The study investigates how the territorial community can influence the individual and social well-being of lesbian, gay, bisexual youth and especially the recognition of their feelings and the construction of their own identity as well as their needs to be socially recognized. This research focuses on the experiences of 30 LGB individuals, with a mean age of 25.07 years, living in urban and rural areas of Southern Italy. Focalized open interviews were conducted, and the Grounded Theory Methodology, supported by the (...) Atlas.ti 8.0 software, was used for data analysis. The textual material was first coded, and then codes were grouped into five macro-categories: Freedom of identity expression in the urban and rural context, identity construction and acceptance process, need of aggregation and identification with the LGB community, role of the interpersonal relationship in the process of identity acceptance, socio-cultural context, and LGB psychological well-being. The results showed a condition common to the two contexts that we can define as “ghettoization.” The young LGB is alone in the rural area due to a lack of places and people to identify with and greater social isolation. On the contrary, although there are more opportunities in the urban area, young people feel stigmatized and ghettoized because “their places” are frequented exclusively by the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transexual, queer community. The work will extensively discuss the limitations of the research, future proposals, and the practical implications of the results. (shrink)

This study investigated how young Italian people experienced the period of peak spread of COVID-19 in their country by probing their emotions, thoughts, events, and actions related to interpersonal and community bonds. This approach to the pandemic will highlight social dimensions that characterized contextual interactions from the specific perspective of Community Psychology. The aim was to investigate young people's experiences because they are the most fragile group due to their difficulty staying home and apart from their peers and because they (...) are, at the same time, the most potentially dangerous people due to their urge to gather in groups. The research involved 568 university students, 475 females, and 93 males, with an average age of 21.82 years. The collected data were analyzed with the Grounded Theory Methodology, using the Atlas 8.0 software. From the textual data, representative codes were defined and grouped into 10 categories, which reflect the individuals' prosocial attitudes, behaviors, and values. These categories formed three macro-categories, called: “Collective Dimensions,” which includes Connectedness, Solidarity, Italian-ness, Social Problems, and Collective Mourning; “Prosocial Orientation,” which includes Trust and Hope; and “Collective Values,” which includes Values of Freedom, Respect of Social Rules, and Civic-Mindedness. All these macro-categories are indicative of the shared feelings experienced by Italians during the first time of the pandemic. Further practical implications of these results will be discussed, including a consideration of the risk of developing distress and improving well-being, as well as promoting preventive behaviors. (shrink)

The spread of COVID-19 in Italy resulted in the implementation of a lockdown that obligated the first time the general populace to remain at home for approximately two months. This lockdown interrupted citizens’ professional and educational activities, in addition to closing shops, offices and educational institutions. The resulting changes in people’s daily routines and activities induced unexpected changes in their thoughts, feelings and attitudes, in addition to altering their life perceptions. Consequently, the present study explores how young adults perceived their (...) lives under lockdown during the final week of March 2020, when the reported number of daily coronavirus infections reached its peak in Italy. The research was carried out among 293 university students (234 women and 59 men) with an average age of 20.85 years old (SD = 3.23). The researchers asked participants to describe the emotions, thoughts and experiences that characterized their time under lockdown. The study analyzed specific narratives related to time and space using grounded theory methodology, which was applied using Atlas 8 software, leading to the creation of 68 codes. The study organized these codes into three specific categories: confined in the present, confined in the past, and striving toward one’s goals. Finally, the researchers also created a core-category labeled “continuity of being.” The results showed that the closure of open spaces caused a division in participants’ perceptions of time continuity, with many viewing themselves as feeling fragmented and as living the present in a static and fixed way. Additionally, participants also saw the present as being discontinuous from the past, while, simultaneously, projecting toward the future and the changes it might bring. Finally, this study examined further implications surrounding individual projecting among young people in greater depth. (shrink)

It has been reported by some studies that the desire to be involved in decisions concerning one’s healthcare especially with regard to obtaining informed consent is related to educational status. The purpose of this study, therefore, is to assess the influence of educational status on attitude towards informed consent practice in three south-eastern Nigerian communities.

