The nurse's moral competences in the management of situations which present ethical implications are less investigated in literature than other ethical problems related to clinical nursing. Phenomenology affirms that emotional warmth is the first fundamental attitude as well as the premise of any ethical reasoning. Nevertheless, it is not clear how and when this could be confirmed in situations where the effect of emotions on the nurse's decisional process is undiscovered. To explore the processes through which situations of moral distress (...) are determined for the nurses involved in nursing situations, a phenomenological–hermeneutic analysis of a nurse's report of an experience lived by her as a moral distress situation has been conducted. Nursing emerges as a relational doctrine that requires the nurse to have different degrees of personal involvement, the integration between logical–formal thinking and narrative thinking, the perception of the salience of the given situation also through the interpretation and management of one's own emotions, and the capacity to undergo a process of co‐construction of shared meanings that the others might consider adequate for the resolution of her problem. Moral action requires the nurse to think constantly about the important things that are happening in a nursing situation. Commitment towards practical situations is directed to training in order to promote the nurse's reflective ability towards finding salience in nursing situations, but it is also directed to the management of nursing assistance and human resources for the initial impact that this reflexive ability has on patients' and their families' lives and on their need to be heard and assisted. The only case analysed does not allow generalizations. Further research is needed to investigate how feelings generated by emotional acceptance influence ethical decision making and moral distress in nursing situations. (shrink)

Pandemic infection by COVID‐19 could be changing the public image of the nursing profession in Italy. Recently, as in any western country, we were being registered with an increase in the number of violence against healthcare professionals. Nevertheless, due to pandemic in the social media, the nursing profession is remembered for competence, determination, courage, and humanity, and it is continually remercied by people, politicians, and journalists. In this paper, we will conduct a phenomenological argument that proposes both phenomena can be (...) explained by Paul Ricoeur's courses of recognition. In cases of violence, patients and their family members reacting because they feel betrayed for a real or alleged injustice—primarily not to be listened to by health professionals. Nurses and other professionals are often unable to take the right grade of involvement for understanding patient's needs. On the other hand, during COVID‐19 pandemic, patients and family members perceive the extraordinary daily work of caring, and they react thanking. The principle of the gift is implicated in both cases: the crisis of gift received or donated can be explaining violence; gratitude and thanks can be explaining by gratuitousness of care. (shrink)

In this article we focus on female genital mutilation. We analyse this problem as one of the most important issues of multiculturalism, which is also coming to the attention of the public in Italy as a consequence of the growing number of immigrants from African countries. The fundamental problem is about the acceptability of this practice: can female genital mutilation be permitted and, if so, on what basis? We will try to cope with this as a genuine conflict between culture-relative (...) values and universal values, such as human rights. Some attention will be drawn to Italian law. Finally, the impact on nurses of requests for genital mutilation will be described. (shrink)

We reflect upon the meaning of freedom and autonomy in nursing behaviour, attempting to outline the contemporary situation of nursing in Italy, where the profession is achieving important results after a long period of submission and subordination. The way to real emancipation is not easy, but a statement of law on the one hand - abolishing constraints such as the Mansionario - and professional self-regulation on the other - the recent new Deontological Code - represent a real conquest in that (...) direction. However, no statement of law or deontology can be sufficient without deeper reflection by the profession on itself and its tasks, potentiality, social importance and self-esteem. (shrink)

Ethical challenges are traditionally described in a negative light, even though moral conflict can express the individual ability to perceive when something is not working and promote change. The true question, therefore, is not to how to silence moral conflict but how to educate it. Although the need for ethical support of health- and social-care professionals in elderly care is clearly perceived, there is no universal method for providing effective interventions. The authors hypothesize that adequate training sessions can help care (...) professionals enhance this skill, once clear goals and specific educational techniques are set. This research tests the hypothesis on twenty care professionals working in acute and residential care settings for the elderly, building on the ethics round method. Mixed methods drawn from literature and the experience of educators were adapted to meet different educational goals. Moral issues can hardly be removed from a context characterized by increasing demand and decreasing resources, but they can be recognized and addressed with common efforts, a critical attitude, and a growth mindset. Enhancing these skills in qualified workers can help them accept the reality of work, release pressure, and identify common team goals. Introducing these skills before graduation can help future workers avoid unreal expectations and reduce frustration and early job quit rates. (shrink)

In the domain of evolutionary cognitive archaeology, the early body ornaments from the Middle Stone Age/Palaeolithic are generally treated as mere by-products of an evolved brain-bound cognitive architecture selected to cope with looming social problems. Such adaptive artefacts are therefore taken to have been but passive means of broadcasting a priori envisaged meanings, essentially playing a neutral role for the human mind. In contrast to this epiphenomenalist view of material culture, postphenomenology and the Material Engagement Theory have been making a (...) case for the active role of artefacts on the count that they can actually shape and restructure the human mind. By bringing these dissenting voices together, the paper at hand employs an enactive way of thinking in order to challenge the epiphenomenalist take on early body ornaments. In fact, two variants of enactivism are presented, each advancing a unique explanation of how the engagement of early humans with body ornaments transformed their minds along the two postphenomenological categories of embodied and hermeneutic cognition. Our theoretical frameworks specifically seek to explore how early beadworks could have scaffolded the creation of semiotic categories and the development of cognitive processes. Despite relying on inherently different premises, both theories suggest that beads fostered the emergence of an epistemic apparatus which thoroughly transformed the way humans engaged with the world. Having concurred on the ornaments’ transformative effects, we ultimately conclude that the epiphenomenalist paradigm best be replaced with an enactive approach grounded on the dictates of postphenomenology and the MET. (shrink)

