The exceptional pandemic due to the 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has obliged all Italians to stay at home. In the literature, there are evidences that traumatic global events, such as natural catastrophes and pandemic, have negative effects on the physical and psychological health of the population. We carried out a survey to analyze the physical and psychological conditions of Italians during the pandemic. Due to the severe limitations in moving during the phase one lockdown, the survey was administered by internet. (...) Results show that Italians followed the provisions established by the Italian government to avoid contamination, but 43% of them declared to have suffered from physical symptoms, in particular migraine, sleep disorders, persistent exhaustion, and difficulty of concentration. They have great fear to be contaminated or that relatives or friends can be contaminated, and they actively take actions to avoid contamination. Participants declared that they had suffered a lot of inconveniences due to restrictions in their movements, and that their life habits were strongly changed. They spent their time at home in different activities, but their psychological well-being was strongly impaired by the lockdown. The level of anxiety tripled, in relation to the prepandemic period, and 30% of males and 41% of females declared to have severe levels of depression. Participants with high levels of optimism and hopefulness show a stronger resilience against anxiety and depression. In addition, there is a negative correlation between anxiety and depression and the five factors of personality. These results show that psychological diseases must not be neglected, and that people in lockdown do need support for their psychological health, also with the help of internet and communication technologies. (shrink)

Promoting translational research as a means to overcoming chasms in the translation of knowledge through successive fields of research from basic science to public health impacts and back is a central challenge for research managers and policymakers. Organizational leaders need to assess baseline conditions, identify areas needing improvement, and to judge the impact of specific initiatives to sustain or improve translational research practices at their institutions. Currently, there is a lack of such an assessment tool addressing the specific context of (...) translational biomedical research. To close this gap, we have developed a new survey for assessing the organizational climate for translational research. This self-assessment tool measures employees’ perceptions of translational research climate and underlying research practices in organizational environments and builds on the established Survey of Organizational Research Climate, assessing research integrity. Using this tool, we show that scientists at a large university hospital perceive translation as a central and important component of their work. Importantly, local resources and direct support are main contributing factors for the practical implementation of translation into their own research practice. We identify and discuss potential leverage points for an improvement of research climate to foster successful translational research. (shrink)

Clinician scientists have gained institutional support in the era of translational research, as the key solution to closing the ‘translational gap’ between biomedical research and medical practice. However, clinician scientists remain an ‘endangered species’ in search of a secure niche, while new grants and training programs attempt to counteract their measurable decline in numbers over the past decades. Our study asks how an occupational space for clinician scientists is currently situated between the politics of translation, professional dynamics, and the specialization (...) of academic disciplines. We interviewed clinician scientists, their adjacent professions—clinicians and biomedical researchers—, and contrast their views with expectations from the discourse on clinician scientists in the biomedical and policy literature. We identify professionalizable work and tasks that relate to, first, being able to speak the two languages of both clinic and research, second, translating patients’ needs and clinical experience for further research, and third, counteracting the trends towards specialization by providing an inclusive point of view. We find that clinician scientists are overburdened with fulfilling a hybrid role of simultaneously being clinicians and scientists. Based on these findings, we suggest a path for the future professional development of clinician scientists towards the role of a translator. (shrink)

Simone Weil (1909-1943) was a defining figure of the twentieth century; a philosopher, Christian, resistance fighter, anarchist, feminist, labor activist and teacher. She was described by T. S. Eliot as "a woman of genius, of a kind of genius akin to that of the saints," and by Albert Camus as "the only great spirit of our time." Originally published posthumously in two volumes, these newly reissued notebooks, are among the very few unedited personal writings of Weil's that still survive today. (...) Containing her thoughts on art, love, science, God and the meaning of life, they give context and meaning to Weil's famous works, revealing a unique philosophy in development and offering a rare private glimpse of her singular personality. (shrink)

Continuous reducibilities are a proven tool in Computable Analysis, and have applications in other fields such as Constructive Mathematics or Reverse Mathematics. We study the order-theoretic properties of several variants of the two most important definitions, and especially introduce suprema for them. The suprema are shown to commutate with several characteristic numbers.

Particle indistinguishability has always been considered a purely quantum mechanical concept. In parallel, indistinguishable particles have been thought to be entities that are not properly speaking objects at all. I argue, to the contrary, that the concept can equally be applied to classical particles, and that in either case particles may (with certain exceptions) be counted as objects even though they are indistinguishable. The exceptions are elementary bosons (for example photons).

