This article gives a practice-based overview of the implementation aspects of Corporate Responsibility. After discussing the success factors for implementing Corporate Responsibility, the article describes a model for implementing Corporate Responsibility. Special attention is given to the success factors in the subsequent phases of implementation (sensitivity to the organizational environment, awareness of core values and clear leadership), to ensure that the most optimal results attainable for the organization can be reached. The implementation-model is clarified by looking at experiences in implementing (...) Corporate Responsibility at Chiquita. (shrink)

This article gives a practice-based overview of the implementation aspects of Corporate Responsibility. After discussing the success factors for implementing Corporate Responsibility, the article describes a model for implementing Corporate Responsibility. Special attention is given to the success factors in the subsequent phases of implementation (sensitivity to the organizational environment, awareness of core values and clear leadership), to ensure that the most optimal results attainable for the organization can be reached. The implementation-model is clarified by looking at experiences in implementing (...) Corporate Responsibility at Chiquita. (shrink)

Hugo Grotius and the Century of Revolution, 1613-1718 is a reconstruction of the way Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) was read and used by English political and religious writers in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Engaging with the reception of all of Grotius's key works and a wide range of topics, the volume has much to say about the search for peace in an age of religious conflict and about the cultural roots of the Enlightenment. Most of all, Marco Barducci (...) aims to deepen our understanding of the connections that made English political thought part of the history of European thought. To this end, it brings together a succinct account of Grotius's own thinking on key topics, mapping these accounts within English debates, to show why his ideas were seen to be relevant at key moments; shows awareness of the possibilities for the misappropriation inherent in reception; and adds something new to our understanding of why seventeenth-century Englishmen argued in the ways that they did. (shrink)

In the theoretical literature on moral responsibility, one sometimes comes across cases of manipulated agents. In cases of this type, the agent is a victim of wholesale manipulation, involving the implantation of various pro-attitudes (desires, values, etc.) along with the deletion of competing pro-attitudes. As a result of this manipulation, the agent ends up performing some action unlike any that she would have performed were it not for the manipulation. These sorts of cases are sometimes thought to motivate historical (...) views of responsibility, on which the agent’s past is relevant to whether she is responsible for a specific action. In a recent paper, Daniel Sharp and David Wasserman bring these theoretical discussions on moral responsibility to bear on practical issues regarding neurological modifications of individuals. After proposing and arguing for a historical view, Sharp and Wasserman offer some insight into how such a view may help us in determining the responsibility of subjects who have undergone Deep Brain Stimulation. This paper aims to join this discussion, by arguing that the correct historical view to be applied will also appeal to the agent’s control over her mental life and the fact that this was bypassed. I conclude with some brief comments on the practical implications of such a historical view. (shrink)

This paper examines the subversive role of statistics paleontology at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. In particular, I will focus on German paleontology and its relationship with statistics. I argue that in paleontology, the quantitative method was questioned and strongly limited by the first decade of the 20th century because, as its opponents noted, when the fossil record is treated statistically, it was found to generate results openly in conflict with the Darwinian theory (...) of evolution. Essentially, statistics questions the gradual mode of evolution and the role of natural selection. The main objections to statistics were addressed during the meetings at the Kaiserlich-Königliche Geologische Reichsanstalt in Vienna in the 1880s. After having introduced the statistical treatment of the fossil record, I will use the works of Charles Léo Lesquereux, Joachim Barrande, and Henry Shaler Williams to compare the objections raised in Vienna with how the statistical treatment of the data worked in practice. Furthermore, I will discuss the criticisms of Melchior Neumayr, one of the leading German opponents of statistical paleontology, to show why, and to what extent, statistics were questioned in Vienna. The final part of this paper considers what paleontologists can derive from a statistical notion of data: the necessity of opening a discussion about the completeness and nature of the paleontological data. The Vienna discussion about which method paleontologists should follow offers an interesting case study in order to understand the epistemic tensions within paleontology surrounding Darwin’s theory as well as the variety of non-Darwinian alternatives that emerged from the statistical treatment of the fossil record at the end of the 19th century. (shrink)

While there is convincing evidence that preverbal human infants and non-human primates can spontaneously represent number, considerable debate surrounds the possibility that such capacity is also present in other animals. Fish show a remarkable ability to discriminate between different numbers of social companions. Previous work has demonstrated that in fish the same set of signature limits that characterize non-verbal numerical systems in primates is present but yet to provide any demonstration that fish can really represent number rather than basing their (...) discrimination on continuous attributes that co-vary with number. In the present work, using the method of 'item by item' presentation, we provide the first evidence that fish are capable of selecting the larger group of social companions relying exclusively on numerical information. In our tests subjects could choose between one large and one small group of companions when permitted to see only one fish at a time. Fish were successful when both small (3 vs. 2) and large numbers (8 vs. 4) were involved and their performance was not affected by the density of the fish or by the overall space occupied by the group. (shrink)

In discussions on moral responsibility for actions, a commonly discussed case is one in which an agent is manipulated into performing some action. On some views, such agents lack responsibility for those actions partly because they issue from attitudes that were acquired in an inappropriate way. In this paper, it is argued that such views are in need of revision. After introducing a new problematic case of a manipulated agent, revisions are offered for specific views. The paper concludes with (...) a discussion of the views in a broader context, as well as some potential implications of the revisions. (shrink)

Between 1909 and 1913, Berlin’s Museum für Naturkunde unearthed more than 225 tons of fossils in former German East Africa and transported them to Berlin. Among them were the bones of Brachiosaurus brancai, which would eventually become the biggest mounted dinosaur in the world. By analyzing the social and communicative strategies that made this expedition possible, this paper aims to reveal several aspects of natural history knowledge production at the end of the long nineteenth century. Using rhetoric, the director (...) of the Geological–Paleontological Museum in Berlin, Wilhelm von Branca, conducted a highly successful campaign to market the dinosaurs in Prussia and to convince public opinion and the Prussian central state of the value of paleontology. He fired the Prussian imagination and took advantage of the competitive urge to emulate American paleontology and industry. This work examines how his public relations strategies shaped the German biological “landscape” of the first decades of the twentieth century. It asks: when and under what conditions did paleontology successfully appeal to the public? How does communication dictate, shape, and constrain the development of a specific epistemic agenda? And what kind of power do the public and money have? (shrink)

