Ever wonder if it is possible to construct a numeric scale for environmental variables, like one does for the temperature? This paper is an attempt to construct one. There are two main parts: section “Statistical Analysis of Variations” presents a general statistical strategy for environmental factor selection. Section “Nonlinear Analytical Geometric Model of Variations” develops an analytical geometric representation of system variations in response to environmental changes. The model is used to quantify the effects of environmental interactions. The paper treats (...) only one-dimensional case, however, the derivation of the case of multiple independent factors follows immediately. The general method developed in this paper may prove applicable to many different fields, such as extensions beyond classical physics, economics, and other sciences. Section “Conclusion” provides an illustration of applications, examples and implications of the results. (shrink)

Ecrivain bilingue, Cioran a conçu deux oeuvres distinctes qui expriment différemment les deux visages de son existence et ses deux patries. Il a mis en relief deux topoï : la Roumanie - lieu de désastre - et la France - espace d'altérité. Il a esquissé la portraiture de l'être, libéré aussi bien qu'entravé par le mot.

During the last decade there has been burgeoning research concerning the ways in which we should think of and apply the concept of responsibility for Artificial Intelligence. Despite this conceptual richness, there is still a lack of consensus regarding what Responsible AI entails on both conceptual and practical levels. The aim of this paper is to connect the ethical dimension of responsibility in Responsible AI with Aristotelian virtue ethics, where notions of context and dianoetic virtues play a grounding role for (...) the concept of moral responsibility. The paper starts by highlighting the important difficulties in assigning responsibility to either technologies themselves or to their developers. Top-down and bottom-up approaches to moral responsibility are then contrasted, as we explore how they could inform debates about Responsible AI. We highlight the limits of the former ethical approaches and build the case for classical Aristotelian virtue ethics. We show that two building blocks of Aristotle’s ethics, dianoetic virtues and the context of actions, although largely ignored in the literature, can shed light on how we could think of moral responsibility for both AI and humans. We end by exploring the practical implications of this particular understanding of moral responsibility along the triadic dimensions of ethics by design, ethics in design and ethics for designers. (shrink)

The “Mind Matters” case study presents an opportunity for students in a wide range of courses such as business ethics, organizational behavior, leadership, marketing, and strategy to recognize and contemplate the difficult planning, the ethical challenges, and the high level of creativity necessary in many business decisions when bringing a new product or service to market. Also, this case study encourages its readers to formulate solutions and provide answers for complexproblems fraught with ethical dilemmas.

The “Mind Matters” case study presents an opportunity for students in a wide range of courses such as business ethics, organizational behavior, leadership, marketing, and strategy to recognize and contemplate the difficult planning, the ethical challenges, and the high level of creativity necessary in many business decisions when bringing a new product or service to market. Also, this case study encourages its readers to formulate solutions and provide answers for complexproblems fraught with ethical dilemmas.

Deep learning AI systems have proven a wide capacity to take over human-related activities such as car driving, medical diagnosing, or elderly care, often displaying behaviour with unpredictable consequences, including negative ones. This has raised the question whether highly autonomous AI may qualify as morally responsible agents. In this article, we develop a set of four conditions that an entity needs to meet in order to be ascribed moral responsibility, by drawing on Aristotelian ethics and contemporary philosophical research. We encode (...) these conditions and generate a flowchart that we call the Moral Responsibility Test. This test can be used as a tool both to evaluate whether an entity is a morally responsible agent and to inform human moral decision-making over the influencing variables of the context of action. We apply the test to the case of Artificial Moral Advisors and conclude that this form of AI cannot qualify as morally responsible agents. We further discuss the implications for the use of AMAs as moral enhancement and show that using AMAs to offload human responsibility is inadequate. We argue instead that AMAs could morally enhance users if they are interpreted as enablers for moral knowledge of the contextual variables surrounding human moral decision-making, with the implication that such a use might actually enlarge human moral responsibility. (shrink)

In this paper, a special type of polysemantic words, that is, words with multiple meanings for the same part of speech, are analyzed under the name of neutrosophic words. These words represent the most dif cult cases for the disambiguation algorithms as they represent the most ambiguous natural language utterances. For approximate their meanings, we developed a semantic representation framework made by means of concepts from neutrosophic theory and entropy measure in which we incorporate sense related data. We show the (...) advantages of the proposed framework in a sentiment classification task. (shrink)

This study explored the influence of healthcare ageism on nurses’ moral distress. Episodic interviews were conducted on 25 Romanian nurses in 2020. Thematic analysis revealed that all moral distress sources reported reflected macro-, meso- and micro-level ageism, benevolent and hostile, self- or other-directed, including stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination of older patients. The COVID-19 pandemic-related ageist measures increased healthcare ageism and transformed nurses’ representations of older patients accordingly. Nurses felt moral conflict both when passively witnessing ageist acts and when perpetrating them (...) to adhere to group norms, highlighting the need to combat ageism for both patients’ and nurses’ well-being. (shrink)

