The main accounts of the documentary in contemporary analytic aesthetics have difficulties in dealing with the distinction between documentaries and docudramas. On the one hand, the assertion-based accounts proposed by Carroll, Ponech and Plantinga cannot properly differentiate documentaries from docudramas. On the other hand, Currie’s account can do so by relying on the notion of trace but this involves an undesirable side-effect, namely, the exclusion, from the documentary, of those documentaries that do not include traces of their subjects, as for (...) instance documentaries that resort to reenactments. Is there a way to exclude docudramas from the documentary without also excluding other films that we usually treat as documentaries? The paper affirmatively answers to this question by relying on the notion perceptual belief, that is, a belief that one can form by endorsing one's perception. Documentaries are defined as films that mandate us to form perceptual beliefs. Even if a docudrama mandates us to form beliefs, it does not mandate us to form perceptual beliefs, and thus does not count as a documentary. By contrast, a documentary that resorts to reenactments still mandates us to form perceptual beliefs and thus properly satisfies the definition proposed. (shrink)

Our usual method" is an expression that Aristotle uses in a passage of the Politics (I.1, 1252a17-20) to describe the technique of subdividing a composite object of study into the elements that make it up, in order to study the possible combinations. What theory is the basis for this method? Is it really a usual method for Aristotle? Enrico Rini responds to these questions, starting with the analysis of some passages of the Aristotelian corpus that refer to concepts of (...) the part and the whole. From these passages, Rini attempts to extrapolate a theory that Aristotle states explicitly only on occasion. The mereology that emerges from this study is not a formal theory, unlike the logical mereology present today, and therefore takes into account different types of the whole and the part, with a scope that has applications for the field of biology. (shrink)

Il presente studio indaga lo sviluppo della dottrina teologica degli Atomisti antichi, secondo cui gli dèi esistono, ma non si occupano in tutto o in parte di noi umani. Ritenuta per lungo tempo espressione di ateismo, essa è presentata qui come una teoria filosofica solida ed eticamente rilevante, perché offre una concezione positiva della natura divina. Il volume compie un’indagine sistematica dei testi teologici degli Atomisti, partendo dai frammenti di Democrito e di Epicuro, fino agli scritti degli Epicurei di età (...) romana, come Demetrio Lacone e Filodemo, preservati soprattutto dai papiri di Ercolano. Oltre alle immancabili somiglianze che intercorrono tra questi autori, si sottolineano anche alcune profonde differenze tra le loro idee. In particolare, si propone l’ipotesi che esistano tre “teologie”, o meglio tre varianti teologiche, nell’Atomismo antico: l’idea di Democrito che gli dèi sono mortali e aiutano gli uomini saggi; la concezione di Epicuro, che stima dio un vivente del tutto indifferente alle vicende umane e dedito alla sola contemplazione di sé; la variante degli Epicurei successivi, che considera la divinità come dedita ad azioni e occupazioni che non ledono la sua perfezione. Attraverso le loro ipotesi sulla divinità, gli Atomisti individuano, inoltre, alcuni modelli di beatitudine, al quale l’essere umano deve cercare di assimilarsi per vivere felicemente. Sulla base di tale ulteriore proposta, si ricavano alcune potenziali ricadute morali delle teologie atomiste e si suggerisce che queste possano proporre alternative “stranianti” di pensiero / di prassi, capaci di influire costruttivamente sulle nostre vite. (shrink)

The Western Legal Tradition (WLT) is a child of the Cold War era. Originally conceived by the Harvard legal historian HJ Berman in his 1950 book on Justice in Russia, a work aimed at explaining to the West what laid beyond the Iron Curtain, this idea gives life to an account set out in an opposition in which the West and Soviet Russia are defined with the features missing to each other. In those pages is the blueprint for his two (...) well-known volumes published in 1983 and 2003, and for a third volume left unfinished. -/- The WLT grows from another legacy from the Cold War era: human rights history. While this theme entered public debate fuelled by the concern with human rights in the Eastern European countries during the Cold War era, this paper shows how the WLT absorbed this theme hijacking a core component of continental legal science (subjectives Recht) re-engineered by political theorists into the major identitary element of the WLT in an eternity history rooted in medieval canon law. (shrink)