In this paper, I try to show that Kripke’s proposed solution to the problem of negative existentials fails. I try to show that Kripke’s proposal fails because it entails that anybody who has good reasons to believe that there are no propositions has also good reasons to believe that he or she does not exist. However, there were philosophers who had good reasons to believe that there are no propositions even though they didn’t have good reasons to believe that (...) they do not exist. I conclude that Kripke’s proposed solution to the problem of negative existentials fails. (shrink)

In recent years, the postulation that deception is necessary for placebos to have an effect on pain relief or increased well-being has come into question. Latest studies have shown that an openly administered mock drug works just as well as a deceptively administered placebo on certain complaints. This open-label placebo effect has primarily been used in the area of pain treatment so far. This study is the first to examine the effect of such placebos on healthy individuals with the use (...) of drinking water. In two experiments, participants were required to use certain specified water bottles for their daily drinking water consumption. At the beginning of Experiment 1, all participants received one bottle of water, which they were asked to refill themselves each day during a 2-week intervention period. In Experiment 2, participants received a new sealed water bottle every day. In both experiments, participants were randomly assigned to one of four groups: no treatment, open-label placebo without rationale, open-label placebo with rationale, and open-label placebo with additional rationale in a suggested relaxed state. We conducted baseline and post-treatment measurements of the subjective perceived physical and mental well-being of the participants. In Experiment 1, only the OPR++ group reported enhanced vitality at the post-treatment level compared to the other groups. In Experiment 2, post-treatment measurements showed improvements for the OPR++ group in the Physical Performance Capability, Mental Performance Capability, Emotional Balance, Overall Recovery, Negative Emotional State, and Overall Stress categories compared to the other groups. Our results support the idea that placebos with an additional rationale in a suggestive relaxed state are more effective than with just a rationale in a normal state. Furthermore, our study shows the tendency that OLP++ in the form of water with health claims may be more effective when the water is given in several sealed bottles separately than in one sealed but refillable bottle. (shrink)

By inserting the dialogue between Einstein, Schlick and Reichenbach into a wider network of debates about the epistemology of geometry, this paper shows that not only did Einstein and Logical Empiricists come to disagree about the role, principled or provisional, played by rods and clocks in General Relativity, but also that in their lifelong interchange, they never clearly identified the problem they were discussing. Einstein’s reflections on geometry can be understood only in the context of his ”measuring rod objection” (...) against Weyl. On the contrary, Logical Empiricists, though carefully analyzing the Einstein–Weyl debate, tried to interpret Einstein’s epistemology of geometry as a continuation of the Helmholtz–Poincaré debate by other means. The origin of the misunderstanding, it is argued, should be found in the failed appreciation of the difference between a “Helmholtzian” and a “Riemannian” tradition. The epistemological problems raised by General Relativity are extraneous to the first tradition and can only be understood in the context of the latter, the philosophical significance of which, however, still needs to be fully explored. (shrink)

The coronavirus disease imposes an unusual risk to the physical and mental health of healthcare workers and thereby to the functioning of healthcare systems during the crisis. This study investigates the clinical knowledge of healthcare workers about COVID-19, their ways of acquiring information, their emotional distress and risk perception, their adherence to preventive guidelines, their changed work situation due to the pandemic, and their perception of how the healthcare system has coped with the pandemic. It is based on a quantitative (...) cross-sectional survey of 185 Swiss healthcare workers directly attending to patients during the pandemic, with 22% of them being assigned to COVID-19-infected patients. The participants answered between 16th June and 15th July 2020, shortly after the first wave of COVID-19 had been overcome and the national government had relaxed its preventive regulations to a great extent. The questionnaire incorporated parts of the “Standard questionnaire on risk perception of an infectious disease outbreak”, which were adapted to the case of COVID-19. Clinical knowledge was lowest regarding the effectiveness of standard hygiene. Knowledge of infectiousness, incubation time, and life-threatening disease progression was higher, however still significantly lower than regarding asymptomatic cases and transmission without physical contact. 70% of the healthcare workers reported considerable emotional distress on at least one of the measured dimensions. They worried significantly more strongly about patients, elderly people, and family members, than about their own health. Adherence to preventive guidelines by the government displayed patterns such that not all guidelines were followed equally. Most of the participants were faced with a lack of protective materials, personnel, structures, processes, and contingency plans. An increase in stress level was the most prevalent among the diverse effects the pandemic had on their work situation. Better medical equipment, better protection for their own mental and physical health, more personnel, more comprehensive information about the symptoms of the disease, and a system of earlier warning were the primary lessons to be learned in view of upcoming waves of the pandemic. (shrink)

Young children interpret some acts performed by adults as normatively governed, that is, as capable of being performed either rightly or wrongly. In previous experiments, children have made this interpretation when adults introduced them to novel acts with normative language (e.g. ‘this is the way it goes’), along with pedagogical cues signaling culturally important information, and with social-pragmatic marking that this action is a token of a familiar type. In the current experiment, we exposed children to novel actions with no (...) normative language, and we systematically varied pedagogical and social-pragmatic cues in an attempt to identify which of them, if either, would lead children to normative interpretations. We found that young 3-year-old children inferred normativity without any normative language and without any pedagogical cues. The only cue they used was adult socialpragmatic marking of the action as familiar, as if it were a token of a well-known type (as opposed to performing it, as if inventing it on the spot). These results suggest that – in the absence of explicit normative language – young children interpret adult actions as normatively governed based mainly on the intentionality (perhaps signaling conventionality) with which they are performed. (shrink)