Kant’s early work The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures is typically considered a narrow, technical work still embedded in the tradition of Wolffian logic. I argue instead that it needs to be considered in light of Kant’s developing theory of cognition and his corresponding criticism of the Wolffian single faculty theory. Whereas the mature Kant criticizes the rationalists for misrepresenting the nature of sensibility, the urgent task facing him at this stage seems to have been a proper determination (...) of the nature of the understanding. On the Wolffian framework, the latter is defined in a merely nominal manner, in terms of a generic cognitive task: the distinct representation of the possible. On Kant’s view, however, distinctness entails a capacity to relate representations, which only happens in the act of judgment. Thus, the stated aim of the False Subtlety notwithstanding, the work attempts to reorganize the logical operations around the capacity to judge. In turn, by defining the higher faculty of cognition in terms of an act of relating representations, Kant wants to show that this faculty cannot stem from a power of representation that we share with non-rational animals and must instead rest on a different fundamental power, which at the time he alternatively calls “inner sense” or “consciousness”. (shrink)

This book investigates the link Kant discerned between our experience of beauty and our experience of the moral law. By examining Kant's relation to Greek philosophy, to Plato and Pythagoras, as found in Kant's own writings, the author sheds new light on one the most intriguing and mysterious doctrines of Kant's third Critique.

A substantial guide providing an overview of both physicalism and metaphysical naturalism, reviewing both questions of formulation and justification for both doctrines. Includes a diagnostic strategy for understanding talk of naturalism as a metaphysical thesis.

This article advances research on moral responsibility in organizations by drawing on both philosophical virtue ethics grounded in the Aristotelian tradition and Positive Organizational Scholarship research concerned with virtuousness. The article discusses the very conditions that make possible the realization of virtues and virtuousness, respectively. These conditions ground notions of moral responsibility and the resulting praise or blame on organizational contexts. Thus, we analyze the way individuals and organizations may be ascribed interconnected degrees of retrospective moral responsibility and blame as (...) depending on the interplay between the individual conditions leading to virtue and the organizational conditions leading to virtuousness. Based on this analysis, we develop a two‐level account of moral responsibility in organizations that connects individual and organizational moral responsibility through the concepts of virtue and virtuousness. This is further operationalized into practical guidelines to ascribe degrees of individual and organizational blame, which can be used as a tool by managers, policymakers, or industry regulators. (shrink)

This article will present my autobiographical journey: from communism to capitalism, from the banking system and the pedagogy of the oppressed to problem-posing education. My personal experiences are seen as a way of emigrating internally and as part of the struggle through the process of self-actualisation and self-understanding. In effect, the practice of intellectual freedom shifts from a personal to a civic perspective. My wish for social justice, especially for children from diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds living in a global (...) society, will be considered, with reference to the voluntary work in the Romanian community. Thus, from a postmodern perspective, the autobiographical process is not just about self, but also about the Other. (shrink)

This article will present my autobiographical journey: from communism to capitalism, from the banking system and the pedagogy of the oppressed to problem-posing education. My personal experiences are seen as a way of emigrating internally and as part of the struggle through the process of self-actualisation and self-understanding. In effect, the practice of intellectual freedom shifts from a personal to a civic perspective. My wish for social justice, especially for children from diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds living in a global (...) society, will be considered, with reference to the voluntary work in the Romanian community. Thus, from a postmodern perspective, the autobiographical process is not just about self, but also about the Other. (shrink)

For twenty years, the European Union has qualified as a supranational actor more and more present on the educational scene. Through the European strategies - Lisbon 2010 and Europe 2020 - but also the open method of coordination, an essential mutation has been occurring at the level of Member States. In this article, I intend to analyse in which manner the European Union manages to become a genuine educational actor. Thematic analysis of forty semi-structured interviews conducted with European and international (...) officials demonstrate that the European leaders prepared the European “suitcase” for the first “flight” of 2010 and the second one in 2020. Mainly, this briefcase regroups benchmarks, core competencies, mobility programs and the European qualifications framework. If the European Union is able to “boast” with a national or international political visibility through educational proposals however, an unknown factor remains in this geopolitical equation. (shrink)

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

As Mircea Eliade’s translator and biographer Mac Linscott Rickett states, Eliade involved the whole discipline of the history of religions in the quest for meaning. The paper examines Eliade’s approach of religious documents, with benefits and shortcomings as appraised by some of his American critics, and looks closely at the Eliadean creative hermeneutics and the ambitious mission he envisaged for the discipline he has founded in the United States.