The phrase "natural kind term" has come into the linguistic and philosophical literature in connection with well-known work of Kripke (1972) and Putnam (1970, 1975a). I use that phrase here in the sense it has acquired from those and subseqnent works on related topics. This is not the transparent sense of the phrase. That is, if I am right in what follows there are words for kinds of things existing in nature which are not natural kind terms in the current (...) sense - e.g. planet, woman, and weed. I use the term "nondescriptional", following Salmon (1981), to mean "lacking a Fregean sense", where a Fregean sense is taken to be a property or group of properties semantically associated with an expression which determines its denotation. I hope that the term "nondescriptional" will be clarified in subsequent discussion, but perhaps a few words about it and its opposite, "descriptional", would be useful here. These terms (as Salmon notes (p.15, n. 11)) should be taken as technical terms. The idea is that descriptional words, of which bachelor is the overwhelmingly favorite example, express a semantic content, or sense, which is what mediates their denotation. Entities fall in their denotation in virtue of possessing the property or properties expressed as their sense. (It is not necessary, however, that this sense be as easily paraphrasable with descriptive synonyms as it is typically held to be in the case of bachelor, or even that it be paraphrasable at all.) In the case of nondescriptional words there is no Fregean sense to mediate the link between word and object. Hence such terms are described by what Salmon, following Kaplan, calls "the theory of direct reference". What it is that does associate such terms with their denotations is another question which will be touched on briefly at the end. I have several aims in this paper. The first is to defend a conservative position on nondescriptionality. I will argue that relatively few natural language words have this property. My other aims are primarily clarificatory. Among the issues I would like to clarify are those connected with the determination of this property and flae explanation of why it exists, its relationship with other properties such as rigid designation and essentiality, and its significance for lexical semantics. The organization of the paper is as follows. The first section identifies the position taken here on the question of which expressions are nondescriptional and provides a general defense of it. The second section is a critical examination of criteria associated with nondescriptionality. In the third section provide further defense for the conservative position, and in the fourth section we turn to related issues in lexical semantics. (shrink)

Ulrich Beck's best selling Risk Society established risk on the sociological agenda. It brought together a wide range of issues centering on environmental, health and personal risk, provided a rallying ground for researchers and activists in a variety of social movements and acted as a reference point for state and local policies in risk management. The Risk Society and Beyond charts the progress of Beck's ideas and traces their evolution. It demonstrates why the issues raised by Beck reverberate widely throughout (...) social theory and covers the new risks that Beck did not foresee, associated with the emergence of new technologies, genetic and cybernetic. The book is unique because it offers both an introduction to the main arguments in Risk Society and develops a range of critical discussions of aspects of this and other works of Beck. (shrink)

Szabó follows Heim in viewing familiarity, rather than uniqueness, as the essence of the definite article, but attempts to derive both familiarity and uniqueness implications pragmatically, assigning a single semantic interpretation to both the definite and indefinite articles. I argue that if there is no semantic distinction between the articles, then there is no way to derive these differences between them pragmatically.

Cette introduction explique la perception, reconnue par Husserl sous le titre de "donation par esquisses". Il s'agit d'opérer une réduction radicale qui va de la critique du néant au monde comme a priori de tout apparaître. A ce monde correspond un sujet dont le sens d'être fait problème puisqu'il est à la fois un moment du monde et en rapport avec la totalité comme telle.

