BackgroundProphylactic Bilateral Salpingo-Oophorectomy reduces the risk of developing ovarian cancer. However, the psychological mechanisms that may affect post-surgery Quality of Life among patients who underwent PBSO are still largely unknown. Thus, this study aimed at exploring the direct and indirect associations of satisfaction with medical communication and cancer anxiety on post-surgery QoL among women at high risk of developing ovarian cancer.MethodFifty-nine women who underwent PBSO took part in this cross-sectional study, filling out a sociodemographic and clinical questionnaire, a battery of (...) validated psychological measures and an ad hoc developed scale for the assessment of cancer anxiety. We first examined the correlations among all variables of interest, and then tested if cancer anxiety mediated the association between satisfaction with medical communication and post-surgery psychological QoL, controlling both for time from surgery and education.ResultsPost-surgery psychological QoL was unrelated from any sociodemographic or clinical variable. Cancer anxiety had a significant direct negative effect on psychological QoL, while satisfaction with medical communication had a significant positive direct effect on it. Finally, cancer anxiety significantly mediated the association between satisfaction with medical communication and post-surgery psychological QoL.DiscussionResults suggest that post-surgery psychological QoL of patients who underwent PBSO may be increased with interventions, delivered in a genetic counselling setting, targeting quality of medical communication and cancer anxiety. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Reception of René Girard's Thought in Italy:1965-Present1Federica Casini (bio) and Pierpaolo Antonello (bio)Italy provides an important national cultural context for the global mapping of constantly growing interest in René Girard's thought and in mimetic theory. Girard is widely and unquestionably recognized as one of the most influential thinkers of our times. Interviews, public interventions, and excerpts of his books are featured quite regularly in Italian national newspapers and (...) magazines, and, as a result, Girard's name is known outside narrow academic circles.2 All his books have been translated into Italian, including several unique titles, which are available neither in French nor in English, and which are collections of previously unpublished occasional papers or essays.3 The reception of his thought has not been confined to any specific disciplinary ambit; it has been discussed, among others, by philosophers, literary critics, social scientists, cognitive scientists, theologians, and psychoanalysts.4 This article aims at providing a chronology of Girard's reception in Italy, while surveying the critical literature and the intellectual response to his theory, from the publication of his first book to the present. [End Page 139]From the 1960s to the 1980s: Lies and Truth (About Girard) and the Early Reception of His BooksThe first Italian translation of Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque5 was released by Bompiani in 1965, with a title that was both misleading and symptomatic: Struttura e personaggi del romanzo moderno (Structures and Characters in the Modern Novel). The reference to structuralism, which was the theoretical fashion of the day in Italian literary circles in the mid-1960s, and the pigeonholing of Girard's exegetical scrutiny as novelistic criticism testify emblematically to the difficulty of classification, plus the substantial misunderstanding that the book withstood both in Italy and in other parts of Europe at that time. To omit mensonge and vérité from the title of the Italian edition is to ignore the "truth" of the matter, that the book was also a mediation on the structure of human desire, extending outside the limits of representation and literature, branching out into a theory of human behavior and the social dynamic that had a profound psychological, anthropological, and sociological reach. Moreover, Mensonge romantique is a meditation on modernity (the novel being its most emblematic form of representation) and the consequences of the unleashing of increasing levels of "internal mediation" within bourgeois society. The reception of this volume was quite cold, and it was reprinted only in 1981, after the wave of discussion stirred by the publication of the Italian translation of Violence and the Sacred. The only review published between 1965 and 1979, by the literary critic Enzo Golino, appeared in 1966 in L'Espresso,6 a weekly magazine that has played, and still plays today, a determinant role in the presentation of Girardian texts to the general public in Italy.Given this minimal reception, it is not surprising that the publication of Girard's groundbreaking work, La Violence et le sacré, in 1972,7 was largely ignored in Italy, in spite of the discussion it stirred in French intellectual quarters and the cultural exchange that Italian intellectuals have always maintained with Parisian cultural circles. The only review that appeared in Italy was by Paola Daniela Giovannelli, a literary critic and an expert on Italian theater, showing that the new work clearly still suffered from the same kind of disciplinary classification and reception as Mensonge romantique. In fact, it appeared in the literary journal Lingua e stile, and it discusses the anthropology of sacrifice and the interdisciplinary perspective, ranging from ethnology to psychoanalysis to myth, that feature in La Violence et le sacré in terms of a "theatricalization" of anthropology, mainly due to Giovannelli's disciplinary interests and the book's focus on Greek tragedies.8 [End Page 140]However, Girard's name finally burst onto the intellectual scene in Italy in 1980, when the Italian translation of Violence and the Sacred was released by Adelphi, with the title La violenza e il sacro.9 This marks the "official" entrance of Girardian thought into the Italian cultural debate, as the volume was hailed by a series of... (shrink)