What is comparative legal history? This essay argues that to understand this new field of legal-historical studies, we need first to clarify how legal historiography has changed over time. To this purpose, this essay begins from two main ideas. -/- First, the writing of legal history is deeply intertwined with an image of law that tells us what law is, how it is created and by whom. This is, in fact, the premise for writing legal history, as it determines the (...) object of investigation. Second, the decades between 1930 and 1960 saw a profound turn in European legal science. Some legal scholars challenged the legacy received from the 19th century and launched an attack on the ‘formalism’ at the heart of its intellectual framework. -/- Those path-breaking insights gave life to a wave of works self-styled as comparative legal history published in the period 1930–60. At their heart were some of the challenging ideas that have continued to fuel original legal-historical research in the last few decades (e.g. to place law in context, to think outside the doctrinal box, the dislike of abstract theorising) and which today are shared as an obvious truth. They are the fruit of the antiformalist turn of between1930 and 1960. (shrink)

I temi discussi all’interno del volume sono il frutto di una intensa attività seminariale svolta all’interno dei corsi di Filosofia politica e di Storia delle dottrine politiche presso il Dipartimento di Scienze politiche dell’Università di Roma Sapienza. Ha tra i suoi obiettivi quello di introdurre allo studio e alla comprensione di alcuni argomenti che sono al centro della politica e sono volti al compimento del grande progetto politico che vede nella libertà i luoghi della felicità e della solidarietà. Dalla riflessione (...) che ne è scaturita è emersa la convinzione che alla base di questo progetto la democrazia continua ad essere, nonostante le sue criticità, un valore attuale e uno strumento fondamentale per la convivenza pacifica tra i popoli, in un epoca in cui la libertà si è riconciliata con l’uguaglianza assumendo il significato di fonte di legittimazione democratica che oggi si ripropone a tutela delle differenze che fanno «di ciascuno di noi un individuo unico». (shrink)

This paper develops Richard Wollheim’s claim that the proper appreciation of a picture involves not only enjoying a seeing-in experience but also abiding by a standard of correctness. While scholars have so far focused on what fixes the standard, thereby discussing the alternative between intentions and causal mechanisms, the paper focuses on what the standard does, that is, establishing which kinds, individuals, features and standpoints are relevant to the understanding of pictures. It is argued that, while standards concerning kinds, individuals (...) and features can be relevant also to ordinary perception, standards concerning standpoints are specific to pictorial experience. Drawing on all this, the paper proposes an ontology of depiction according to which a picture is constituted by both its visual appearance and its standard of correctness. (shrink)

Vanity and pride have been condemned by Christian thinkers for centuries. Therefore, it may seem curious that Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach, one of the fiercest critics of religion, decried these passions. Holbach’s work is interspersed with remarks about vanity and pride which have gone unnoticed in the literature. This chapter analyzes Holbach’s account of vanity, delving into the role it plays in the establishment and maintenance of religion. I show that the desire for prestige is at the very core of (...) religious practices, which aim to justify the alleged superiority of man over nature. Holbach’s well-known critique of religion, therefore, cannot be fully understood without reference to his lesser known account of vanity and pride. The study of these passions is also essential to grasping Holbach’s conception of philosophy and how the philosophe should be: an individual free from prejudices, who has abandoned every trace of vanity in order to move forward in their journey towards the truth. (shrink)