L'oeuvre de Merleau-Ponty est tout entiere commandee par le souci de mettre rigoureusement en oeuvre le mot d'ordre husserlien de retour aux choses memes, ce qui exige, conformement au geste amorce par Husserl dans la Krisis, de reconnaitre l'oeuvre de l'idealisation -c'est-a-dire de l'objectivation- la meme ou elle se fait oublier, afin de la neutraliser. A l'instar de Bergson, pour qui la tache de la philosophie etait d'aller chercher l'experience au-dessus du tournant ou, s'inflechissant dans le sens de l'utilite, elle (...) devient proprement l'experience humaine, pour Merleau-Ponty, la tache de la pensee est de se situer a ce tournant ou l'experience s'accomplit et se voile a la fois dans des productions ou elle se fait proprement humaine, de definir un sens de l'Etre anterieur a la bifurcation du preobjectif et de l'oeuvre idealisante. Le but des recherches est de tenter de clarifier la nature exacte du tournant de l'experience ainsi que le projet phenomenologique merleau-pontien. (shrink)

Source: Author: Remi Chukwudi Okeke, Sylvia Uchenna Agu Local governments in many parts of Africa are yet to be fully accepted as important levels of government. This gives rise to the contradictory scenario whereby such political actors at the central and sub-central levels remain the apostles of centralization on one hand and exponents of democracy as a model of national government on the other hand. Nigeria is the most populous African country. And this marginalization of the local government in the (...) democratic process is prevalent in Nigeria. Invariably, the pervasive effect of this condition, as it negatively affects the availability of dividends of democracy to the African citizen, is worrisome. In the meantime, the continent of Europe is perceived in the study as having possibly taken local government understanding to a model level of local self-governance, through its European Charter of Local Self-Government. Europe is thus, seen in this study as a region in the lead in situating the local government paradigm, within its proper democratic context. The theoretical framework of deliberative democracy is adopted in the study to engage African states to embrace local self-governance as a critical component of democratization. ]]>. (shrink)

Feminists all over the world are united in their contentions on many fronts such as societal norms and conditions that militate against a woman’s expression of her rights and abilities. In as many fronts, they have gained grounds, if not outright victories. However, we observe that among the Igbo women of Eastern Nigeria there is a front which accounts for substantial female deprivation, and which feminists have consistently passed over in their contentions, namely, the feminine cognition also known as epistemology (...) of womanhood. In this paper, using the random sampling method, we have arrived at the conclusion that consciousness oftheir own gender has deprived Igbo women of free expression of their rights and abilities, sometimes as much as constraining societal norms and conditions have done. Consequently, we recommend a conscious adjustment of the epistemology of womanhood among Igbo women. (shrink)

This book presents the most important problems of reference and considers their solution. It presupposes no technical knowledge, presents analyses from first principles, illustrates every stage with examples, and is written with verve and clarity. This is the ideal introduction to reference for students of linguistics and philosophy of language.

This book considers the context of the colonial policies of Britain, Locke's contribution to them, and the importance of these ideas in his theory of property. It also reconsiders the debate about John Locke's influence in America. The book argues that Locke's theory of property must be understood in connection with the philosopher's political concerns, as part of his endeavour to justify the colonialist policies of Lord Shaftesbury's cabinet, with which he was personally associated. The author maintains that traditional scholarship (...) has failed to do justice to Locke by ignoring the implications of contemporary British imperial policy for the interpretation of his political thought. (shrink)

"Le philosophe chilien Javier Agüero Águila a consacré ses recherches à la psychanalyse, à la philosophie française contemporaine - avec une attention toute particulière à la pensée de Jacques Derrida -, à la « philosophie politique » : la violence, la démocratie et les droits de l'homme, l'hospitalité, la communauté et l'extranéité, la marginalité mais encore l'héritage, la mémoire, l'oubli, le pardon, etc. C'est autour du pardon que ce livre s'organise, engageant un débat sur le processus chilien de transition et (...) de démocratisation mis en oeuvre après la dictature militaire de Pinochet" (4ème de couv.). (shrink)