Some philosophers search for the mark of the cognitive: a set of individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions identifying all instances of cognition. They claim that the mark of the cognitive is needed to steer the development of cognitive science on the right path. Here, I argue that, at least at present, it cannot be provided. First (§2), I identify some of the factors motivating the search for a mark of the cognitive, each yielding a desideratum the mark is supposed (...) to satisfy (§2.1). I then (§2.2) highlight a number of tensions in the literature on the mark of the cognitive, suggesting they’re best resolved by distinguishing two distinct programs. The first program (§3) is that of identifying a mark of the cognitive capturing our everyday notion of cognition. I argue that such a program is bound to fail for a number of reasons: it is not clear whether such an everyday notion exists; and even if it existed, it would not be able to spell out individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for cognition; and even if it were able to spell them out, these conditions won’t satisfy the desiderata a mark of the cognitive should satisfy. The second program is that of identifying a mark of the cognitive spelling out a genuine scientific kind. But the current state of fragmentation of cognitive science, and the fact that it is splintered in a myriad of different research traditions, prevent us from identifying such a kind. And we have no reason to think that these various research traditions will converge, allowing us to identify a single mark. Or so, at least, I will argue in (§4). I then conclude the paper (§5) deflecting an intuitive objection, and exploring some of the consequences of the thesis I have defended. (shrink)

Humans have been using fire for hundreds of millennia, creating an ancestral expansion toward the nocturnal niche. The new adaptive challenges faced at night were recurrent enough to amplify existing psychological variation in our species. Night-time is dangerous and mysterious, so it selects for individuals with higher tendencies for paranoia, risk-taking, and sociability. During night-time, individuals are generally tired and show decreased self-control and increased impulsive behaviors. The lower visibility during night-time favors the partial concealment of identity and opens (...) more opportunities for disinhibition of self-interested behaviors. Indeed, individuals with an evening-oriented chronotype are more paranoid, risk-taking, extraverted, impulsive, promiscuous, and have higher antisocial personality traits. However, under some circumstances, such as respiratory pandemics, the psychobehavioral traits favored by the nocturnal niche might be counter-productive, increasing contagion rates of a disease that can evade the behavioral immune system because its disease cues are often nonexistent or mild. The eveningness epidemiological liability hypothesis presented here suggests that during the COVID-19 pandemic, the evening-oriented psychobehavioral profile can have collectively harmful consequences: there is a clash of core tendencies between the nocturnal chronotype and the recent viral transmission-mitigating safety guidelines and rules. The pandemic safety protocols disrupt much normal social activity, particularly at night when making new social contacts is desired. The SARS-CoV-2 virus is contagious even in presymptomatic and asymptomatic individuals, which enables it to mostly evade our evolved contagious disease avoidance mechanisms. A growing body of research has indirectly shown that individual traits interfering with social distancing and anti-contagion measures are related to those of the nocturnal chronotype. Indeed, some of the social contexts that have been identified as superspreading events occur at night, such as in restaurants, bars, and nightclubs. Furthermore, nocturnal environmental conditions favor the survival of the SARS-CoV-2 virus much longer than daytime conditions. We compare the eveningness epidemiological liability hypothesis with other factors related to non-compliance with pandemic safety protocols, namely sex, age, and life history. Although there is not yet a direct link between the nocturnal chronotype and non-compliance with pandemic safety protocols, security measures and future empirical research should take this crucial evolutionary mismatch and adaptive metaproblem into account, and focus on how to avoid nocturnal individuals becoming superspreaders, offering secure alternatives for nocturnal social activities. (shrink)

Among the accusations raised against Peter of John Olivi, during the Council of Vienne, one of the strongest concerned de ecclesia vocata Magna meretrix. The Council Fathers were concerned about the identification of the great prostitute of the Apocalypse with the Roman See. This interpretation, as we know, was well weighed by Ubertino de Casale, and the pope, Clement the fifth, preferred to leave the question aside and it disappeared in the final texts of the Council.1The recent “double” publication (...) of the Lectura super Apocalipsim2 now permits us reconsider the question of the conciliar fathers of Vienne regarding the identification between the Church and the great prostitute of Apocalypse. In addition, we can... (shrink)

We applied a technique borrowed from the field of bioethics to test whether justice-related factors influence laypersons’ decisions concerning business ethics. In the first experiment, participants judged the acceptability of remuneration policies and in the second that of executive bonuses. In each study, participants judged a set of 36 situations. To create the scenarios, we varied retributive justice—the amount of remuneration; procedural justice—the clarity of the procedure that determined the remuneration; distributive justice—the extent of the distribution of bonus payments amongst (...) employees; and restorative justice—a special compensation for hazardous working conditions or accidents at work. K-means clustering of all 36 judgments revealed four different personal positions in both experiments. One group of people readily accepted all situations. The other three groups’ judgments were mainly a function of distributive justice modulated in different ways by the context determined by the other variables. Furthermore, people conceive of distributive justice as categorical: Acceptability judgments only increase if companies give bonuses to all employees. Granting bonuses to a subset does not increase acceptability. Our results are useful for policy makers and provide business ethics researchers with a novel technique. (shrink)

Visiting a museum and seeing an original artwork can be a special experience. We use a survey and a set of hypothetical questions to explore how such experience would be affected by changes in how the artwork is seen. In a first study, participants imagined that they had travelled to see a painting that they particularly like. They discover that it is impossible to directly see the original painting. Three alternatives are offered: seeing an optical reflection (using a mirror), seeing (...) a video screening (a closed-circuit camera) or seeing a reproduction. In all cases it is made clear that the size, brightness, and resolution will match that of the original. In addition, these options could be within the same room as the original, in the room next door, or in a different building. Results show that physical distance did not affect significantly the responses. However, there was an overall preference for seeing a reproduction as opposed to an optical or digital image. Contrary to the idea that the original is always superior to a copy, many people felt that a direct view of a copy is a preferable experience than an indirect view. The second study was focused directly on the comparison between a mirror and a monitor. Here we highlighted the fact that for the mirror light coming from the mirror originated from the painting. Data were collected in Britain and in China. In both cases there was a clear preference for the mirror over the monitor. (shrink)