The main accounts of the documentary in contemporary analytic aesthetics have difficulties in dealing with the distinction between documentaries and docudramas. On the one hand, the assertion-based accounts proposed by Noël Carroll, Trevor Ponech, and Carl Plantinga cannot properly differentiate documentaries from docudramas. On the other hand, Gregory Currie's account can do so by relying on the notion of trace, but this involves an undesirable side effect, namely, the exclusion, from the documentary, of those documentaries that do not include traces (...) of their subjects, as, for instance, documentaries that resort to reenactment. Is there a way to exclude docudramas from the documentary without also excluding other films that we usually treat as documentaries? This article affirmatively answers by relying on the notion of perceptual belief, that is, a belief that one can form by endorsing the demonstrative content of one's perception. While documentaries primarily involve the formation of perceptual beliefs, docudramas invite us to form nonperceptual beliefs by primarily involving the formation of perceptual imaginings. That is why docudramas are not documentaries. By contrast, a documentary that resorts to reenactment primarily involves the formation of perceptual beliefs, namely, perceptual beliefs about the reenactment itself. (shrink)

The World Health Organization has published a global priority list of antibiotic-resistant bacteria to guide research and development of new antibiotics. Every pathogen on this list requires R&D activity, but some are more attractive for private sector investments, as evidenced by the current antibacterial pipeline. A “pipeline coordinator” is a governmental/non-profit organization that closely tracks the antibacterial pipeline and actively supports R&D across all priority pathogens employing new financing tools.

Over the past two decades, virtue ethicists have begun to devote increasing attention to applied ethics. In particular, the application of virtue ethical frameworks to the environmental ethics debate has flourished. This chapter reviews recent contributions to the literature in this field and highlights some strengths and weaknesses of thinking about climate change through a virtue ethical lens. Section “Two Benefits of Virtue Ethical Approaches to Climate Change” explores two benefits of applying virtue ethics to climate change: (a) we can (...) better capture the phenomenology of our moral experience, and (b) we avoid the problem of inconsequentialism. Section “A Catalogue of Environmental Virtues” analyzes various practical proposals that have been put forward in the form of specific environmental virtues. Section “An Objection to Virtue-Oriented Approaches to Climate Change” reconstructs a fundamental objection to the idea of using a virtue ethical normative approach to tackling the urgent and imminent dangers of climate change. (shrink)

In the first decades of the twentieth century, many philosophers and philosophical movements attempted to make philosophy scientific by analogy with science. Such attempts vary with respect to the strategies adopted for implementing the analogy. In this article, I single out the specificity of logical empiricism’s strategy, by comparing it to some of its most relevant contemporary scientific philosophies, such as Russell’s method of analysis, Husserl’s phenomenology, neo-Kantianism, and American pragmatism. Logical empiricism sees philosophy as continuous with science, by reducing (...) the problems of philosophy to problems in mathematical logic. The other scientific philosophies postulate a specificity of philosophy, by maintaining a special domain for it and also a specific methodology, while requiring this methodology to be scientific in a manner analogous to the general method of the special sciences. I argue that this distinction helps to revise and possibly to settle some of the debates concerning our understanding of both the genealogy and the development of the movement, such as the conjectural derivation of its scientific philosophy from Russell’s analytic philosophy or from a special brand of Austrian philosophy and the complex relationship with its German and American contemporaries. (shrink)

Both perception and imagination seem to play a crucial role in our engagement with fiction films but whether they really do so, and which role they possibly play, is controversial. On the one hand, a fiction film, as film, is a depiction that invites us to perceive the events portrayed. On the other hand, as fiction, it invites us to imagine the story told. Thus, after watching the film Alien, one might say that one saw Ripley fighting the monster but (...) one might also say that one imagined Ripley fighting the monster. Are these two reports compatible? If they are, how can we combine them so to make sense of them? If, instead, they are not, which of them should we give up? (shrink)

Il volume affronta i complessi problemi sollevati dalla musica a studiosi, critici, filosofi, e che riguardano cio che ruota attorno a questa arte dalle molteplici facce. Punto chiave della riflessione sono le avanguardie del Novecento, poiché le sue profonde trasformazioni mettono a nudo ed evidenziano, a volte in modo drammatico, gli interrogativi di fondo a cui la musica ci ha sempre posto di fronte. Il tema centrale è il rapporto tra una supposta universalità dell'esperienza musicale in senso lato e la (...) sua innegabile storicità, tema su cui si dibatte nel pensiero occidentale sin dai tempi di Pitagora. Pur essendo un linguaggio chiuso nella sua specificita, la musica ci spinge di continuo ad andare oltre: allude sempre a qualcosa che sta al di fuori dei suoni stessi e ci invita a esplorare i luoghi a cui segretamente tende"--Back cover. (shrink)

