“HTA is a multidisciplinary process that summarizes information about the medical, social, economic and ethical issues related to the use of a health technology in a systematic, transparent, unbiased, robust manner. Its aim is to inform the formulation of safe, effective, health policies that are patient focused, and seek to achieve best value” (EUnetHTA 2007). Even though the assessment of ethical aspects of a health technology is listed as one of the objectives of a HTA process, in practice, the integration (...) of these dimensions into reports remains limited. The article is focused on four points: 1. the HTA concept; 2. the difficult HTA-ethics relationship; 3. the ethical issues in HTA; 4. the methods for integrating ethical analysis into HTA. (shrink)

Simondon adopts some concepts of social psychology as ‘in group’ and ‘out group’, namely from Kurt Lewin and Gordon Allport, that allow him to describe the fundamental processes shaping the domain of collective individuation, and to challenge Bergson’s distinction between a ‘closed’ community and an ‘open’ society. Reconstructing Simondon’s sources is necessary to understand how he tries to provide an analysis of the social system without presupposing a given anthropology, but rather exploring different perspectives on the human/nature threshold through the (...) concept of transindividual. In his study of the social system Simondon progressively gives conceptual shape to the processes he calls transindividual thanks to the ontogenetic analysis of the phenomena of belief, work and language. In all these domains, a ‘basic community’ emerges just over the threshold of the biological group, where the structural ambivalence of all collective processes as simultaneously closed and open becomes clear. That is why Simondon does not present the concept of the transindividual as a solution to the epistemological problem of psychic and collective individuation, but rather as the ‘field’ in which a whole series of social, biological and technical dimensions can be made converge towards a science of anthropogenic processes. (shrink)

Citizen science models of public participation in scientific research represent a growing area of opportunity for health and biomedical research, as well as new impetus for more collaborative forms of engagement in large-scale research. However, this also surfaces a variety of ethical issues that both fall outside of and build upon the standard human subjects concerns in bioethics. This article provides background on citizen science, examples of current projects in the field, and discussion of established and emerging ethical issues for (...) citizen science in health and biomedical research. (shrink)

This paper explores an idea of Stoic descent that is largely neglected nowadays, the idea that an argument is valid when the conditional formed by the conjunction of its premises as antecedent and its conclusion as consequent is true. As it will be argued, once some basic features of our naıve understanding of validity are properly spelled out, and a suitable account of conditionals is adopted, the equivalence between valid arguments and true conditionals makes perfect sense. The account of validity (...) outlined here, which displays one coherent way to articulate the Stoic intuition, accords with standard formal treatments of deductive validity and encompasses an independently grounded characterization of inductive validity. (shrink)

In the current debate on theodicy, the problem of animal suffering is becoming increasingly relevant, as demonstrated by some recent books devoted to this topic. Such a problem is particularly challenging for a theistic theodicy, as its traditional arguments do not seem able to deal with it. In the first instance, the article aims to provide a brief overview of the main arguments sustained by theists regarding animal suffering, and secondly to provide an evaluation of such arguments which might be (...) useful for further research on this topic. (shrink)

The essay discusses Donald Davidson’s concept of anomalous monism in the framework of Husserlian phenomenology. It develops in four stages. Section 1 is devoted to a critical presentation of the argument for anomalous monism. Section 2 succinctly examines those Husserlian notions that best provide the ground for a discussion parallel to Davidson’s. In Sect. 3, the aporetic status of “mental causation” is analyzed by providing a genetic-phenomenological account of efficient causation. Section 4 draws some general conclusions concerning the kind of (...) efficaciousness that must be attributed to consciousness and discusses the sense in which anomalous monism can be defended in a phenomenological framework, but not in a naturalistic one. (shrink)

The article investigates Dostoevsky’s juridical discourse and demonstrates that the apologist of the Russian soul had a genuinely European mind. In his novel The Idiot in particular, in which the death penalty and imprisonment are explored, Dostoevsky unmasks—more radically even than Victor Hugo—the supposedly civilised and lenient forms of modern criminal justice. Dostoevsky’s criticism is ahead of its time; his arguments resemble those subsequently put forward by Foucault. A comparison with Anatoly Pristavkin’s report on post-Communist crime and jurisdiction underscores the (...) topicality of these reflections. (shrink)