This study is embedded in the theoretical framework of the engine model of positive schooling. Accordingly, relations were investigated between students’ endogenous input variables, process variables, and school achievement as an outcome variable. A sample of 300 students completed web-based self-report measures for all key variables. Specific character strengths were substantially positively related to school satisfaction, enjoyment of learning, academic self-efficacy, and/or school achievement. Exploratory mediation analyses supported the basic assumption that processes mediate the relations between character strengths (...) as input variables and school achievement as an outcome variable. The findings underline the benefit of studying inputs, processes, and outcomes simultaneously to better understand the interplay among relevant variables in the context of positive schooling. (shrink)

How to demarcate the political units within which democracy will be practiced? Although recent years have witnessed a steadily increasing academic interest in this question concerning the boundary problem in democratic theory, social contract theory’s potential for solving it has largely been ignored. In fact, contract views are premised on the assumption of a given people and so presuppose what requires legitimization: the existence of a demarcated group of individuals materializing, as it were, from nowhere and whose members agree (...) among themselves to establish a political order. In order to fill this gap in social contract theory, a distinction is made between three kinds of contract views: Lockean political voluntarism, contractarianism, and contractualism. Each of these views can be interpreted in such a way that it offers a democratic solution to the boundary problem. Ultimately, however, a Rawlsian interpretation of the contractualist solution is defended. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe eyes reveal important social messages, such as emotions and whether a person is aroused and interested or bored and fatigued. A growing body of research has also shown that individuals with large pupils are generally evaluated positively by observers, while those with small pupils are perceived negatively. Here, we examined whether observed pupil size influences approach-avoidance tendencies. Participants performed an Approach-Avoidance Task using faces with large and small pupil sizes. Results showed that pupil size influences the accuracy of arm (...) movements. Specifically, individuals were less prone to approach a face with small pupils than a face with large pupils. Conversely, participants were less prone to avoid a face with large pupils than a face with small pupils. Collectively, these findings suggest that perceivers attend to a facial cue – pupil size – when interacting with others. (shrink)

A historical and philosophical reassessment of the impact of Aristotle and early-modern Aristotelianism on the development of Kant’s transcendental philosophy. Kant and Aristotle reassesses the prevailing understanding of Kant as an anti-Aristotelian philosopher. Taking epistemology, logic, and methodology to be the key disciplines through which Kant’s transcendental philosophy stood as an independent form of philosophy, Marco Sgarbi shows that Kant drew important elements of his logic and metaphysical doctrines from Aristotelian ideas that were absent in other philosophical traditions, (...) such as the distinction of matter and form of knowledge, the division of transcendental logic into analytic and dialectic, the theory of categories and schema, and the methodological issues of the architectonic. Drawing from unpublished documents including lectures, catalogues, academic programs, and the Aristotelian-Scholastic handbooks that were officially adopted at Königsberg University where Kant taught, Sgarbi further demonstrates the historical and philosophical importance of Aristotle and Aristotelianism to these disciplines from the late sixteenth century to the first half of the eighteenth century. (shrink)

This work evaluated the structure of dreams in people affected by schizophrenia. The verbal reports of 123 schizophrenic patients were compared with 123 dream reports from a control group. In accordance with the Jungian conceptualization of, dreams as texts, dream reports were assessed using textual analysis processing techniques.Significant differences were found in textual parameters, showing that the dreams reports of schizophrenic patients differ from those of the control group. It is thus possible that schizophrenia probably underlies changes (...) in the oneiric production and dream reports. This work confirms the value of textual analysis in the study of oneiric material. (shrink)

Human adults incline toward moral objectivism but may approach things more relativistically if different cultures are involved. In this study, 4-, 6-, and 9-year-old children (N = 136) witnessed two parties who disagreed about moral matters: a normative judge (e.g., judging that it is wrong to do X) and an antinormative judge (e.g., judging that it is okay to do X). We assessed children’s metaethical judgment, that is, whether they judged that only one party (objectivism) or both parties (relativism) could (...) be right. We found that 9-year-olds, but not younger children, were more likely to judge that both parties could be right when a normative ingroup judge disagreed with an antinormative extraterrestrial judge (with different preferences and background) than when the antinormative judge was another ingroup individual. This effect was not found in a comparison case where parties disagreed about the possibility of different physical laws. These findings suggest that although young children often exhibit moral objectivism, by early school age they begin to temper their objectivism with culturally relative metaethical judgments. (shrink)

Since Darwin proposed that human musicality evolved through sexual selection, empirical evidence has supported intersexual selection as one of the adaptive functions of artistic propensities. However, intrasexual competition has been overlooked. We tested their relative importance by investigating the relationship between the self-perceived talent/expertise in 16 artistic and 2 sports modalities and proxies of intersexual selection and intrasexual competition in heterosexuals. Participants were 82 Brazilian men, 166 Brazilian women, 146 Czech men, and 458 Czech women. Factor analysis revealed five (...) factors: Literary-arts, Visual-arts, Musical-arts, Circus-arts, and Sports. Multivariate General Linear Model showed more associations of the arts to intersexual selection in women and to intrasexual selection in men, and overall more relationships in women than in men. In women, literary and musical-arts were related to elevated inter- and intrasexual selections proxies, visual and circus-arts were related to elevated intersexual selection proxies, and sports were related to intrasexual selection proxies. In men, literary-arts and sports were related to elevated inter- and intrasexual selection proxies, musical-arts were related to intrasexual proxies, and circus-arts were related to intersexual proxies; visual-arts did not have predictors. Although present in both sexes, each sexual selection component has different relative importance in each sex. Artisticality functions to attract and maintain long/short-term partners, and to compete with mating rivals. (shrink)

Cassiodorus, Jordanes, Ennodius and Marcellinus Comes offer quite different accounts of the battle between Ostrogoths and imperial troops which took place at Horreum Margi in 505. A careful study of these sources indicates that Theoderic and Anastasius were uneasy when mentioning the respective allies and that they both tried to hide the other’s involvement in the conflict. Ennodius’ mention of discordia is very important to understand both the causes and the consequences of Horreum Margi. In fact, Anastasius attacked an (...) ally of Theoderic in order to show that the king was not willing to come to the rescue of his foederati. The Ostrogothic quick reaction led to an unforeseen conflict and opened a period of tense relations between Ravenna and Constantinople, whose end, a few years later, was sealed by Cassiodorus’ first letter, a document centered on the concept of concordia. (shrink)

