the analysis of Derrida’s reading of both Benjamin’s Critique of Violence, as well as Austin’s linguistic performative theory, which allows, at first, to link the question of signification with that of force or violence. Subsequently, we use the analysis of W. Hamacher about Benjamin (...) in order to strengthen that connection and propose a new reading of the question of the event in Derrida. We obtain a philosophy of the event that moves between ethics, politics and linguistics that allows new approaches to the “critique” of violence. (shrink)

There have been recurrent reports of fragilities in the Brazilian health system, especially in public institutions. In this commentary, I argue that moral distress in nursing in Brazil can still be considered an innovative and important subject of study. I also highlight the relevance of engaging educational institutions in the development of policies about environmental sustainability. It is relevant to continue studying moral distress in nursing and in health care generally in order to contribute to the transformation of reality by (...) confronting the multiple common situations in the work environment that are recognized by many as morally problematic because they infringe upon the rights of people, patients, and health care professionals and are an affront to environmental health. (shrink)

In chronic schizophrenic patients with both positive and negative symptoms (see Table 1), interhemispheric connections at the high frequency beta2-rhythm are absent during cognitive tasks, in contrast to normal controls, who have many interhemispheric connections at this frequency in the same situation. Connectivity is a fundamental brain feature, evidently greatly promoted by the NMDA system. It is a more reliable measure of brain function than the spectral power of this rhythm.

Although counterproductive work behaviors can be extremely damaging to organizations and society as a whole, we do not yet fully understand the link between employees’ organizational attachment and their intention to engage in such behaviors. Based on social identity theory, we predicted a negative relationship between organizational identification and counterproductive work behaviors. We also predicted that this relationship would be moderated by ambivalent identification. We explored counterproductive work behaviors toward the organization and other individuals. Study 1, a survey of 198 (...) employees, revealed that employees who identified strongly with their organization reported lower levels of CWB-O, but as predicted, only when ambivalent identification was low. Study 2 involved a manipulation in the form of a scenario presented to 228 U.S. employees, generally replicated the findings of Study 1: the link between organizational identification and CWB-O was stronger for participants in the low ambivalence condition than for those in the high ambivalence condition. The interaction effect of ambivalent and organizational identification on CWB-I was only marginally significant in the second study. These findings provide new evidence for the positive influence of organizational identification under conditions of low ambivalence on counterproductive behaviors toward an organization. (shrink)

Within the broader scope of joint actions, there is a particular kind, i.e. transgenerational actions, the realization of which requires a long time span and, consequently, a complex and peculiar subject. This paper starts from the detailed definition of transgenerational actions, such as complex, long-term, and asymmetrical actions and aims at outlining a theory of their subject. Such a theory, without embracing the principles of holism, is able to give account of subjects’ specificities. In particular, this is possible if we (...) focus on the notion of end, as defined by Seumas Miller. The paper will then examine an example of transgenerational action to highlight how a theory which is both non-reductionist and non-holistic allows us to address the question of responsibility – and therefore of normativity, so pressing when it comes to social issues – from another point of view: the phenomenological one. Not implying a notion of collective responsibility, like the one held by traditional plural subject theories, this point of view focuses on the possibility of stimulating the sense of responsibility in the individuals who constitute the collective subject. (shrink)

From a cognitive-psychological perspective, physical exercise (PE) and sports are an interesting tool for improving people’s cognitive abilities. One field of application for such a tool is decision making (DM) support in chronic patients, cancer patients, and survivors in particular. On the one hand, cancer patients and survivors have to continually take important decisions about their own care (e.g., treatment choice; changes in lifestyle), in collaboration with caregivers and health providers; on the other hand, side effects of treatment may be (...) detrimental to cognitive abilities, such as attention, which make the health DM tasks even more demanding, complex, and emotionally disruptive for patients. Since cancer patients have to engage in healthy activities both for improving their own quality of life and for sustaining the effects of medications, clinical advice to engage in sport and PE is becoming more and more widespread within interventions. However, while sports are usually seen as healthy physical activities, their impact on cognitive abilities is mostly overlooked in the literature. The hypothesis of the present work is that sports could be fully exploited in their potential as focused exercises for cognitive ability training, in the field of cognitive training for chronic patients specifically. Indeed, literature shows that different sports (e.g., individual or team-based) influence and possibly augment cognitive abilities such as focused and divided attention, working memory, and DM under time constraints. Moreover, besides providing training for cognitive abilities, the experience of sports may represent an opportunity to explore, train and sharpen DM abilities directly: we identify five ways in which sport experiences may influence DM processes, and provide indications for future research on the topic. (shrink)