In evolutionary cognitive archaeology, the school of thought associated with the traditional framework has been deeply influenced by cognitivist intuitions, which have led to the formulation of mentalistic and disembodied cognitive explanations to address the emergence of artifacts within the archaeological record of ancient hominins. Recently, some approaches in this domain have further enforced this view, by arguing that artifacts are passive means to broadcast/perpetuate meanings that are thoroughly internal to the mind. These meanings are conveyed either in the form (...) of a Language of Thought, constituted by sub-personal, content-bearing mental representations, or in that of a natural language. In both cases, however, material culture stands as the physical derivative of computations run over representations, which include abstract concepts, semantic relationships, and meta-representations about intensional states, a conception hereby indicated as “representational apriorism”. In this paper, I will argue that such mentalistic models are plagued by the fundamental problems of content, substance, and origin, which affect the representational substrates required for the production of artifacts. At the same time, these models fail the criterion of minimalism at the crux of conditional cognitive archaeology, because they propose overly costly explanations which are insufficiently constrained by material evidence. An alternative proposal, based on the principles of radical enactive cognitive science, is hereby introduced in order to counter this mentalistic drift. It is concluded that a radical enactive cognitive archaeology is able to dissolve the deep problems confronting the mentalistic paradigm, while providing minimalistic cognitive explanations about the emergence of Paleolithic artifacts. (shrink)

The documented appearance of body ornaments in the archaeological record of early anatomically modern human and late Neanderthal populations has been claimed to be proof of symbolism and cognitive modernity. Recently, Henshilwood and Dubreuil (Current Anthropology 52:361–400, 2011) have supported this stance by arguing that the use of beads and body painting implies the presence of properties typical of modern cognition: high-level theory of mind and awareness of abstract social standards. In this paper I shall disagree with this position. For (...) the purposes of the argument, body ornaments are divided in three categories: aesthetic, indexical and fully-symbolic, on the basis of the necessary and sufficient conditions to construct meaning for each category. As previously acknowledged by a number of authors, I will argue that the abilities considered by Henshilwood & Dubreuil necessarily apply only to fully symbolic ornaments and they do not extend to the aesthetic and indexical categories. Indeed, a series of situated strategies can be sufficient to process non-symbolic categories of ornaments, through their phases of initiation, understanding and maintenance. Since these strategies could be implemented also by non-modern cognitive architectures, it is concluded that early body ornaments are currently unable to support cognitive equivalence between primitive and modern human populations. (shrink)

The cognitive gadgets theory proposes to reform evolutionary psychology by replacing the standard nativist and internalist approach to modularity with a cultural constructivist one. However, the resulting “cultural evolutionary psychology” still maintains some controversial aspects of the original neo-Darwinian paradigm. These assumptions are unnecessary to the cognitive gadgets theory and can be eliminated without significant conceptual loss.

Appearing in English for the first time, Schelling’s 1842 lectures develop the idea that many philosophical concepts are born of religious-mythological notions.

This paper starts with one of Chalmers’ basic points: first-hand experience is an irreducible field of phenomena. I claim there is no ‘theoretical fix’ or ‘extra ingredient’ in nature that can possibly bridge this gap. Instead, the field of conscious phenomena requires a rigorous method and an explicit pragmatics for its exploration and analysis. My proposed approach, inspired by the style of inquiry of phenomenology, I have called neurophenomenology. It seeks articulations by mutual constraints between phenomena present in experience and (...) the correlative field of phenomena established by the cognitive sciences. It needs to expand into a widening research community in which the method is cultivated further. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss the largely neglected topic of semantics in medicine and the associated ethical issues. We analyse several key medical terms from the informed perspective of the healthcare professional, the lay perspective of the patient and the patient’s family, and the descriptive perspective of what the term actually signifies objectively. The choice of a particular medical term may deliver different meanings when viewed from these differing perspectives. Consequently, several ethical issues may arise. Technical terms that are not (...) commonly understood by lay people may be used by physicians, consciously or not, and may obscure the understanding of the situation by lay people. The choice of particular medical terms may be accidental use of jargon, an attempt to ease the communication of psychologically difficult information, or an attempt to justify a preferred course of action and/or to manipulate the decision-making process. (shrink)

With fascinating historical anecdotes and incisive scientific analysis, this important work combines ancient thought with modern theory to reveal a new way of viewing our universe that can expand our awareness, our lives, and may well point the way to a new science for the twenty-first century.