In the first part of this paper, published in issue 1 of Augustinianum 63 (2023), 9-45, we examined the question of whether Irenaeus of Lyons depended on the Exposition of Logia about the Lord of Papias of Hierapolis. In this second and final part we focus on the way Irenaeus used information which, since the first decades of the second century, had been attributed to presbyters of Asia and then in particular on the way he identifies the succession of presbyters (...) with that of bishops (primarily in Rome). He links the latter with Christian origins but also profoundly alters the function traditionally attributed to the presbyters themselves, within a system he devised in order to respond to urgent problems, in a context quite different from the era in which the traditions to which he appeals were born. (shrink)

The environment impacts human health in profound ways, yet few theories define the form of the relationship between human physiology and the environment. It is conjectured that such complex systems cannot interact directly, but rather their interaction requires the formation of an intermediary “interface.” This position contrasts with current epidemiological constructs of causation, which implicitly assume that two complex systems transfer information directly while remaining separate entities. Further, it is contended that dynamic, process‐based interfaces incorporate components from all the interacting (...) systems but exhibit operational independence. This property has many consequences, the foremost being that characteristics of the interface cannot be fully resolved by only studying the systems involved in the interaction. The interface itself must be the subject of inquiry. Without refocusing the attention on biodynamic interfaces, how the environment impacts health cannot be discerned. Also see the video abstract here https://youtu.be/XeyjeZeyo4o. (shrink)

We used a new method called “Ghost-in-the-Machine” (GiM) to investigate social interactions with a robotic bartender taking orders for drinks and serving them. Using the GiM paradigm allowed us to identify how human participants recognize the intentions of customers on the basis of the output of the robotic recognizers. Specifically, we measured which recognizer modalities (e.g., speech, the distance to the bar) were relevant at different stages of the interaction. This provided insights into human social behavior necessary for the development (...) of socially competent robots. When initiating the drink-order interaction, the most important recognizers were those based on computer vision. When drink orders were being placed, however, the most important information source was the speech recognition. Interestingly, the participants used only a subset of the available information, focussing only on a few relevant recognizers while ignoring others. This reduced the risk of acting on erroneous sensor data and enabled them to complete service interactions more swiftly than a robot using all available sensor data. We also investigated socially appropriate response strategies. In their responses,the participants preferred to use the same modality as the customer’s requests, e.g., they tended to respond verbally to verbal requests. Also, they added redundancy to their responses, for instance by using echo questions. We argue that incorporating the social strategies discovered with the GiM paradigm in multimodal grammars of human–robot interactions improves the robustness and the ease-of-use of these interactions, and therefore provides a smoother user experience. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Rawlsians have largely misunderstood the idea of an overlapping consensus of reasonable comprehensive doctrines, thereby failing to delineate in an appropriate way the place of comprehensive doctrines in political liberalism. My argument rests on two core claims. The first claim is that (i) political liberalism is committed to three theses about the overlapping consensus. The first thesis concerns the subject of the overlapping consensus; the second thesis concerns the function of the overlapping consensus; the (...) third thesis explains how the overlapping consensus can serve its function in accordance with political liberalism’s commitment to epistemic neutrality. The second claim on which my argument relies is empirical: (ii) Rawlsians typically deny at least one of the three theses to which political liberalism is committed. Based on (i) and (ii), I conclude that Rawlsians have hitherto provided unconvincing accounts of the place of comprehensive doctrines in political liberalism. (shrink)