Modeling law search and retrieval as prediction problems has recently emerged as a predominant approach in law intelligence. Focusing on the law article retrieval task, we present a deep learning framework named LamBERTa, which is designed for civil-law codes, and specifically trained on the Italian civil code. To our knowledge, this is the first study proposing an advanced approach to law article prediction for the Italian legal system based on a BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) learning framework, which has (...) recently attracted increased attention among deep learning approaches, showing outstanding effectiveness in several natural language processing and learning tasks. We define LamBERTa models by fine-tuning an Italian pre-trained BERT on the Italian civil code or its portions, for law article retrieval as a classification task. One key aspect of our LamBERTa framework is that we conceived it to address an extreme classification scenario, which is characterized by a high number of classes, the few-shot learning problem, and the lack of test query benchmarks for Italian legal prediction tasks. To solve such issues, we define different methods for the unsupervised labeling of the law articles, which can in principle be applied to any law article code system. We provide insights into the explainability and interpretability of our LamBERTa models, and we present an extensive experimental analysis over query sets of different type, for single-label as well as multi-label evaluation tasks. Empirical evidence has shown the effectiveness of LamBERTa, and also its superiority against widely used deep-learning text classifiers and a few-shot learner conceived for an attribute-aware prediction task. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the issue of how our personal life is given to us in experience as a whole to be actively shaped and determined. I examine in detail Husserl’s analysis of the kind of experience responsible for this achievement, which he terms Überschau and which thus far has never been addressed by scholars of phenomenology. First, I locate Überschau in the context of self-determination and highlight the difference between the unthematic pre-givenness of life in the phenomenon of (...) self-awareness and the actual, i.e. thematic givenness of life in acts of Überschau. Second, I contextualize Husserl’s discovery of Überschau in his analyses of ethical life and the possibility of a universal epoché. I argue that for Husserl the very possibility of ethical life and of phenomenology itself rest on the totalizing apprehension of one’s life rendered possible by Überschau. In the third section I spell out the essential characteristics of Überschau by contrasting this peculiar kind of consciousness with reproductive forms of consciousness such as recollection and expectation, which otherwise might be easily conflated with Überschau. In section four I reply to a possible objection to the very possibility of Überschau based on the consideration of the infinitely open stream of time-consciousness. I argue that the possibility of Überschau is tightly connected with the egological nature of consciousness as understood by Husserl. The ego does not coincide with its own conscious acts and thus enjoys a special vantage point on the totality of its own life. To conclude, I advance a speculative suggestion about the phenomenological origin of Überschau in the structure of self-awareness. This opens up a variety of possible lines of research that would connect Husserl with philosophers such as Augustine or Heidegger who are more immediately associated with the issue of personal life and its unity or lack thereof. (shrink)

This is the first complete critical commentary of Husserl s seminal work Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy. Leading international scholars offer a close reading, examining arguments and phenomenological descriptions, connecting them to Husserl s earlier and later works, and engaging important secondary sources. The book will be invaluable reading for scholars and students of phenomenology and 20th century philosophy.".

Clinical Ethics, Ahead of Print. ObjectiveThe purpose of this study was to assess if a relationship existed between audiologists’ perceptions of moral distress, occupational wellbeing, and patient-practitioner orientation.DesignThe Moral Distress Thermometer, Health and Safety Executive Management Standards Indicator Tool and Patient-Practitioner Orientation Scale was sent out to all audiologists registered with the professional body Audiology Australia.Study sample: A total of 43 audiologists completed the questionnaires.ResultsUsing a multiple linear regression model there was no evidence of a relationship between patient-practitioner orientation and (...) either moral distress or occupational wellbeing. However, an association between higher moral distress and lower occupational wellbeing was demonstrated. The occupational wellbeing subscales of ‘managerial support’, ‘peer support’, ‘relationships’, ‘role’, and ‘change’ were strongly associated with poorer scores on moral distress.ConclusionFor our sample of audiologists, ethical conflict appeared to be linked to reduced job satisfaction. There is a need to consider ways of providing supportive organisational structures in which ethical conflicts can be openly discussed and negotiated in order to improve occupational wellbeing in the profession. (shrink)

This essay explores the connection between representation and explanation in the sciences. I suggest that scientific representation schemes be viewed as pragmatic tools for acquiring the sort of articulated awareness that is the hallmark of nontrivial knowledge. Crystal field theory in chemistry illustrates this perspective. Certain representations achieve the status of being paradigmatically explanatory, thereby shaping models of intelligibility. In turn, these explanatory preferences serve largely to define and differentiate disciplinary communities by implicitly endorsing particular epistemic aims and values. In (...) this way, the pragmatic nature of explanatory discourse effectively grants its intellectual utility. (shrink)

There are essentially two ways to develop the Peircean idea that future contingents are all false. One is to provide a quantificational semantics for "will," as is usually done. The other is to define a quantificational postsemantics based on a linear semantics for "will." As we will suggest, the second option, although less conventional, is more plausible than the first in some crucial respects. The postsemantic approach overcomes three major troubles that have been raised in connection with Peirceanism: the apparent (...) scopelessness of "will" with respect to negation, the failure of Future Excluded Middle, and the so-called zero credence problem. (shrink)