The effort to penetrate the literary surface of Vico’s Autobiography exposes us to questions worthy of the best minds. What could it mean to understand our own lives as the ordered content of our own Ideas? What if, prior to being appropriated by forms imposed upon them from without, our lives possessed their own original and inalienable forms? What if human life were essentially one interpretative ascent to its own native form? What if Ethics coincided with the “writing” in (...) which the original dignity of one’s own life found its truly human vindication? What if human “reading” were in its essence the providential act of civil religion’s God? (shrink)

Offers an extremely bold, far-reaching, and unsuspected thesis in the history of philosophy: Aristotelianism was a dominant movement of the British philosophical landscape, especially in the field of logic, and it had a long survival. British Aristotelian doctrines were strongly empiricist in nature, both in the theory of knowledge and in scientific method; this character marked and influenced further developments in British philosophy at the end of the century, and eventually gave rise to what we now call British empiricism, (...) which is represented by philosophers such as John Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume. Beyond the apparent and explicit criticism of the old Scholastic and Aristotelian philosophy, which has been very well recognized by the scholarship in the twentieth century and which has contributed to the false notion that early modern philosophy emerged as a reaction to Aristotelianism, the present research examines the continuity, the original developments and the impact of Aristotelian doctrines and terminology in logic and epistemology as the background for the rise of empiricism.Without the Aristotelian tradition, without its doctrines, and without its conceptual elaborations, British empiricism would never have been born. The book emphasizes that philosophy is not defined only by the ‘great names’, but also by minor authors, who determine the intellectual milieu from which the canonical names emerge. It considers every single published work of logic between the middle of the sixteenth and the end of the seventeenth century, being acquainted with a number of surviving manuscripts and being well-informed about the best existing scholarship in the field. ​. (shrink)

Background: Although performance on the category fluency test is influenced by many cognitive functions, item-level scoring methods of CFT performance might be a promising way to capture aspects of semantic memory that are less influenced by intervenient abilities. One such approach is based on the calculation of correlation coefficients that quantify the association between item-level features and the serial order with which words are recalled.Methods: We explored the neural underpinnings of 10 of these correlational indices in a sample of 40 (...) healthy adults who completed a classic 1-min CFT and an MRI protocol inclusive of T1-weighted and resting-state fMRI sequences for the evaluation of the default-mode network. Two sets of linear models were defined to test the association between neural maps and each correlational index: a first set in which major demographic and clinical descriptors were controlled for and a second set in which, additionally, all other 9 correlational indices were regressed out.Results: In the analysis of the DMN, ‘SRO-frequency’, ‘SRO-dominance’ and ‘SRO-body-object interaction’ correlational indices were all negatively associated with the anterior portion of the right temporoparietal junction. The ‘SRO-frequency’ correlational index was also negatively associated with the right dorsal anterior cingulate and the ‘SRO-dominance’ correlational index with the right lateral prefrontal cortex. From the second set of models, the ‘SRO-typicality’ correlational index was positively associated with the left entorhinal cortex. No association was found in relation to grey matter maps.Conclusion: The ability to retrieve more difficult words during CFT performance as measured by the correlational indices between SRO and item-level descriptors is associated with DMN expression in regions deputed to attentional reorienting and processing of salience of infrequent stimuli and dominance status. Of all item-level features, typicality appears to be that most closely linked with entorhinal functioning and may thus play a relevant role in assessing its value in testing procedures for early detection of subtle cognitive difficulties in people with suspected Alzheimer’s degeneration. Although exploratory, these findings warrant further investigations in larger cohorts. (shrink)

Thanks to the efforts made in the first decade of the 18th century by Réaumur and, to a lesser extent, by Buffon, glassmaking attracted the attention of Academic French scientists. In the early 1750s, in order to bridge the gap between the protected system of French glass manufactories and the academic thirst for innovation and technological improvement, technical experts with solid scientific backgrounds were charged by the Académie des sciences to supervise the organisation of several royal manufactories. Paul Bosc (...) d'Antic was chosen in 1755 to solve the problems at the mirror manufactory in Saint-Gobain. Bosc d'Antic's career, in its tension between his ambition as an academic author and drive as a technical inventor, and the economic interest of a free entrepreneur, provides an interesting example of the complex and contradictory evolution of the French chemical arts and manufactories during the second half of the 18th century. “Les arts ont entr'eux des rapports plus ou moins marqués, […] mais celui de la verrerie est le fondement de presque tous les autres”. Bosc d'Antic. (shrink)

Over the last few decades climate change has been gaining importance in international scientific and political debates. However, the social sciences, especially in Latin America, have only lately become interested in the subject and their approach is still vague. Scientific understanding of global environmental change and the process of designing public policies to face them are characterized by their complexity as well as by epistemic and normative uncertainties. This makes it necessary to problematize the way in which research efforts understand (...) ‘the social’ of climate change. How do ‘the climate’ and ‘the social’ interpenetrate as scientific objects? What does the resulting field look like? Is the combination capable of promoting reflexivity and collaboration on the issue, or does it merely become dispersed with diffuse boundaries? Our paper seeks to answer these and other related questions using Chile as a case study and examining peer-reviewed scientific research on the topic. By combining in-depth qualitative content analysis of each paper with a statistical meta-analysis, we were able to: characterize the key content and forms of such literature; identify divisions and patterns within it; and, discuss some factors and trends that may help explain these. We conclude that the literature displays two competing trends: while it is inclined to become fragmented beyond the scope of the ‘mitigation’ black box, it also tends to cluster along the lines of methodological distinctions traditionally contested within the social sciences. This, in turn, highlights the persistence of disciplinary divisions within an allegedly interdisciplinary field. (shrink)

This article argues that the current opposition to globalization is not a structural side effect of economic integration. Instead of assuming that globalization generates resistance, it stresses the political and interpretive processes that shape collective action. It substantiates this claim by studying the rise of an antiglobalization social movement organization called ATTAC in France. It holds that ATTAC's emergence is the product of political entrepreneurs whose actions were constrained by the ideational and organizational legacies of previous contentious episodes, particularly (...) the December 1995 strikes. Finally, it contends that ATTAC's success stems in part from its ability to produce a hybrid discourse that marries state interventionism with participatory politics. (shrink)