: The concepts of intention and intentionality were particularly significant notions within the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic medieval philosophical traditions, and they regained philosophical importance in the twentieth century. The theories of intention and intentionality of the medieval Islamic philosopher and physician Ibn Sina and the phenomenological philosopher and mathematician Edmund Husserl are examined, compared, and contrasted here, showing that Ibn Sina's conception of intention is naturalistic and, in its naturalism, is influenced by the medical professional culture to (...) which Ibn Sina belonged. As well, Husserl's anti-naturalistic conception of intentionality is influenced by his background as a mathematician and by his desire to ground mathematics and the empirical sciences in a truly scientific philosophy. In conclusion, an argument is presented for the superiority of the Husserlian transcendentalist account of intentionality over the Avicennian naturalistic account, on the grounds that the latter falls prey to psychologism and reductionism, the two specters that according to Husserl must haunt all naturalistic accounts of consciousness. (shrink)

Manipulationism holds that information about the results of interventions is of utmost importance for scientific practices such as causal assessment or explanation. Specifically, manipulation provides information about the stability, or invariance, of the relationship between X and Y: were we to wiggle the cause X, the effect Y would accordingly wiggle and, additionally, the relation between the two will not be disrupted. This sort of relationship between variables are called 'invariant empirical generalisations'. The paper focuses on questions about causal assessment (...) and analyses the status of manipulation. It is argued that manipulationism is trapped in a dilemma. If manipulationism is read as providing a conceptual analysis of causation, then it fails to provide a story about the methods for causal assessment. If, instead, manipulationism is read as providing a method for causal assessment, then it is at an impasse concerning causal assessment in areas where manipulations are not performed. Empirical generalisations are then reassessed, in such a way that manipulation is not taken as methodologically fundamental. The paper concludes that manipulation is the appropriate tool for some scientific contexts, but not for all. (shrink)

It is widely acknowledged in the literature in social epistemology that knowledge has a social dimension: we are epistemically dependent upon one another for most of what we know. Our knowledge can be, and very often is, grounded on the epistemic achievement of somebody else. But what about epistemic aims other than knowledge? What about understanding? Prominent authors argue that understanding is not social in the same way in which knowledge is. Others can put us in the position to understand, (...) but when we understand something, this accomplishment is to be credited mainly if not entirely to us, as it is due to the successful exercise of our own cognitive abilities. In this paper, I show that the social dimension of understanding closely resembles the social dimension of knowledge. I distinguish between three different ways in which a subject can depend upon another subject for (either the acquisition or the possession of) a certain epistemic good. I then argue that all these kinds of epistemic dependence apply to knowledge and understanding alike. If I am right, understanding is not (always) an achievement to be (mainly) credited to the single epistemic agent who understands. (shrink)

This book investigates the unresolved issue of democratic legitimacy in contexts of pervasive disagreement and contributes to this debate by defending a relational version of political liberalism that rests on the ideal of co-authorship. According to this proposal, democratic legitimacy depends upon establishing appropriate interactions among citizens who ought to ascribe to one another the status of putative practical and epistemic authorities. To support this relational reading of political liberalism, the book proposes a revised account of the civic virtue of (...) reasonableness along with an investigation of the epistemic-specific dimension of political equality. By engaging with political epistemology and social theory, this book explores ways to address inherent tensions within the liberal paradigm, using the following strategies of addressing these tensions: first, it defends a twofold model of legitimacy that distinguishes the goals, methodologies, and justificatory tasks of both ideal and nonideal phases of the two-level justificatory framework; second, it contends that democratic legitimacy requires an engaged and contextual critical appraisal of the injustices that characterize our daily social lives, illustrating how structural forms of injustice represent a profound betrayal of the liberal ideal of democratic legitimacy. (shrink)