According to a traditional view, logical validity consists in necessary truth preservation. Such an account has been argued to carry an apparent commitment to a unique property of truth to be preserved from premises to conclusion. Recent discussions, however, have concluded that if the metaphor of truth preservation is carefully unpacked, no need for a unique property is there. All is needed is that certain structural relations among instantiations of truth properties hold. Against this view, we argue that a unique (...) general truth property is indeed required by logical validity. We first show that the unpacking should be correctly understood since it imposes constraints on the concept and the properties of truth. We then demonstrate that, under such constraints, a general property is not imposed by truth preservation but by another feature of validity: its uniformity. Finally, some options that could be attempted to resist this result are discussed, showing that (strong) truth pluralism and deflationism are affected in different ways. (shrink)

Resumen: El objetivo de este artículo es estudiar la inducción analítica como método científico de investigación, es decir, como modo válido de hacer ciencia. En 1934, su creador, el filósofo y sociólogo Florian Znaniecki, afirmó que este era el método que debía ser adoptado en toda investigación sociológica. Su relevancia radica en que se propone encontrar explicaciones globales de los fenómenos sociales a partir de la utilización de técnicas cualitativas de investigación. Aquí adopto una perspectiva histórica que permite inscribir su (...) emergencia y evolución en un contexto mayor del desarrollo de metodologías cualitativas en sociología, para luego reflexionar sobre sus presupuestos epistemológicos y las críticas de las que fue objeto. Por último, realizo un balance de los aportes de esta metodología a la disciplina.: The aim of this article is to study analytic induction as a scientific research method, that is, as a valid way of making science. In 1934, the philosopher and sociologist Florian Znaniecki, its creator, referred to this methodology as the method that should be adopted by any sociological research. Its relevance lies on the fact that its goal is to find global explanations to social phenomena by using qualitative research techniques. I adopt a historical perspective to inscribe this method’s emergency and evolution in a larger context of the development of qualitative methods in sociology, and then reflect upon its epistemological basis and the criticisms made in relation to it. Finally, I evaluate this method’s contributions to the discipline. (shrink)

Cet article présente la philosophie des sciences de Max Frischeisen-Köhler, conçue comme une réponse critique aux néo-kantiens. Frischeisen-Köhler tire son enseignement à la fois de son professeur Wilhelm Dilthey et d’Edmund Husserl. Dans les quatre premières parties j’examine la critique que Frischeisen-Köhler adresse au néo-kantisme de l’École de Marbourg et à celui de l’École de Baden. Cette critique défend l’idée que la réalité joue un rôle dans la cognition en tant qu’élément totalement indépendant que la cognition doit reconnaître et qui (...) ne peut jamais se développer en dehors de sa propre légalité. Dans la cinquième section, je m’attache à la phénoménologie de Frischeisen-Köhler. Sa thèse principale est que la réalité est expérimentée comme telle dans l’action, de sorte que notre conscience de la réalité ne provient pas de considérations théoriques sur les causes hypothétiques de nos sensations, mais de nos activités dans le monde en tant qu’agents. La science part de cette expérience pré-scientifique de la réalité. Je conclus par une critique de la distinction que Frischeisen-Köhler établit entre conscience en général et subjectivité individuelle d’un point de vue phénoménologique. (shrink)

© The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Scots Philosophical Association and the University of St Andrews. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] Fisette and Riccardo Martinelli have put together the most comprehensive, ambitious, and engaging collection of essays on the philosophy of Carl Stumpf to date. The volume is impressive in both scope and depth. It covers every single aspect of Stumpf's contribution to philosophy, including issues in the philosophy of mathematics, metaphysics, (...) epistemology, phenomenology, aesthetics, philosophy of language, and the theory of feelings. It draws on an extensive array of Stumpf's writings, both published and unpublished, and it even features a selection of archival materials, notably, the transcription of a lecture on metaphysics from the late 1880s and some correspondence between Stumpf and Brentano. Some might suspect that we should simply ‘catalogue [Stumpf's] work... (shrink)

In this paper I develop a conception of joint practical deliberation as a special type of shared cooperative activity, through which co-deliberators jointly accept reasons as applying to them as a pair or group. I argue, moreover, that the aspiration to deliberative “pairhood” is distinguished by a special concern for mutuality that guides each deliberator’s readiness to accept a given consideration as a reason-for-us. It matters to each of us, as joint deliberators, that each party’s (individual) reasons for accepting something (...) as a reason-for-us support a conception of our relationship as one characterized by mutual, non-instrumental concern for one another. (shrink)