In this paper we aim to show that motor intentionality, as the underlying ground for social cognition, can be explained through the predictive engagement model. Sensorimotor processes seem to play central roles in social interaction, cognition and language. We question the phenomenological role of the body in social cognition and further investigate a causal neural explanation. We will adopt a different perspective by linking the role of the body and intercorporeality with recent findings in philosophy of neuroscience under the predictive (...) brain hypothesis. In fact, the living body seems to entertain a dialogical and enactive relationship with the surrounding context, as well as with neural circuits actively responding to external stimuli. The body is thus configured as a living organism, and not as a mere biological substratum, offering to phenomenology and empirical sciences further confirmations of the possibility-and need-for a cooperation. (shrink)

It is often argued that in order to prevent migration from having social dumping effects, a strict enforcement of equal labour and welfare rights for both migrants and local workers is required. However, we claim that the specific circumstances of those migrants who engage in temporary migration may require a regime of special rights and labour standards that protect and further their distinctive interests and needs. We defend this claim by appealing to the principle that labour and welfare rights should (...) accommodate the life plans of workers and we show that not only these special arrangements are fairer to the migrants involved, but they could also help to prevent social dumping. (shrink)

In pluralistic deliberative settings, where people come from different cultural and social backgrounds, sharing personal experiences and narratives in the first person is often advocated as a preferential means to bridge the informational and motivational gap between members of different social groups. Whatever the epistemic merits of personal storytelling in democratic deliberation may be, the request for transparency and disclosure of people’s private experiences that this practice entails may be objectionable on moral grounds, because it disrespects people as agents who (...) have practical authority over their own lives. Having people disclose their personal stories in public can humiliate them, reify them and abridge their personal liberties. What is worse, these harms are especially likely to be inflicted upon members of marginalised or disadvantaged minorities. For deliberativists, this should be a matter of concern because respect for people as agents is arguably one of the founding principles of democratic deliberation. (shrink)

Public deliberation has been defended as a rational and noncoercive way to overcome paradoxical results from democratic voting, by promoting consensus on the available alternatives on the political agenda. Some critics have argued that full consensus is too demanding and inimical to pluralism and have pointed out that single-peakedness, a much less stringent condition, is sufficient to overcome voting paradoxes. According to these accounts, deliberation can induce single-peakedness through the creation of a ‘meta-agreement’, that is, agreement on the dimension according (...) to which the issues at stake are ‘conceptualized’. We argue here that once all the conditions needed for deliberation to bring about single-peakedness through meta-agreement are unpacked and made explicit, meta-agreement turns out to be a highly demanding condition, and one that is very inhospitable to pluralism. (shrink)

Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) is an idiographic approach to qualitative research. It is widely used in psychologically-informed studies which aim to understand the meaning and context of specific experiences. In this paper, we provide some background and introduction to the principles and processes underpinning IPA research. We extend this via a practical example, reporting on selected analyses from a study which explores the phenomenology and meaning of loneliness, through interviews conducted with a group of religious women. Through our observations on (...) the complex role of absence for loneliness, we show that IPA can be a powerful tool for exploring and understanding the meaning of salient experiences. We reflect on the significance of the results for advancing theories of loneliness; and on the capacity of the IPA approach to provide researchers with an important and useful phenomenological perspective, through its emphasis on context, and its commitment to integrating convergent and divergent claims. (shrink)

This essay aims to vindicate the importance of a theory of ordinary citizens' political prudence in a democratic society. It follows a reconstructive method, by looking at the full range of powers and decisions that are enabled by democratic rights in order to show that in contemporary democracies there is room for the exercise of political prudence by ordinary citizens. By the same method, it also reconstructs the main traits and manifestations of citizens' political prudence in the everyday politics of (...) our democracies. Theorizing citizens' political prudence is important for detecting and correcting the ways in which the citizens of a democratic society, as well as its institutions, may fail to fulfil the mandates of such an essential political virtue. (shrink)

The myth of transparency and truthfulness is the foundation for contemporary theories of information design. Avoiding distortion and ambiguity is the moral imperative of an upstanding data visualizer. Sometimes, though, data that is collected is not accurate enough and the sources use indirect indicators to approach a phenomenon: what to do then, if the need to graphically represent a phenomenon is urgent and necessary? Should the designer wait to have the exact data, or should he indicate a trend, expressing the (...) hypothetical status of his statement? Can data visualization be designed to express doubt rather than to inform about facts? This essay will deal with the forms of expression of uncertainty in infographics. It will consider the designer as both an observer and a translator, whose position of neutrality is only one of the possible realms of discourse. In general, it will focus on the forms of visual expression of a self-criticizing mood in quantitative research today and it will explore the ways in which data that is not meaningful in statistical terms can become meaningful in semiotic terms. (shrink)