The research discussed in this paper centers around the convergence of extended reality (XR) platforms, computational design, digital fabrication, and critical urban study practices. Its aim is to cultivate interdisciplinary and multiscalar approaches within these domains. The research endeavor represents a collaborative effort between two primary disciplines: critical urban studies, which prioritize socio-environmental justice, and integrated digital design to production, which emphasize the realization of volumetric or voxel-based structural systems. Moreover, the exploration encompasses augmented reality to assess its utilization in (...) both the assembly process of the structures and the integration of phygital (physical and digital) data with the physical environment. Within the context of these research scopes, this paper introduces FabriCity-XR as an interactive phygital installation. In addition to presenting an overview of the integrated research driven and performative design to production methodologies, the project showcases the practical implementation of web-based augmented reality trails, eliminating the requirement for external applications for interaction. This approach allows users to seamlessly navigate and engage with phygital content overlaid on physical objects using their personal smart devices. The result is a captivating and immersive user experience that effectively merges the physical and digital realms. (shrink)

We argue that the health sciences make causal claims on the basis of evidence both of physical mechanisms, and of probabilistic dependencies. Consequently, an analysis of causality solely in terms of physical mechanisms or solely in terms of probabilistic relationships, does not do justice to the causal claims of these sciences. Yet there seems to be a single relation of cause in these sciences - pluralism about causality will not do either. Instead, we maintain, the health sciences require a theory (...) of causality that unifies its mechanistic and probabilistic aspects. We argue that the epistemic theory of causality provides the required unification. (shrink)

Populism is on the rise, especially in Western Europe. While it is often assumed that populist actors have a tendency for fallacious reasoning, this has not been systematically investigated. We analyze the use of informal fallacies by right-wing populist politicians and their representation in the media during election campaigns. We conduct a quantitative content analysis of press releases of right-wing populist parties and news articles in print media during the most recent elections in the United Kingdom and Switzerland in 2015. (...) The results show that fallacies are used in more than a third of all analyzed texts and overwhelmingly co-occur with populist key messages. Moreover, fallacies occur more often in populist parties’ press releases than in news articles and are more common in Switzerland compared to the United Kingdom. This study confirms the argument that populist actors use fallacies in combination with populist claims. (shrink)

Cross-situational statistical learning of words involves tracking co-occurrences of auditory words and objects across time to infer word-referent mappings. Previous research has demonstrated that learners can infer referents across sets of very phonologically distinct words, but it remains unknown whether learners can encode fine phonological differences during cross-situational statistical learning. This study examined learners’ cross-situational statistical learning of minimal pairs that differed on one consonant segment, minimal pairs that differed on one vowel segment, and non-minimal pairs that differed on two (...) or three segments. Learners performed above chance for all pairs, but performed worse on vowel minimal pairs than on consonant minimal pairs or non-minimal pairs. These findings demonstrate that learners can encode fine phonetic detail while tracking word-referent co-occurrence probabilities, but they suggest that phonological encoding may be weaker for vowels than for consonants. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The article critically discusses Rahel Jaeggi’s recent philosophical contribution to a critical theory of capitalism. The first part reconstructs Jaeggi’s account of Lebensform, life-form, that builds up the main ontological framework for addressing and problematizing capitalism intended not as an economic system but as a social whole. The second part focuses on the three different theoretical strategies that Jaeggi puts forward to detect and deal with capitalism’s immanent flaws. The third and last part problematizes the metaphysical assumptions and implications (...) of Jaeggi’s understanding of life-form and outlines a more dialectical, or “transactional” notion of form of life, which is inspired by Dewey’s non-reductionist naturalist method of inquiry. The overall aim is to strengthen the philosophical critique of the capitalist form of life. (shrink)

Data‐driven algorithms are widely used to make or assist decisions in sensitive domains, including healthcare, social services, education, hiring, and criminal justice. In various cases, such algorithms have preserved or even exacerbated biases against vulnerable communities, sparking a vibrant field of research focused on so‐called algorithmic biases. This research includes work on identification, diagnosis, and response to biases in algorithm‐based decision‐making. This paper aims to facilitate the application of philosophical analysis to these contested issues by providing an overview of three (...) key topics: What is algorithmic bias? Why and how can it occur? What can and should be done about it? Throughout, we highlight connections—both actual and potential—with philosophical ideas and concerns. (shrink)