We aimed to characterize the age of onset of training, age at menarche, menstrual periodicity, and performance perception during the menstrual cycle and examined the impact of these reproductive variables on body composition, morphology, and body weight satisfaction in Brazilian elite futsal players. The study consisted of 115 female Brazilian elite futsal players from the top national teams. Data were collected during the twentieth Women’s Brazil Futsal Cup. Players were interviewed and self-reported their age of onset of training, (...) age at menarche, menstrual periodicity, and the menstrual period, where they performed best. We also asked for what they considered to be their ideal body weight as well as information related to their training. Subsequently, anthropometric measurements were performed to estimate the body composition and determine morphological characteristics. Fifty-nine players were postmenarche-trained and 52 were premenarche-trained. Eighteen, 65, and 28 were classified as early, normal, and late menarche, respectively. Only 11 and 1 had irregular menstrual cycles and were amenorrheic, respectively. Seventy-three, 23, and 9 reported that their game performance was the best at the follicular phase, menses, and luteal phase of the menstrual cycle, respectively. No associations between the four reproductive-related variables were found. Postmenarche-trained players had significant lower age at menarche and higher percentage body fat. The somatotype profile registered lower ectomorphy rate for the postmenarche-trained participants after controlling for covariates. Early menarche group presented higher sum of six skinfold thickness and endomorphy rate compared to normal and late menarche groups. No differences were found when menstrual periodicity groups and best performance groups were compared, except for higher femur width in the regular menstrual cycle group compared to the irregular one. The association between body weight satisfaction and the four reproductive-related variables were not observed. Premenarche-trained Brazilian elite futsal players had the menarche later than the postmenarche-trained athletes. Most of the participants had menarche age classified as “normal,” presented “regular” menstrual cycles and perceived to perform better during the follicular phase of the menstrual cycle. (shrink)

In this event-related potential study a masking technique that prevents conscious perception of words and non-words through attentional distraction was used to reveal the temporal dynamics of word processing under non-conscious and conscious conditions. In the non-conscious condition, ERP responses differed between masked words and non-words from 112 to 160 ms after stimulus-onset over posterior brain areas. The early onset of the word–non-word differences was compatible with previous studies that reported non-conscious access to orthographic information within this time period. Moreover, (...) source localisations provided evidence for automatic activation of prelexical phonological information, whereas no evidence for non-conscious semantic processing was found. When subjects were informed about the masking technique, lexical differences occurred at later time intervals, suggesting conscious access to additional word related information. These results indicate that early visual word processing does not depend entirely on attentional resources, but that non-conscious processing probably is restricted to rather lower-level linguistic information. (shrink)

Previous research has documented that type 2 diabetes mellitus is associated with cognitive impairment. Psychological variables were repeatedly investigated to understand why T2DM patients are poorly active, despite standards of medical care recommends performing aerobic and resistance exercise regularly and reducing the amount of time spent sitting. This exploratory study aims to investigate how affective variables as thoughts, feelings, and individuals’ stage of exercise adoption can modulate low cognitive performances during an experimental procedure based on exercise. The Exercise Thoughts (...) Questionnaire, Exercise-Induced Feeling Scale, and Physical Activity Stage of Change were administered to a sample of 12 T2DM patients. The Bivalent Shape Task alone, BST with exercise [control exercise recovery + BST], and BST with metaboreflex [post-exercise muscle ischemia + BST] were used as mental task, and response time to congruent, incongruent, and neutral stimuli was recorded. Concomitant cerebral oxygenation was evaluated by near-infrared spectroscopy. As expected, T2DM patients performed significantly better when the stimulus was presented in congruent trials. In the CER + BST session, T2DM patients showed longer reaction time to incongruent trials than in the PEMI + BST and BST alone sessions. Positive feelings toward exercise seem to modulate cognitive performances in high challenging task only if T2DM patients were conscious to play exercise. These results could provide some insights for health intervention targeting exercise for patients with T2DM in order to enhance cognitive performances. (shrink)

The lockdown imposed in Italy to reduce the spread of COVID-19 posited unusual challenges to people practicing sports and physical activities. The rebooting of activities highlighted the need to cope with new behaviors and routines, such as wearing a face mask while exercising. We conducted a web-based survey in Italy at the start of physical activities’ rebooting, to investigate how people reacted to the new norms. Participants completed the questionnaires assessing insomnia, regulatory self-efficacy, optimism, mood states, and mental toughness. Age, (...) gender, and environment were assumed as design variables. Results showed that in outdoor activities, the younger females as compared to the older manifest less regulatory self-efficacy, while the younger males manifest more regulatory self-efficacy than the older. In indoor activities, a reversed pattern of regulatory-self-efficacy was observed. Regarding life orientation, younger participants showed less optimism and positive expectation for the future and seem to be more exposed to the unexpected effects of the restrictions: they showed more sleep disturbances, confusion, depression, anger, and fatigue and less vigor and mental toughness than older participants. An understanding of the psychological implications of the rebooting phase can support the enactment of more appropriate behaviors to practice sports and physical activities when living at the time of the coronavirus. (shrink)

Convivo is a VoIP system designed to provide reliable voice communication for poor quality networks, especially those found in rural areas of the developing world. Convivo introduces an original approach to maintain voice communication interaction in the presence of poor network performance: an Interface‐ Adaptation mechanism that adjusts the user interface to reduce the impact of high latency and low bandwidth networks. Interface modes facilitate turn taking for high latency connections, and help to sustain voice communication even with extremely low (...) bandwidth or high error rates. An evaluation of the system, conducted in a rural community in the Dominican Republic, found that Interface‐Adaptation helped users to maintain voice communication interaction as network performance degrades. Transitions from full duplex to voice messaging were found particularly valuable. Initial results suggest that as users get more experience with the application they would like to manually control transitions based on feedback provided by the application and their own perceived voice quality. (shrink)