In this paper I propose a set-theoretical interpretation of the logical square of opposition, in the perspective opened by generalized quantifier theory. Generalized quantifiers allow us to account for the semantics of quantificational Noun Phrases, and of other natural language expressions, in a coherent and uniform way. I suggest that in the analysis of the meaning of Noun Phrases and Determiners the square of opposition may help representing some semantic features responsible to different logical properties of these expressions. I will (...) conclude with some consideration on scope interactions between quantifiers. (shrink)

With precision and profundity born of 30 years of devoted study, John Boyle offers an essential introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas on Scripture, shedding helpful light on the goals, methods, and commitments that animate the Angelic Doctor's engagement with the sacred page. Because the genius of St. Thomas's approach to the Bible lies not so much in its novelty but rather in the fidelity and clarity with which he recapitulates the riches of the preceding interpretive Tradition, this initiation into St. (...) Thomas's vision of Scripture is itself an orientation to the Church's vision of Scripture, from the Fathers through and beyond the Middle Ages. St. Thomas's embeddedness within the Church's Tradition and his own historical context is integral to his approach to Scripture, yet it sets him at some distance from modern readers, for whom his interpretive vision may seem perplexing or even impenetrable. In this Primer, Boyle first provides an acclimation to this medieval context through a survey and explanation of pertinent technical terminology used by St. Thomas and characteristic of the scholastic theology of the time. With an eye to the medieval practice of considering Scripture according to the fourfold division of causes, Boyle builds on this initial foundation by exploring in turn St. Thomas's accounts of the end or use of Scripture (final cause), its divine and human authorship (efficient cause), its order and division (material cause), and its literary styles or genres (formal cause). Drawing on writings from across St. Thomas's corpus, but especially his work On the Commendation and Division of Sacred Scripture and the prologues to his biblical commentaries, Boyle masterfully elucidates both the hermeneutical principles and deep wisdom of the Angelic Doctor's approach to Scripture, imparting invaluable guidance not only for reading and understanding St. Thomas and other great masters of the Tradition, but also-and ultimately-for understanding Scripture in light of this Tradition and reading it with greater benefit and joy. (shrink)

This is an English translation of Schelling's Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (first published in 1797 and revised in 1803), one of the most significant works in the German tradition of philosophy of nature and early nineteenth-century philosophy of science. It stands in opposition to the Newtonian picture of matter as constituted by inert, impenetrable particles, and argues instead for matter as an equilibrium of active forces that engage in dynamic polar opposition to one another. In the revisions of (...) 1803 Schelling incorporated this dialectical view into a neo-Platonic conception of an original unity divided upon itself. The text is of more than simply historical interest: its daring and original vision of nature, philosophy, and empirical science will prove absorbing reading for all philosophers concerned with post-Kantian German idealism, for scholars of German Romanticism, and for historians of science. (shrink)

I begin by criticizing an elaboration of an argument in this journal due to Hawley , who argued that, where Leibniz’s Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles faces counterexamples, invoking relations to save PII fails. I argue that insufficient attention has been paid to a particular distinction. I proceed by demonstrating that in most putative counterexamples to PII , the so-called Discerning Defence trumps the Summing Defence of PII. The general kind of objects that do the discerning in all cases (...) form a category that has received little if any attention in metaphysics. This category of objects lies between indiscernibles and individuals and is called relationals: objects that can be discerned by means of relations only and not by properties. Remarkably, relationals turn out to populate the universe. (shrink)

"Not only one of the best but also the most comprehensive treatment of Stoicism written in this century." --Times Literary Supplement.

This landmark work provides a systematic introduction to systems of modal logic and stands as the first presentation of what have become central ideas in philosophy of language and metaphysics, from the "new theory of reference" and non-linguistic necessity and essentialism to "Kripke semantics.".

"A very good book indeed: there is scarcely an issue anyone has thought to raise about the topic which Childress fails to treat with sensitivity and good judgement....Future discussions of paternalism in health care will have to come to terms with the contentions of this book, which must be reckoned the best existing treatment of its subject."--Ethics. "A clear, scholarly and balanced analysis....This is a book I can recommend to physicians, ethicists, students of both fields, and to those most affected--the (...) patients themselves."--Edmund D. Pellegrino, John Carroll Professor of Medicine and Medical Humanities, Georgetown University Medical Center. (shrink)

"The chief business of twentieth-century philosophy” is “to reckon with twentieth-century history," claimed R. G. Collingwood. In this remarkable collection of essays, Frank Ankersmit demonstrates the prescience of that remark and goes a long way toward meeting its challenge. Responding to the work of Hayden White, Arthur Danto, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, he examines such issues as the difference between historical representation and artistic expression, the status of metaphor in historical description, and the relation of postmodernism to historicism. Ankersmit's fluent grasp (...) of European thought and his ability to incorporate concepts from literary theory, art history, the philosophy of science, and political thought into his analyses assure that this collection will interest readers throughout the humanities. (shrink)