The relationship of part to whole is one of the most fundamental there is; this is the first and only full-length study of this concept. This book shows that mereology, the formal theory of part and whole, is essential to ontology. Peter Simons surveys and criticizes previous theories, especially the standard extensional view, and proposes a more adequate account which encompasses both temporal and modal considerations in detail. 'Parts could easily be the standard book on mereology for the next (...) twenty or thirty years.' Timothy Williamson, Grazer Philosophische Studien. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kant-Studien Jahrgang: 108 Heft: 1 Seiten: 19-54.

The article discusses Sartre’s the o retical conversion towards Marxism and historical ma t e r ialism. It emphasizes, however, that this conversion has ne v e r implied abandoning certain existentialist conc e p t s. In the Critique of dialectical reason Sartre aimed at defining a new dialectics, in which the subjective and ex i stential dimension is part of the process of economic, political and social transformation.

Das Lehrbuch, das neuartige Zugänge bietet, die sowohl die Politikgestaltung beeinflussen, als auch der Politikwissenschaft ein komplexes kritisch-rationales Handlungs- und Orientierungswissen bereitstellen. Das Werk eignet sich sowohl für das Selbststudium als auch für den akademischen Unterricht.

We demonstrate that the quantum-mechanical description of composite physical systems of an arbitrary number of similar fermions in all their admissible states, mixed or pure, for all finite-dimensional Hilbert spaces, is not in conflict with Leibniz's Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles (PII). We discern the fermions by means of physically meaningful, permutation-invariant categorical relations, i.e. relations independent of the quantum-mechanical probabilities. If, indeed, probabilistic relations are permitted as well, we argue that similar bosons can also be discerned in all (...) their admissible states; but their categorical discernibility turns out to be a state-dependent matter. In all demonstrated cases of discernibility, the fermions and the bosons are discerned (i) with only minimal assumptions on the interpretation of quantum mechanics; (ii) without appealing to metaphysical notions, such as Scotusian haecceitas, Lockean substrata, Postian transcendental individuality or Adamsian primitive thisness; and (iii) without revising the general framework of classical elementary predicate logic and standard set theory, thus without revising standard mathematics. This confutes: (a) the currently dominant view that, provided (i) and (ii), the quantum-mechanical description of such composite physical systems always conflicts with PII; and (b) that if PII can be saved at all, the only way to do it is by adopting one or other of the thick metaphysical notions mentioned above. Among the most general and influential arguments for the currently dominant view are those due to Schrodinger, Margenau, Cortes, Dalla Chiara, Di Francia, Redhead, French, Teller, Butterfield, Giuntini, Mittelstaedt, Castellani, Krause and Huggett. We review them succinctly and critically as well as related arguments by van Fraassen and Massimi. (shrink)

Exploration of the political roles firms play in society is a flourishing stream within corporate social responsibility research. However, few empirical studies have examined multiple levels of political CSR at the same time from a critical perspective. We explore both how the motivations of managers and internal organizational practices affect a company’s choice between competing CSR approaches, and how the different CSR programs of corporate and civil society actors compete with each other. We present a qualitative interpretative case study of (...) how a French children’s clothing retailer develops CSR practices in response to accusations of poor working conditions and child labor in its supply chain. The company’s CSR approach consists of superficial practices, such as supplier audits by a cooperative business-organized nongovernmental organization and philanthropic activities, which enable managers to silence more radical alternative models defended by other NGOs, activists, and trade unions. By this approach, the core business model based on exploitative low-cost country sourcing remains intact through self-regulated CSR. Through the case study, we develop a framework of dynamism in competing CSR programs. We discuss the implications of our study for CSR researchers, company managers, and policy makers. (shrink)

Gravity and Grace was the first ever publication by the remarkable thinker and activist, Simone Weil. In it Gustave Thibon, the priest to whom she had entrusted her notebooks before her untimely death, compiled in one remarkable volume a compendium of her writings that have become a source of spiritual guidance and wisdom for countless individuals.

I show that frequentism, as an explanation of probability in classical statistical mechanics, can be extended in a natural way to a decoherent quantum history space, the analogue of a classical phase space. The result is a form of finite frequentism, in which Gibbs’ concept of an infinite ensemble of gases is replaced by the quantum state expressed as a superposition of a finite number of decohering microstates. It is a form of finite and actual frequentism (as opposed to hypothetical (...) frequentism) insofar as all the microstates exist, in keeping with the decoherence-based Everett interpretation, and some versions of pilot-wave theory. (shrink)

The central claim of this article is that post-truth requires a political and socio-economical perspective, rather than a moral or epistemological one. The article consists of two parts. The first part offers a critical examination of the dominant analyses of post-truth in terms of shifting standards of the origin and the evaluation of facts. Moreover, the claim that postmodernism is the cause of post-truth is examined and refuted. In the second part an alternative perspective is developed, centring around the notion (...) of gatekeepers. Rather than linking post-truth to bullshit and postmodernism, it should be understood as a symptom of a contemporary shift in the gatekeepers of truth and knowledge. Knowledge and truth are always mediated in society through the hands of gatekeeping institutions such as journalism or science. Post-truth is a symptom of a broader transformation of the gatekeeping institutions of our current society. It therefore requires a political philosophy of these institutional shifts and the new risks they involve. (shrink)

Into wrestling with that question, Simone Weil put the very substance of her mind and temperament.