We investigated motor resonance in children using a priming paradigm. Participants were asked to judge the weight of an object shortly primed by a hand in an action-related posture or a non action-related one . The hand prime could belong to a child or to an adult. We found faster response times when the object was preceded by a grasp hand posture . More crucially, participants were faster when the prime was a child’s hand, suggesting that it could (...) belong to their body schema, particularly when the child’s hand was followed by a light object . A control experiment helped us to clarify the role of the hand prime. To our knowledge this is the first behavioral evidence of motor simulation and motor resonance in children. Implications of the results for the development of the sense of body ownership and for conceptual development are discussed. (shrink)

By the end of the 1820s, an innovative product was introduced in the northern Italian editorial market: technical and popular periodicals offering “useful knowledge” to a larger audience composed of members of the provincial middle-class, clergymen, and modestly educated craftsmen. By examining their medical content, this paper shows that popularisation did not merely entail disseminating a set of stable, unanimous, and trustworthy medical doctrines; rather, it represented a crucial step in the making of science during a period in which medical (...) theories were still various and contradictory. Moreover, it demonstrates that the environmental and preventative approach to disease, which these medical contributors often employed, did reflect recent developments in chemical or physical knowledge and responded to pedagogical and informative goals; but it mostly served to affirm the social usefulness of medicine and the legitimacy of health professionals' participation in determining how to regulate more general epidemiologic, social, and political issues. (shrink)

Workplace Incivility (WI) occurs worldwide and has negative consequences on individuals and organizations. Valid and comprehensive instruments have been used, specifically in English speaking countries, to measure such adverse process at work, but it is not available a validated instrument for research carried out in Spanish speaking countries. In this study we aim to test the psychometric properties of the Matthews and Ritter’s four-item Workplace Incivility Scale (2016) with Spanish workers (N= 407) from different sectors. Participants’ mean age was 38.73 (...) (SD= 10.45) years old and the percentage of female employees was 59.2%. Confirmatory factor analysis using AMOS 19.0 was carried out, presenting a good fit. The internal consistency, convergent and concurrent validity of the scale were examined. Results show good scale reliability and expected high correlations with social undermining. Moreover, the scale related to propensity to leave a job, job satisfaction, and psychological well-being in the expected way. After configural invariance across groups was established, testing for metric invariance and scalar invariance was performed. Considering Δχ² and ΔCFI tests for two nested models, the 4-item scale was invariant when the employment status is considered (permanent vs temporal, full-time vs part-time and supervisor vs non supervisors). Overall, our findings showed good psychometric properties of the shorter version of the Workplace Incivility Scale in Spain. Theoretical and practical implications of this study are discussed. (shrink)

Testing is an effective learning method, and it is the basis of mobile quiz apps. Quiz apps have the potential to facilitate remote and self-regulated learning. In this context, automatized feedback plays a crucial role. In two experimental studies, we examined the effects of two feedback types of quiz apps on performance, namely, the standard corrective feedback of quiz apps and a feedback that incorporates additional information related to the correct response option. We realized a controlled lab setting (n= 68, (...) Study 1) and an unsupervised mobile setting (n= 150, Study 2). In the learning phase, participants used the quiz app and received feedback. They also completed a subsequent test as well as a follow-up test 1 week later by using the same quiz app. Irrespective of feedback type and setting, cognitive outcomes (quiz scores) and metacognitive outcomes (response certainty) increased similarly in the short term and long term. Feedback effects were not moderated by participants' overall response certainty during learning, their prior knowledge, and the difficulty of quiz items. Moreover, we found that participants perceived the quiz app to be similarly attractive, interesting, and enjoyable in both feedback conditions and that they spent slightly more time to process quiz items in the lab setting. We discuss these results in detail, including the role of moderating and mediating factors and prospects for further research and practice. Overall, our results underline that quiz apps are useful and effective tools that can support the acquisition and retention of semantic knowledge in different learning settings. (shrink)

In his 1916 review paper on general relativity, Einstein made the often-quoted oracular remark that all physical measurements amount to a determination of coincidences, like the coincidence of a pointer with a mark on a scale. This argument, which was meant to express the requirement of general covariance, immediately gained great resonance. Philosophers such as Schlick found that it expressed the novelty of general relativity, but the mathematician Kretschmann deemed it as trivial and valid in all spacetime theories. With the (...) relevant exception of the physicists of Leiden (Ehrenfest, Lorentz, de Sitter, and Nordström), who were in epistolary contact with Einstein, the motivations behind the point-coincidence remark were not fully understood. Only at the turn of the 1960s did Bergmann (Einstein’s former assistant in Princeton) start to use the term ‘coincidence’ in a way that was much closer to Einstein’s intentions. In the 1980s, Stachel, projecting Bergmann’s analysis onto his historical work on Einstein’s correspondence, was able to show that what he started to call ‘the point-coincidence argument’ was nothing but Einstein’s answer to the infamous ‘hole argument’. The latter has enjoyed enormous popularity in the following decades, reshaping the philosophical debate on spacetime theories. The point-coincidence argument did not receive comparable attention. By reconstructing the history of the argument and its reception, this paper argues that this disparity of treatment is not justified. This paper will also show that the notion that only coincidences are observable in physics marks every critical step of Einstein’s struggle with the meaning of coordinates in physics. (shrink)

Machiavelli is the first modern political thinker who pays great attention to the magistracy of dictatorship. “Dictatorial authority,” as he puts it, is fundamental to the survival and prosperity of republics: It is the magistracy, the “ordinary mode,” to which they turn to deal with “extraordinary accidents,” political and military emergencies. Machiavelli's gaze is cast both on the Ancient and the Modern world: Although he concentrates on the Roman magistracy, he also pays attention to magistracies of the modern world that (...) were in some way similar, such as the Council of the Ten in the Republic of Venice. In my paper, I will attempt to reconstruct the essential points of Machiavelli's discussion on dictatorship; in the concluding remarks, I will briefly tackle the more general question of the relationship between politics and law in his work as a whole. (shrink)