This article defends a specific account of reasonableness as a virtue of liberal citizenship. I specify an account of reasonableness that I argue is more consistent with the phenomenology of intersubjective exchanges among citizens over political matters in contexts of deep disagreement. My reading requires reasonable citizens to undertake an attitude of epistemic modesty while deliberating public matters with agents who hold views different from theirs. In contrast with my view, I debate Martha Nussbaum’s and Steven Wall’s accounts of reasonableness (...) and specify why I believe that these proposals, although interesting, both require revisions. Distinguishing my account from theirs, I specify the normative relation between reasonableness and a general framework of political legitimacy that identifies citizens as ‘co-authors of democratic decisions’. Here, I argue that the liberal ideal of ascribing to each member of the constituency the status of putative epistemic authority can be properly fulfilled if coupled with a correct specification of the political ideal of mutual respect. I conclude claiming that opacity respect, a notion of respect according to which the recognition respect that is owed to individuals is expressed by the idea that we have to treat them as ‘opaque’, is the most adequate concept of political respect when dealing with interpersonal deliberations at political level in contexts of deep disagreement. (shrink)

Previous simulation models have found positive effects of cognitive diversity on group performance, but have not explored effects of diversity in demographics (e.g., gender, ethnicity). In this paper, we present an agent-based model that captures two empirically supported hypotheses about how demographic diversity can improve group performance. The results of our simulations suggest that, even when social identities are not associated with distinctive task-related cognitive resources, demographic diversity can, in certain circumstances, benefit collective performance by counteracting two types of conformity (...) that can arise in homogeneous groups: those relating to group-based trust and those connected to normative expectations towards in-groups. (shrink)

Cells and tissues are continuously exposed to a changing microenvironment, hence the necessity of a flexible modulation of gene expression that in complex organism have been achieved through specialized chromatin mechanisms. Chromatin-based cell memory enables cells to maintain their identity by fixing lineage specific transcriptional programs, ensuring their faithful transmission through cell division; in particular PcG-based memory system evolved to maintain the silenced state of developmental and cell cycle genes. In evolution the complexity of this system have increased, particularly in (...) vertebrates, indicating combinatorial and dynamic properties of Polycomb proteins, in some cases even overflowing outside the cell nucleus. Therefore, their function may not be limited to the imposition of rigid states of genetic programs, but on the ability to recognize signals and allow plastic transcriptional changes in response to different stimuli. Here, we discuss the most novel PcG mediated memory functions in facing and responding to the challenges posed by a fluctuating environment. Cellular microenvironment can regularly change, hence the need for a dynamic modulation of transcriptional programs by the epigenome. In the current review, we highlight novel emerging aspects of epigenetic memory controlled by PcG proteins and the evolution of specialized functions to convey plasticity and adaptability to environmental changes. (shrink)

My aim in this article is to investigate the epistemic dimension of reasonableness. In the last decades, the concept of reasonableness has been deeply analysed, and yet, I maintain that a strictly epistemic analysis of reasonableness is still lacking. The goal of this article is to clarify which epistemic features characterize reasonableness as one of the fundamental virtues in the political domain. In order to justify political liberalism through a public justification that averts the risk of falling into a dilemma, (...) it is important to establish in advance which are the epistemic constraints that should be respected. My proposal is that a moderate approach in moral epistemology expresses the best scheme available to us – as moral agents constrained by the limit of our rationality – for establishing a normatively binding, and yet realistic, procedure of justification for political institutions and practices. (shrink)

Testimony spreads information. It is also commonly agreed that it can transfer knowledge. Whether it can work as an epistemic source of understanding is a matter of dispute. However, testimony certainly plays a pivotal role in the proliferation of understanding in the epistemic community. But how exactly do we learn, and how do we make advancements in understanding on the basis of one another’s words? And what can we do to maximize the probability that the process of acquiring understanding from (...) one another succeeds? These are very important questions in our current epistemological landscape, especially in light of the attention that has been paid to understanding as an epistemic achievement of purely epistemic value. Somewhat surprisingly, the recent literature in social epistemology does not offer much on the topic. The overarching aim of this paper is to provide a tentative model of understanding that goes in-depth enough to safely address the question of how understanding and testimony are related to one another. The hope is to contribute, in some measure, to the effort to understand understanding, and to explain two facts about our epistemic practices: the fact that knowledge and understanding relate differently to testimony, and the fact that some pieces of testimonial information are better than others for the sake of providing one with understanding and of yielding advancements in one’s epistemic standing. (shrink)