The idea of an ?inversion principle?, and the name itself, originated in the work of Paul Lorenzen in the 1950s, as a method to generate new admissible rules within a certain syntactic context. Some fifteen years later, the idea was taken up by Dag Prawitz to devise a strategy of normalization for natural deduction calculi (this being an analogue of Gentzen's cut-elimination theorem for sequent calculi). Later, Prawitz used the inversion principle again, attributing it with a semantic role. Still working (...) in natural deduction calculi, he formulated a general type of schematic introduction rules to be matched ? thanks to the idea supporting the inversion principle ? by a corresponding general schematic Elimination rule. This was an attempt to provide a solution to the problem suggested by the often quoted note of Gentzen. According to Gentzen ?it should be possible to display the elimination rules as unique functions of the corresponding introduction rules on the basis of certain requirements?. Many people have since worked on this topic, which can be appropriately seen as the birthplace of what are now referred to as ?general elimination rules?, recently studied thoroughly by Sara Negri and Jan von Plato. In this study, we retrace the main threads of this chapter of proof-theoretical investigation, using Lorenzen's original framework as a general guide. (shrink)

This paper explores some phenomenological consequences of the ontological affinity between films and pop songs. Given the central place of the recording technology in both films and pop songs, one can wonder whether pop songs can elicit from their listeners the same kind of experience that films elicit from their spectators. In other words, one can wonder whether pop songs encourage us to play a ‘game of make-believe’ analogous to that we play when we engage with films. The main part (...) of the paper is meant to provide a positive answer to this question. The remaining sections illustrate and test the proposed account by contrasting paradigmatic pop songs with borderline cases. (shrink)

Papers from the 1994 meeting represent a broad review of contemporary experimental work on quantum phenomena, emphasizing state-of-the-art experimental science. Useful as an introductory manual for young researchers, the volume addresses topics that include: experiments with single and ultracold ato.

The theory that ``consistency implies existence'' was put forward by Hilbert on various occasions around the start of the last century, and it was strongly and explicitly emphasized in his correspondence with Frege. Since (Gödel's) completeness theorem, abstractly speaking, forms the basis of this theory, it has become common practice to assume that Hilbert took for granted the semantic completeness of second order logic. In this paper I maintain that this widely held view is untrue to the facts, and that (...) the clue to explain what Hilbert meant by linking together consistency and existence is to be found in the role played by the completeness axiom within both geometrical and arithmetical axiom systems. (shrink)

Social health disparities are increasing in most countries around the world. During the past two decades, a large amount of evidence has emerged about the health consequences of social inequalities. Despite such evidence, the concept of medical fairness, as traditionally defined by the World Medical Association, has remained unchallenged and even reinforced by some scholars who emphasize that doctors should remain neutral to the socioeconomic status of their patients when providing clinical care. The inconsistency between public health and clinical care (...) perspectives raises tension between a narrow interpretation of the ethics of justice, which stresses the importance of equality and impartiality, and the ethics of care, which highlights the importance of particularity and individuality in clinical practice. This article analyzes the concept of medical fairness using the emerging evidence that demonstrates the impact of social health disparities on clinical care. It proposes a new approach of medical fairness based on equity rather than on equality and provides a consistent ethical framework based on Paul Ricoeur’s three levels of medical judgments. This integrative framework provides a better balance between public health and clinical care in medical practice. (shrink)

This paper considers two issues raised by the claim that fictional characters are abstract artifacts. First, given that artifacts normally have functions, what is the function of a fictional character? Second, given that, in experiencing works of fictions, we usually treat fictional characters as concrete individuals, how can such a phenomenology fit with an ontology according to which fictional characters are abstract artifacts? I will indirectly address the second issue by directly addressing the first one. For this purpose, I will (...) rely on the notion of a mental file. I will argue that the function of fictional characters is the generation of mental files of a special kind. I will show that our experience of fictional characters as concrete individuals depends on the kind of mental files that are generated by fictional characters as abstract artifacts. I will conclude that an appreciator of a work of fiction can open two files about a certain fictional character; one about the character as an individual in the fictional world, and the other about the character as an abstract artifact in the actual world. In this sense, our relation to a fictional character is characterized by a duality of files or ‘twofileness’. (shrink)