This paper investigates Slovak migrants’ use of new media to build social capital. It draws on data from a pilot study with 36 Slovaks living in the UK, and on content analysis of the main Facebook page for Czechs and Slovaks in the UK. The data suggest that Facebook is used for sharing emotions rather than to build a community and share practical information. While Facebook and Skype are used to maintain preexisting strong ties in the country of origin, face-to-face (...) contact and mobile phones are used to maintain ties within the UK. However, social media do not seem to facilitate the formation of weak ties prior to migration, with face-to-face contact being dominant upon arrival. Transnational migration experience forms a separate dimension within the participants’ identity, independent from social capital. The data are discussed in relation to findings from previous studies about Slovak migrants in the Republic of Ireland. (shrink)

Making room for character -- Pluralism and the community of moral judgment -- A cosmopolitan kingdom of ends --Responsibility and moral competence --Can virtue be taught?: the problem of new moral facts -- Training to autonomy: Kant and the question of moral education -- Bootstrapping -- Rethinking Kant's hedonism -- The scope of moral requirement -- The will and its objects -- Obligatory ends -- Moral improvisation -- Contingency in obligation.

Anerkannt zu werden, ist nicht nur ein menschliches Grundbedurfnis, sondern vermittelt ebenfalls das Gefuhl, in einen sozialen Kontext integriert zu sein.

The book introduces young researchers to phenomenology and the two primary philosophical approaches along with the vocabulary of phenomenology including how to set up the research design and execute the study to include data collection, data analysis, and presentation of findings.

A noção de justiça tem tido sempre uma função importante na história da humanidade e particularmente na Antiguidade. Nas civilizações pré-clássicas, a justiça é sinónimo de ordem e depende da vontade e da legitimidade que é conferida pelos deuses. No mundo clássico, na Odisseia, Homero alude à justiça, embora o poeta que na época arcaica mais se ocupa deste valor tenha sido Hesíodo. Autores posteriores, como Platão, Aristóteles, Epicuro ou Cícero, entre outros, abordam esta questão, ainda que...

This chapter discusses the phenomenology of life. The a priori of correlation characterises the being as what presents itself in its appearances only by being absent from them, as offering itself up to an exploration, in the face of which it continuously steps back or withdraws. Transcendental life must contain something living in order to be able to characterise itself as life. Desire never meets its object except in the mode of the object's own absence, and this is why nothing (...) stops it. The link between desire and the world is the truth of the relation between consciousness and object. The phenomenological dynamic that sees in desire the essence of the subject leads to a dynamic which has a truly ontological scope. In truth, ‘Life’ is the name given to the sense of Being: nothing that claims to be can stand outside life's embrace. (shrink)

Historians and cultural critics face special challenges when treating the nonhuman natural world in the medieval and early modern periods. Their most daunting problem is that in both the visual and written records of the time, nature seems to be both everywhere and nowhere. In the broadest sense, nature was everywhere, for it was vital to human survival. Agriculture, animal husbandry, medicine, and the patterns of human settlement all have their basis in natural settings. Humans also marked personal, community, and (...) seasonal events by natural occurrences and built their cultural explanations around the workings of nature, which formed the unspoken backdrop for every historical event and document of the time. Yet in spite of the ubiquity of nature's continual presence in the physical surroundings and the artistic and literary cultures of these periods, overt discussion of nature is often hard to find. Until the sixteenth century, responses to nature were quite often recorded only in the course of investigating other subjects. In a very real sense, nature went without saying. As a result, modern scholars analyzing the concept of nature in the history of medieval and early modern Europe must often work in deeply interdisciplinary ways. This challenge is deftly handled by the contributors to Engaging with Nature, whose essays provide insights into such topics as concepts of animal/human relationships; environmental and ecological history; medieval hunting; early modern collections of natural objects; the relationship of religion and nature; the rise of science; and the artistic representations of exotic plants and animals produced by Europeans encountering the New World. "As scholars of medieval and early modern Europe increasingly embrace environmental perspectives and animal studies, Engaging with Nature will be recognized as a landmark collection in the field. Taken together, the essays in this volume provide a synthetic overview of critical developments in the many disciplines that are now incorporating the approaches of natural and environmental studies. Each essay represents a substantial advance in scholarship and thought in its particular field. This is an essential collection for literary and cultural historians, and for historians of economy and society, art and ideas." --Rita Copeland, University of Pennsylvania "Engaging with Nature vividly captures the breadth and depth of human interactions with the natural world in premodern Europe. Its multidisciplinary approach generates new questions about how Europeans understood and connected with nature and delves into issues that will interest the specialist and the general reader alike. The book challenges readers to rethink not just the history of human engagement with nature but also the many ways the past has influenced our modern conceptions of ecology and environment." --James Masschaele, Rutgers University "This substantial collection of articles is far more than a response to current obsessions with climate change. It is a thought-provoking demonstration of the inter-disciplinary character of research on medieval history and culture. Students of medieval and early-modern society and economy, literature, philosophy, and art, will find much that is new in these essays, and much to provoke their own thinking about the vexed relationship of human societies with their natural surroundings." --Fredric Cheyette, Emeritus professor of history, Amherst College "Engaging with Nature is a deeply pleasurable volume to read. Using an incredible range of primary and secondary sources, the authors richly realize the methodological promise inherent in the emergent field of medieval and pre-modern studies on the history of nature." --Kathleen Biddick, Temple University "Engaging with Nature is a collection of impeccable scholarship that will make a highly original contribution to the emergent field of medieval and pre-modern studies on the history of nature." --Claire Sponsler, University of Iowa. (shrink)