Proceduralists hold that democracy has a non-instrumental value consisting in the ideal of equality incorporated by fair procedures. Yet, proceduralism does not imply that every outcome of a democratic procedure is fair per se. In the non-ideal setting of constitutional democracies, government and legislative decisions may result from factional conflicts, or depend on majoritarian dictatorships. In these circumstances, Supreme Courts provide a guardianship against contested outcomes by enacting mechanisms of checks and balances, constitutional interpretation and judicial review. Yet, in virtue (...) of this role, Supreme Courts exercise a form of epistocratic power, which rests at odds with the ideal of political equality. We analyse this dilemma and propose a solution, arguing that Supreme Courts do not run unrestrained decisions; rather their decisional power is bound to the protective function of fundamental rights, in which their constitutional mandate ultimately consists. (shrink)

Democratic legitimacy is often grounded in proceduralist terms, referring to the ideal of political equality that should be mirrored by fair procedures of decision-making. The paper argues (§1) that the normative commitments embedded in a non-minimalist account of procedural legitimacy are well expressed by the ideal of co-authorship. Against this background, the main goal of the paper is to argue that structural forms of epistemic injustice are detrimental to the overall legitimacy of democratic systems. In §2 I analyse Young’s notion (...) of political powerlessness and claim that in structurally unjust social contexts members of powerless groups often are not properly acknowledged as functioning members of the polity, hence being jeopardized in their ability to develop part of their personal identity. In §III, I define gerrymandering as an example of political disempowerment that involves an epistemic harm for oppressed citizens, namely, to be prejudicially excluded from the community of epistemic trust. My thesis is that being epistemically disempowered has a negative impact on the way in which citizens understand themselves as political actors, since they suffer a lack of social recognition that may impede a proper development of their reflexive agency. In §IV, I discuss the proposal of granting epistemic privilege to members of oppressed groups, given their specific experience of social injustices. I introduce two concerns about this proposal, one morally grounded and one pragmatically oriented. Finally, in §V, I briefly sketch some institutional remedies that can be employed in order to politically fight systemic forms of epistemic injustice. (shrink)

The paper sketches out an account of ambiguous and agonistic love by drawing on the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Axel Honneth and Hannah Arendt. To begin with, I reconstruct the ambiguity of love within the conceptual framework of a paradigm of recognition. I argue further that the social relation of love, understood as an intertwine between dependence and independence, entails a power dynamic. Insofar as the dynamic actualises as “power in concert” or “power with”, namely as mutual empowerment, love (...) unfolds as free love. Finally, I show how agonistic love is damaged by turning into violent domination. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this article, I address a highly controversial question of feminist philosophy, namely, the so-called sex/gender distinction, from a Deweyan perspective. I argue that Dewey's naturalism provides useful insights for dealing with and solving the problems concerning this particular type of dualism. My argumentation unfolds in three steps. First, after having briefly introduced the meanings of the two terms, I outline two different, both unsuccessful strategies for overcoming the sex/gender distinction, namely, what I call the radical social constructionist and (...) the nondialectical naturalist strategies. Second, I draw on Dewey's version of naturalism with the aim of conceiving of human beings as simultaneously naturally and socially constructed. Third, I sketch out the hypothesis that Dewey's way of overcoming the pernicious dichotomy between nature and society may be useful for outlining a critical metaphysics of gender. (shrink)

Inspired by recent breakthroughs in predictive modeling, practitioners in both industry and government have turned to machine learning with hopes of operationalizing predictions to drive automated decisions. Unfortunately, many social desiderata concerning consequential decisions, such as justice or fairness, have no natural formulation within a purely predictive framework. In efforts to mitigate these problems, researchers have proposed a variety of metrics for quantifying deviations from various statistical parities that we might expect to observe in a fair world and offered a (...) variety of algorithms in attempts to satisfy subsets of these parities or to trade o the degree to which they are satised against utility. In this paper, we connect this approach to fair machine learning to the literature on ideal and non-ideal methodological approaches in political philosophy. The ideal approach requires positing the principles according to which a just world would operate. In the most straightforward application of ideal theory, one supports a proposed policy by arguing that it closes a discrepancy between the real and the perfectly just world. However, by failing to account for the mechanisms by which our non-ideal world arose, the responsibilities of various decision-makers, and the impacts of proposed policies, naive applications of ideal thinking can lead to misguided interventions. In this paper, we demonstrate a connection between the fair machine learning literature and the ideal approach in political philosophy, and argue that the increasingly apparent shortcomings of proposed fair machine learning algorithms reflect broader troubles faced by the ideal approach. We conclude with a critical discussion of the harms of misguided solutions, a reinterpretation of impossibility results, and directions for future research. (shrink)