Although machine learning has been successful in recent years and is increasingly being deployed in the sciences, enterprises or administrations, it has rarely been discussed in philosophy beyond the philosophy of mathematics and machine learning. The present contribution addresses the resulting lack of conceptual tools for an epistemological discussion of machine learning by conceiving of deep learning networks as ‘judging machines’ and using the Kantian analysis of judgments for specifying the type of judgment they are capable of. At the center (...) of the argument is the fact that the functionality of deep learning networks is established by training and cannot be explained and justified by reference to a predefined rule-based procedure. Instead, the computational process of a deep learning network is barely explainable and needs further justification, as is shown in reference to the current research literature. Thus, it requires a new form of justification, that is to be specified with the help of Kant’s epistemology. (shrink)

The use and development of technic always presuposes- as every human interaction does- at least implicitely as set of leading concepts conceming the essense and destiny of human life and the good order of society. This study analyses and explains out of a christian perspective the concepts of technic, technical damages, technical risks, developes principals for the treatment of such risks and finally tries to evaluate the nuclear energy technic.

There is a nationwide resurgence of tuberculosis in the country’s urban centers; New York City stands at the forefront of this resurgence. The root causes are increased homelessness, drug addiction and poverty, all symbols of deteriorating social and economic conditions in the city. The inadequate level of public health resources devoted to TB has also contributed to its spread. Still, even with these factors, it is questionable whether the escalating number of TB cases in this country would have occurred without (...) the reservoir of immunosuppressed persons, who are less resistant to the disease, created by the AIDS epidemic. The fear and urgency of this public health crisis, which has been emerging since the beginning of the last decade, are fueled by the rise of TB strains resistant to the first-line drugs and by the disease’s contagiousness. (shrink)

"What is required if men and women are to feel at home in society and are to recover their vitality? Into wrestling with that question, Simone Weil put the very substance of her mind and temperament. The apparently solid edifices of our prepossessions fall down before her onslaught like ninepins, and she is as fertile and forthright in her positive suggestions . . . she can be relied upon to toss aside the superficial and to come to grips with the (...) essential and the profound." -- Time Literary Supplement. (shrink)

We define and investigate a family of local–global principles for fields involving both orderings and p-valuations. This family contains the PAC, PRC and PpC fields and exhausts the class of pseudo classically closed fields. We show that the fields satisfying such a local–global principle form an elementary class, admit diophantine definitions of holomorphy domains, and their orderings satisfy the strong approximation property.

This paper reviews the debate on the notion of biological function and on functional explanation as this takes place in philosophy. It describes the different perspectives, issues, intuitions, theories and arguments that have emerged. The author shows that the debate has been too heavily influenced by the concerns of a naturalistic philosophy of mind and argues that in order to improve our understanding of biology the attention should be shifted from the study of intuitions to the study of the actual (...) practice of biological inquiry. (shrink)

The systematic development of the concept of justice occurs on the basis of human rights. First, this human rights basis is examined in terms of theories of conflict and cooperation. Furthermore, it is investigated whether wisdom suffices as the basis of human rights or whether moral norms are necessary. With the distinguishing of human rights into negative, active and positive rights, distinctions result with respect to the concept of justice, leading to the concepts of a state under the rule of (...) law, democracy and the welfare state, and explaining the concept of socialjustice through exchange, participation, distribution, and procedural faimess. Overcoming the tension between formal rights of freedom and social rights, reference is made to the principles of subsidiarity and democracy. Finally, issues arising with respect to the theory of justice are considered in relation to the problern of globalisation. (shrink)

There is a nationwide resurgence of tuberculosis in the country’s urban centers; New York City stands at the forefront of this resurgence. The root causes are increased homelessness, drug addiction and poverty, all symbols of deteriorating social and economic conditions in the city. The inadequate level of public health resources devoted to TB has also contributed to its spread. Still, even with these factors, it is questionable whether the escalating number of TB cases in this country would have occurred without (...) the reservoir of immunosuppressed persons, who are less resistant to the disease, created by the AIDS epidemic. The fear and urgency of this public health crisis, which has been emerging since the beginning of the last decade, are fueled by the rise of TB strains resistant to the first-line drugs and by the disease’s contagiousness. (shrink)