The book aims to provide both theoretical perspectives and practical approaches for teachers interested in transforming the future. Through the approaches of theoretical background but also through the studies of practical application nature, the book can serve as bibliographic support for early education programs.

This article highlights how Internet and new media are experienced by Romanian Seventh-Day Adventist pastors in their ministry. What is the acceptance of Web 2.0 services for neo-Protestant pastors of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, what uses of these technologies they make in their work, what is their mobilization for the appropriation of an innovative culture in the daily pastoral work, how these uses allow them to manage their religious activity, these are the main questions of a survey we conducted in (...) 2016 to shed light on uses of digital technologies by Romanian Seventh-Day Adventist pastors. (shrink)

With this nuanced and interdisciplinary work, political theorist Mihaela Mihai tackles several interrelated questions: How do societies remember histories of systemic violence? Who is excluded from such histories' cast of characters? And what are the political costs of selective remembering in the present? Building on insights from political theory, social epistemology, and feminist and critical race theory, Mihai argues that a double erasure often structures hegemonic narratives of complex violence: of widespread, heterogeneous complicity and of "impure" resistances, not easily (...) subsumed to exceptionalist heroic models. In dialogue with care ethicists and philosophers of art, she then suggests that such narrative reductionism can be disrupted aesthetically through practices of "mnemonic care," that is, through the hermeneutical labor that critical artists deliver—thematically and formally—within communities' space of meaning. Empirically, the book examines both consecrated and marginalized artists who tackled the memory of Vichy France, communist Romania, and apartheid South Africa. Despite their specificities, these contexts present us with an opportunity to analyze similar mnemonic dynamics and to recognize the political impact of dissenting artistic production. Crossing disciplinary boundaries, the book intervenes in debates over collective responsibility, historical injustice, and the aesthetics of violence within political theory, memory studies, social epistemology, and transitional justice. (shrink)

The religiosity of the first settlers shaped the American spirit, the essence of national traits, shared values and ideals that define the American nation. Influential in public discourse in the colonial times and beyond, religious expression has its place in contemporary American political discourse. This article is concerned not so much with the intermingling of religion and politics in theUnited States of Americaas with the religiousness that has permeated political speech. For illustration, we look for religiousness inU. S.presidential inaugural addresses (...) and other speeches to the nation. Inspiring and a good start in our enterprise are Mircea Eliade’s reflections on myth and on religiousness, which is sometimes unconscious and camouflaged without ceasing to be a constant value of humankind, or in his frequent expression, a human universal. (shrink)

Gervais & Fessler's Attitude–Scenario–Emotion (ASE) model is a useful tool for the detection of affect in social media. In this commentary, an addition to the model is proposed – the audience – and its role in the manifestation of affect is discussed using a cyberbullying scenario. The presence of contempt in cyberbullying is also discussed.

This paper is an analysis of comparative multiculturalisms. Starting from the historical reality that both the Roma and the African-Americans were reified through slavery and discriminated against because of their racial visibility, the author analyses the position of the two groups in the Romanian, namely, the American society. The lead of the African-Americans in overcoming the racial stigma is explained by the author through: the opportunities offered by a powerful and consolidated democracy, and by the existence of an elite of (...) the minority group. These factors should be envisaged by Romanian society when trying to make both the minority and the majority cooperate in order to avoid the transformation of the Roma into an under-class group, a great challenge with a view to Romania’s integration into the EU structures. (shrink)

Moshe Idel, Ascension on High in Jewish Mysticism: Pillars, Lines, Ladders Budapest:Central European University Press, 2005.

This conference follows the “traditional” poetics of many Romanian feminist discourses: warning, justification, and body proper. After introducing new proofs about the necessity of feminist discourse in present-day Romania, the conference deploys the body of the conference proper. The conference has two main sections, constructed symmetrically according to the distance/proximity principle, which argue for the specific position of Romanian feminism among contemporary feminisms.

Vehement resentment and indignation are rife in societies emerging from dictatorship or civil conflict. How should institutions deal with these emotions? Arguing for the need to recognize and constructively engage negative public emotions, Mihaela Mihai contributes theoretically to the growing field of transitional justice. Drawing on an extensive philosophical literature and case studies of democratic transitions in South Africa, South America, and Eastern Europe, her book rescues negative emotions from their bad reputation and highlights the obstacles and the opportunities (...) such emotions create for democracy. By valorizing negative emotions, either through the judicial review of transitional justice bills or the criminal trials of victimizers, institutions realize the value of respect and concern for all while contributing to a public culture hospitable to democracy. (shrink)