Whistleblowing is a controversial yet socially significant topic of interest due to its impact on employees, organizations, and society at large. The purpose of this paper is to integrate knowledge of whistleblowing with theoretical advancements in the broader domain of business ethics to propose a novel approach to research and practice engaged in this complex phenomenon. The paper offers a conceptual framework, i.e., the wheel of whistleblowing, that is developed to portray the different features of whistleblowing by applying the whistleblower’s (...) perspective. The framework is based on five “W” questions: Who, What, hoW, Why, and to Whom? The answers to the proposed questions clarify the main aspects of whistleblowing, provide insights into existing studies of the subject, and identify relevant gaps in the literature which, in turn, offer opportunities for future research. (shrink)

The book highlights how well-intentioned white people who might even consider themselves as paragons of antiracism might be unwittingly sustaining an unjust system that they say they want to dismantle.

Being White, Being Good focuses on white complicity and white complicity pedagogy. It examines the shifts in our conceptualization of the subject, language and moral responsibility that are required for understanding white complicity and draws out implications for social justice pedagogy.

In the history of formal semantics, the successful joining of linguistic and philosophical work brought with it some difficult foundational questions concerning the nature of meaning and the nature of knowledge of language in the domain of semantics: questions in part about “what’s in the head” of a competent language-user. This paper, part of a project on the history of formal semantics, revisits the central issues of (Partee, 1979) in a historical context, as a clash between two traditions, Fregean and (...) Chomskyan, a clash that accompanied early work combining Montague’s semantics with Chomskyan syntax. Recent advances in philosophy of mind (from, e.g., Stalnaker and Burge) go a long way towards changing the framework of arguments about “psychological reality” and “competence”, challenging the suppositions on which the original dichotomy rested, thus largely defusing the tension. (shrink)

Barbara Stafford is at the forefront of a growing movement that calls for the humanities to confront the brain’s material realities. In Echo Objects she argues that humanists should seize upon the exciting neuroscientific discoveries that are illuminating the underpinnings of cultural objects. In turn, she contends, brain scientists could enrich their investigations of mental activity by incorporating phenomenological considerations—particularly the intricate ways that images focus intentional behavior and allow us to feel thought. This, then, is a book for (...) both sides of the aisle, a stunningly broad exploration of how complex images—or patterns that compress space and time—make visible the invisible ordering of human consciousness. Stafford demonstrates, for example, how the compound formats of emblems, symbols, collage, and electronic media reveal the brain’s grappling to construct mental objects that are redoubled by prior associations. On the other hand, she compellingly shows that findings in evolutionary biology and the neurosciences are providing profound opportunities for understanding aesthetic conundrums as old and deep-seated as the human urge to imitate, the mapping of inner space, and the role of narrative and nonnarrative representation. As precise in her discussions of firing neurons as she is about the coordinating dynamics of image making, Stafford locates these major transdisciplinary issues at the intersection of art, science, philosophy, and technology. Ultimately, she makes an impassioned plea for a common purpose—for the acknowledgement that, at the most basic level, these separate projects belong to a single investigation. (shrink)