One of the most controversial questions in feminist philosophy, and maybe the most controversial of all, concerns our determination as sexual or gendered human beings: Is it nature or is it our culture, or society, that makes us what we are—women, men, other? And if it is both, to what extent and in which sense is it nature, and to what extent and in which sense is it social life? Whatever the answer may be, one widespread and allegedly useful modality (...) to cast the question consists in naming “sex” the biological aspects and “gender” the cultural or social aspects of this dimension of our living. The distinction, however, has raised a number of issues; the attempts to overcome the distinction, which is... (shrink)

Accelerating environmental uncertainty and the need to cope with increasingly complex market and social demands, combine to create high value for the intuitive approach to decision-making at the strategic level. Research on intuition suffers from marked fragmentation, due to the existence of disciplinary silos based on diverse, apparently irreconcilable, ontological and epistemological assumptions. Not surprisingly, there is no integrated interdisciplinary framework suitable for a rich account of intuition, contemplating how affect and cognition intertwine in the intuitive process, and how intuition (...) scales up from the individual to collective decision-making. This study contributes to the construction of a broad conceptual framework, suitable for a multi-level account of intuition and for a fruitful dialogue with distant research areas. It critically discusses two mainstream conceptualizations of intuition which claim to be grounded in a cross-disciplinary consensus. Drawing on the complexity paradigm, it then proposes a conceptualization of intuition as emergence. Finally, it explores the theoretical and practical implications. (shrink)

El objetivo de este dossier es reflexionar, desde una perspectiva histórica, sobre los valores y significados que el municipalismo ha adquirido para los iberoamericanos en la época actual. La elección de este tema se debe a dos razones principales: por un lado, al papel que esta institución desempeña hoy en día en los regímenes democráticos de América latina, tanto en su dimensión social como política y territorial; por el otro, al hecho que el municipio tiene una herencia histórica muy larga (...) y compleja que va desde la Antigüedad, la Edad Media y Moderna hasta nuestros días. (shrink)

The Critical Naturalism Manifesto is a common platform put forward as a basis for broad discussions around the problems faced by critical theory today. We are living in a time, e.g. a pandemic time, when present-day challenges exert immense pressure on social critique. This means that models of social critique should not be discussed from the point of view of their normative justification or political effects alone, but also with reference to their ability to tackle contemporary problematic issues (like the (...) dismantlement of the welfare state, the environmental catastrophe, and the sanitary crisis). With this manifesto, we invite varying practices of philosophical, artistic and scientific social critique to take seriously the enormous challenges our societies face with regard to inner and outer nature. We first identity eleven theses of critical naturalism which contemporary critical theory should take into consideration. We then identify the historical crises and catastrophes that critical naturalism seeks to respond to, dispelling the prejudices against naturalism in contemporary critical thought, and considering alternative answers to these questions such as social constructivism, accelerationism, xenofeminism, flat ontologism, and monist world ecology. By sketching the notions of nature and naturalism, we anchor critical naturalism in the history of materialism and critical theory, understood initially as that of the Frankfurt School, but expanded and enriched by other approaches to social critique. Finally, we sketch models and projects of critical naturalism, which are exemplary fragments of varying ways to practice naturalist social critique. (shrink)

Hope and Gabbert (2008) and Jay and colleagues (in press) show us that collaborative remembering, in certain contexts, may result in incomplete and less accurate memories. Here, I will discuss the evolutionary origins of this behavior, linking it to phenomena such as social contagion, conformity, and social learning, which are highly adaptive and widespread across non-human taxa.

Can we transmit understanding via testimony in more or less the same way in which we transmit knowledge? The standard view in social epistemology has a straightforward answer: no, we cannot. Three arguments supporting the standard view have been formulated so far. The first appeals to the claim that gaining understanding requires a greater cognitive effort than acquiring testimonial knowledge does. The second appeals to a certain type of epistemic trust that is supposedly characteristic of knowledge transmission (and maybe of (...) the transmission of epistemic goods in general) and that is allegedly incompatible with understanding. The third aims to show that there is a certain aspect of understanding (what epistemologists these days like to call “grasping”) that cannot be passed on to another person via testimony alone. In this article, I show that all of these arguments can be resisted. Thus, there seem to be no compelling reasons to embrace the standard view. (shrink)

We discuss the social-epistemic aspects of Catherine Elgin’s theory of reflective equilibrium and understanding and argue that it yields an argument for the view that a crucial social-epistemic function of epistemic authorities is to foster understanding in their communities. We explore the competences that enable epistemic authorities to fulfil this role and argue that among them is an epistemic virtue we call “epistemic empathy”.