This article examines how theology and social science can contribute to the specific task of talking about God in management without compromising the integrity of the Triune God. To talk about God in management studies initially requires a discussion on the character of modernity and about whether modernity is absence or transformation of religious forms; to follow is an examination of the governing assumptions operating in social theory from a religious perspective. The conclusion is that without the correct hermeneutics, what (...) management scholars mean by God cannot be more than an idea. (shrink)

Regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees with Stacie Friend’s claim that fiction is a genre, her notion of genre can be fruitfully applied to a paradigmatic genre such as science fiction. This article deploys Friend’s notion of genre in order to improve the influential characterization of science fiction proposed by Darko Suvin and to defend it from a criticism recently raised by Simon Evnine. According to Suvin, a work of science fiction must concern “a fictional ‘novum’ validated by cognitive (...) logic.” While Suvin conceives of his characterization as a necessary and sufficient condition for membership in the genre, I propose to cast the notions of “fictional novum” and “cognitive validation” as standard features of the genre, which works of science fiction should have but might lack. I argue that this amended version of Suvin’s characterization can better account for two basic properties of science fiction as a genre, namely its historicity and its relevance to appreciation. Lastly, I show that the amended version can shed some light on the affinity between works of science fiction and philosophical thought experiments. (shrink)

'Io poi ho sempre pensato--scrive Henri Matisse nel 1935--che gran parte della bellezza di un quadro derivi dalla lotta impegnata dall'artista con i limiti del suo mezzo espressivo.'" Le sue parole riassumono bene il tema di questo libro, la lotta dell'artista con la materia dell'arte, dunque il ruolo fondamentale della costruzione concreta dell'arte rispetto all'idea. L'opera d'arte--una composizione, un romanzo, un dipinto, una scultura, un film--è il risultato di un atto intellettuale consapevole--dunque di un'idea--dove tuttavia entra in gioco l'azione concreta, (...) materiale del fare artistico, che inevitabilmente pervade e condiziona l'opera fin dal momento in cui essa inizia a prendere forma sul pentagramma, sulle righe, sulla tela, sulla pellicola. L'immagine iniziale o idea può mantenere inalterata la sua forza oppure trasformarsi nel corso del lavoro, ma il più delle volte serve soprattutto da stimolo, perché a poco a poco--come scrive Italo Calvino--la materia resta padrona del campo e offre il suo prezioso, indispensabile alimento all'immaginazione. È solo mentre si scrive o dipinge che la fantasia dona i suoi frutti, in astratto la materia è ancora troppo lontana per suggerire combinazioni, accostamenti, soluzioni, scoperte. Le testimonianze dei maggiori protagonisti delle arti del '900, qui ampiamente riportate, confermano nella sostanza la tesi del libro: anche il pittore più desideroso di trasmettere un messaggio e di contribuire attraverso la sua arte alla crescita civile della società, quando riflette sul proprio lavoro difficilmente può negare che l'opera sia il risultato talvolta inatteso di un percorso accidentato nel quale l'azione concreta, materiale del fare artistico entra in gioco giungendo in alcuni casi a modificare in modo radicale le intenzioni originali. L'arte--scrivono Fellini, Mirò, Calvino, Stravinsky e tanti altri--si fa facendola. Sul piano interpretativo ciò comporta un radicale ridimensionamento del ruolo messianico dell'artista, il quale spesso non ha alcuna intenzione o pretesa di comunicare qualcosa di fondamentale, è perso in questo mondo esattamente come tutti noi. 'Giornalisti curiosi e amatori di pittura'--scrive Picasso--vengono a vederci per trarre da noi verità dogmatiche o definizioni che potrebbero spiegare loro la nostra arte, mettendo in rilievo il suo valore pedagogico, valore che io nego categoricamente. Noi facciamo della pittura. Vorrebbero forse che, per aggiunta, noi fossimo fabbricanti di verità e di massime?'"--Back cover. (shrink)

Medical discoveries have led to an unprecedented level of competence in the field, but it is as if the patient is finding it increasingly difficult to get the right holistic care. Medicine must be put on a path towards being humanised.