In this article, I trouble the pedagogical practice of comforting discomfort in the social-justice classroom. Is it possible to support white students, for instance, and not comfort them? Is it possible to support white students without recentering the emotional crisis of white students, without disregarding the needs and interests of students of color, and without reproducing the violence that students of color endure? First I address the dangers of comforting discomfort and discuss Robin DiAngelo's notion of white fragility, which has (...) been used to explain the tendency of white people to flee discomfort rather than tarry with it. Employing Erinn Gilson's work on vulnerability, I argue that white fragility is not a weakness but an active performance of invulnerability. I conclude by arguing that developing vulnerability is a counter to white fragility, and that one way such vulnerability can be encouraged is through offering critical hope, which I maintain is a type of support that does not comfort. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty disparaît brusquement en 1961, laissant inachevée une œuvre essentielle qui devait fixer la signification ultime de toutes ses recherches antérieures et qui nourrira de nombreux courants de la philosophie contemporaine. Le propos du présent ouvrage est à la fois d'en tenter une lecture, c'est-à-dire une reconstitution aussi précise que possible s'appuyant de manière privilégiée sur les notes de travail posthumes, et de prendre la mesure de cette " intra-ontologie " que Merleau-Ponty considérait comme l'accomplissement nécessaire de la phénoménologie husserlienne. (...) L'ambition de cette ontologie est d'assumer, c'est-à-dire de dépasser la " diplopie " de l'ontologie occidentale depuis Descartes, la tension entre la reconnaissance d'un ordre brut de l'existence, irréductible aux thématisations de la science, et la nécessité de fonder la connaissance et l'objectivité. Une telle entreprise ne peut aboutir qu'au prix d'un changement de terrain radical. Celui-ci passe d'abord par la dénonciation du " positivisme " ontologique à l'œuvre dans la revendication réaliste du fait, dans la position intellectualiste de l'eidos, comme dans la tentative de dépasser dialectiquement leur opposition. Il s'accomplit sous la forme d'un mouvement régressif qui, de l'expression, fait retour vers le logos originaire en lequel elle s'enracine, mettant ainsi à jour un univers de l'essence sauvage, sol phénoménologique ultime que les notions de Chair et de Dimension visent à thématiser. Celles-ci permettent de penser une unité et une signifiance du monde qui ne compromettent pas sa profondeur originaire, une expression qui n'est pas ordonnée à la positivité d'un eidos ou d'un telos, une phénoménalisation qui excède de toutes parts les phénomènes qu'elle déploie. L'ambition de cet ouvrage est ainsi de tenter de restituer à l'ontologie de Merleau-Ponty la place qui lui revient: par-delà Husserl et Heidegger. (shrink)

We study arithmetic and hyperarithmetic degrees of categoricity. We extend a result of E. Fokina, I. Kalimullin, and R. Miller to show that for every computable ordinal $\alpha$, $\mathbf{0}^{}$ is the degree of categoricity of some computable structure $\mathcal{A}$. We show additionally that for $\alpha$ a computable successor ordinal, every degree $2$-c.e. in and above $\mathbf{0}^{}$ is a degree of categoricity. We further prove that every degree of categoricity is hyperarithmetic and show that the index set of structures with degrees (...) of categoricity is $\Pi_{1}^{1}$-complete. (shrink)