In both scientific and popular circles it is often said that we are in the midst of a sixth mass extinction. Although the urgency of our present environmental crises is not in doubt, such claims of a present mass extinction are highly controversial scientifically. Our aims are, first, to get to the bottom of this scientific debate by shedding philosophical light on the many conceptual and methodological challenges involved in answering this scientific question, and, second, to offer new philosophical perspectives (...) on what the value of asking this question has been — and whether that value persists today. We show that the conceptual challenges in defining ‘mass extinction’, uncertainties in past and present diversity assessments, and data incommensurabilities undermine a straightforward answer to the question of whether we are in, or entering, a sixth mass extinction today. More broadly we argue that an excessive focus on the mass extinction framing can be misleading for present conservation efforts and may lead us to miss out on the many other valuable insights that Earth’s deep time can offer in guiding our future. (shrink)

Scientific and philosophical literature on causality has become highly specialised. It is hard to find suitable access points for students, young researchers, or professionals outside this domain. This book provides a guide to the complex literature, explains the scientific problems of causality and the philosophical tools needed to address them.

To contribute to our understanding of the relationship between philosophical ideas and medical and healthcare models. A diachronic analysis is put in place in order to evaluate, from an innovative perspective, the influence over the centuries on medical and healthcare models of two philosophical concepts, particularly relevant for health: how Man perceives his identity and how he relates to Nature. Five epochs are identified—the Archaic Age, Classical Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Modern Age, the ‘Postmodern’ Era—which can be seen, à (...) la Foucault, as ‘fragments between philosophical fractures’. From a historical background perspective, up to the early 1900s progress in medical and healthcare models has moved on a par with the evolution of philosophical debate. Following the Second World War, the Health Service started a series of reforms, provoked by anti-positivistic philosophical transformations. The three main reforms carried out however failed and the medical establishment remained anchored to a mechanical, reductionist approach, perfectly in line with the bureaucratic stance of the administrators. In this context, future scenarios are delineated and an anthropo-ecological model is proposed to re-align philosophy, medicine and health care. (shrink)

Mobile applications are increasingly regarded as important tools for an integrated strategy of infection containment in post-lockdown societies around the globe. This paper discusses a number of questions that should be addressed when assessing the ethical challenges of mobile applications for digital contact-tracing of COVID-19: Which safeguards should be designed in the technology? Who should access data? What is a legitimate role for “Big Tech” companies in the development and implementation of these systems? How should cultural and behavioural issues be (...) accounted for in the design of these apps? Should use of these apps be compulsory? What does transparency and ethical oversight mean in this context? We demonstrate that responses to these questions are complex and contingent and argue that if digital contract-tracing is used, then it should be clear that this is on a trial basis and its use should be subject to independent monitoring and evaluation. (shrink)

Can we gain understanding from testifiers who themselves fail to understand? At first glance, this looks counterintuitive. How could a hearer who has no understanding or very poor understanding of a certain subject matter non-accidentally extract items of information relevant to understanding from a speaker’s testimony if the speaker does not understand what she is talking about? This paper shows that, when there are theories or representational devices working as mediators, speakers can intentionally generate understanding in their hearers by engaging (...) in relevant speech acts without understanding the topic of these speech acts themselves. More specifically, I argue that testifiers can intentionally elicit understanding of empirical phenomena in their hearers even if they themselves lack such understanding – granted that they properly understood the epistemic mediators involved. (shrink)

Machine learning algorithms are increasingly used to shape high-stake allocations, sparking research efforts to orient algorithm design towards ideals of justice and fairness. In this research on algorithmic fairness, normative theorizing has primarily focused on identification of “ideally fair” target states. In this paper, we argue that this preoccupation with target states in abstraction from the situated dynamics of deployment is misguided. We propose a framework that takes dynamic trajectories as direct objects of moral appraisal, highlighting three respects in which (...) such trajectories can be subject to evaluation in relation to their temporal dynamics, robustness, and representation. (shrink)