In the philosophical and cognitive literature, the word ‘intention’ has been used with a variety of meanings which occasionally have been explicitly distinguished. I claim that an important cause of this polysemy is the fact that intentions are complex entities, endowed with an internal structure, and that sometimes different theories in the field are erroneously presented as if they were in conflict with each other, while they in fact just focus on different aspects of the phenomenon. The debate between (...) Gallese’s embodied simulation theory and Csibra and Gergely’s teleological stance hypothesis is discussed as a case in point, and some misunderstandings occurring in that debate are analyzed. The thesis that intentions are complex entities is argued for by shedding light on the following aspects of intentions: conscious control; perceptual (and not only motoric) representations of end-states; attributions of value to those representations; appreciation of the rational relationships between means and ends. (shrink)

The position of the extreme right within the Italian political system has been modified since 1993. A larger political space became available to the rightwing parties when some of the pillars of the "First Republic" governmental coalitions collapsed. The most representative party of this area, the MSI, is experiencing an ideological and organizational change which started by the assumption of the new label "Alleanza Nazionale". In this article we try to explain why the shape and logic of the clientelistic and (...) partitocratie Italian system can be hold responsible for the success of the MSI and to discuss some organizational, ideological and political aspects of its change into the AN. We also analyze the chances of success for the movements of the populist Radical Right, whose strategy is mainly related to the emergence of the immigration cleavage, in a country were the dissatisfaction for the working of democracy is still widespread. (shrink)

Belief Revision addresses the problem of rationally incorporating pieces of new information into an agent’s belief state. In the AGM paradigm, the most used framework in Belief Revision, primacy is given to the new information, which is fully incorporated into the agent’s belief state. However, in real situations, one may want to reject the new information or only accept a part of it. A constructive model called Selective Revision was proposed to meet this need but, as in the AGM framework, (...) focused on belief sets. In this paper we adapt the selective revision operators, that were proposed for belief sets, to the belief base context, obtaining a model in which an agent’s epistemic state is represented by a belief base and that allows the acceptance of only part of the new information. We present several representation theorems for selective base revision operators based on different base revision operators. (shrink)

In late February and early March 2020, Italy became the European epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite increasingly stringent containment measures enforced by the government, the health system faced an enormous pressure, and extraordinary efforts were made in order to increase overall hospital beds’ availability and especially ICU capacity. Nevertheless, the hardest-hit hospitals in Northern Italy experienced a shortage of ICU beds and resources that led to hard allocating choices. At the beginning of March 2020, the Italian Society of (...) Anesthesia, Analgesia, Resuscitation, and Intensive Care issued recommendations aimed at supporting physicians in prioritizing patients when the number of critically ill patients overwhelm the capacity of ICUs. One motivating concern for the SIAARTI guidance was that, if no balanced and consistent allocation procedures were applied to prioritize patients, there would be a concrete risk for unfair choices, and that the prevalent “first come, first served” principle would lead to many avoidable deaths. Among the drivers of decision for admission to ICUs, age, comorbidities, and preexisting functional status were included. The recommendations were criticized as ageist and potentially discriminatory against elderly patients. Looking forward to the next steps, the Italian experience can be relevant to other parts of the world that are yet to see a significant surge of COVID-19: the need for transparent triage criteria and commonly shared values give the Italian recommendations even greater legitimacy. (shrink)

Data-driven algorithms are currently deployed in several fields, leading to a rapid increase in the importance algorithms have in decision-making processes. Over the last years, several instances of discrimination by algorithms were observed. A new branch of research emerged to examine the concept of “algorithmic fairness.” No consensus currently exists on a single operationalization of fairness, although causal-based definitions are arguably more aligned with the human conception of fairness. The aim of this article is to investigate the degree of (...) this alignment in a case study inspired by a recent ruling of an Italian court on the reputational-ranking algorithm used by a food delivery platform. I relied on the documentation of the legal dispute to discuss the applicability, intuitiveness and appropriateness of causal models in evaluating fairness, with a specific focus on a causal-based fairness definition called “counterfactual fairness.” I first describe the details of the dispute and the arguments presented to the court, as well as the court’s final decision, to establish the context of the case study. Then, I translate the dispute into a formal simplified problem using a causal diagram, which represents the main aspects of the data generation process in the case study. I identify the criteria used by the court in ruling that the algorithm was unfair and compare them with the counterfactual fairness definition. The definition of counterfactual fairness was found to be well aligned with the human conception of fairness in this case study, using the court order rationale as a gold standard. (shrink)

This translation is of an article in the April–June 1948 issue of the Bulletin de la société française de philosophie (42, no. 3: 49–91). That article consists primarily of a lecture that Sartre had presented to La Société Française de Philosophie on 2 June 1947 in which he provided an overview of some of his main points in Being and Nothingness, with particular emphasis on its Introduction (especially its third section, ‘The Pre-Reflective Cogito and the Being of the Percipere’) as (...) well as on the first chapter of its second part, that is, “The Immediate Structures of the For-Itself” (covering content in three of its five sub-sections: I, III and IV). The title of the lecture thus does not wholly encompass the subjects that are discussed in it, although it may well be said to reflect its central theme (even in a literal sense, as the positioning of the hypothetically demarcated ‘Section III’ in the Table of Contents above shows). In addition to the presentation, the article in the Bulletin is preceded by a brief introductory statement – seemingly written by Sartre himself1 – which functions largely as a sort of ‘extended abstract’ for the talk (although not all the points in the introduction are covered in the presentation), and is followed by a transcript of the discussion that took place after the presentation between Sartre and some of the reputable scholars who were in attendance (i.e. a ‘question and answer’ session). (shrink)

Abstract The aim of the paper is to reassess the role of British Aristotelianism within the history of early modern logic between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as a crucial moment of cultural transition from the model of humanistic rhetoric and dialectic to that of facultative logic, that is, a logic which concerns the study of the cognitive powers of the mind. The paper shows that there is a special connection between Paduan Aristotelianism and British empiricism, through the mediation of (...) British Aristotelianism. British Aristotelians took the ideas of the Paduan Aristotelian tradition and carried them to an extreme, gradually removing them from the original Aristotelian context in which they were grounded and developing what would later become the fundamental ideas of British empiricism. (shrink)