In contemporary philosophy, it is tempting to apply the metaphysics of properties to the specific case of truth, in the hope of making progress on the investigation of the latter. In this paper, I argue that a different approach, mostly independent from the metaphysics of properties and based on the naturalness, in Lewis’ sense, of semantic nations, is often a better alternative, both in general and in some specific cases. In particular, adopting the new perspective, I present a new problem (...) of combining logical validity and strong truth pluralism, and offer a way to sharply distinguish deflationism and primitivism about truth. The main original upshot of the paper is offering a perspective on philosophy of truth that sheds new light on the general problem of truth and on some particular issues. (shrink)

Adolf Reinach’s theory of social acts and Czesław Znamierowski theory of the environment can show a new perspective of analysis in the fields of computer science and digital communication. This paper will begin analysing the performance of social acts in two categories of digital environments: (i) fictional digital environment and (ii) real digital environment. The analysis will be supported by examples from the history of computer science. In both kinds of digital environments, organigrams play a significant role and depend on (...) the users’ digital power to perform a real or fictional social act. Finally, the paper will analyse one of the possible roles that AI plays in performing social acts in digital environments. It will show how AI could affect the perception of social acts. (shrink)

This paper investigates to what extent laboratory measures of cheating generalise to the field. To this purpose, we develop a lab measure that allows for individual-level observations of cheating whilst reducing the likelihood that participants feel observed. Decisions made in this laboratory task are then compared to individual choices taken in the field, where subjects can lie by misreporting their experimental earnings. We use two field variations that differ in the degree of anonymity of the field decision. According to our (...) measure, no correlation of behaviour between the laboratory and the field is found. We then perform the same analysis using a lab measure that can only detect cheating at the aggregate level. In this case, we do find a weak correlation between the two environments. We discuss the significance and interpretation of these results. (shrink)

Wir rekonstruieren einen signifikanten Strang von Max Benses früher intellektueller Entwicklung über sein Verhältnis zu Oswald Spengler, David Hilbert und Heinrich Scholz. Nach einer kurzen Rekapitulation von Spenglers kulturrelativistischem Bild des Mathematischen folgen wir einigen Spuren der Spengler-Lektüre in Max Benses frühen Texten und zeigen, wie sich Bense unter dem Einfluss von Heinrich Scholz ab Ende der 1930er Jahre sukzessive von Spengler distanziert und schließlich ein Konzept ‚reiner Wissenschaft‘ ausbildet, wie es sich unter anderem in David Hilberts formalistischer Mathematik Ausdruck (...) verleiht. Die Verteidigung Hilberts gegen völkische Denker wie Max Steck ist einer der Schauplätze, auf denen Scholz und Bense gemeinsam ihren Weltanschauungsdissens zur NS-Wissenschaftsauffassung artikulieren, gleichwohl sind auch sie Teil des NS-Wissenschaftssystems. (shrink)

Die Denkfigur des ordo inversus, die seit der Antike in den verschiedensten Disziplinen epistemische Sicherheit garantierte, verliert in der Zeit um 1800 an Plausibilität. Es kommt zu einem Formen- und Funktionswandel, der in den Künsten wie auch in den Natur-und Geisteswissenschaften auf vielfältige Weise resonierte. Der ordo inversus bezeichnet eine zirkuläre Bewegung, die von einem Anfangs- zu einem Endpunkt fortschreitet und im Zurückkehren wieder mit dem Ausgangspunkt verbunden wird, häufig in Teilbewegungen aufgespalten, etwa progressio/regressio oder analysis/synthesis. Als Methodenkonzept spielt er (...) von der Antike über das Mittelalter und die Frühe Neuzeit bis weit ins 18. Jahrhundert hinein eine zentrale Rolle in Theologie, Logik, Naturphilosophie und Hermeneutik. Das Zerbrechen des ordo inversus provoziert eine Reihe von Restitutionsversuchen von so unterschiedlichen Autoren wie Goethe, Novalis und Jean Paul, aber auch bei Lambert, Kant, Fichte und Schleiermacher. Der Band beleuchtet diese Prozesse in komparativer und historischer Perspektive und eröffnet so einen instruktiven Einblick in die historische Epistemologie im Übergang zur "Moderne". (shrink)

In the years of National Socialism, and even during World War II, German scientists traveled abroad extensively. While international travels by natural scientists were studied in some detail, travels by scholars in the humanities have been studied to a much lesser degree, even though travel documents offer valuable insights into the regulated internationality of National Socialism. – We provide a first overview of international travels of scholars in the humanities between 1933 and 1945. The examples demonstrate how travelling academics dealt (...) with conflicting expectations, justified their intentions, articulated disappointment, offered pragmatic advice for the further shaping of contacts abroad, and in this way became active participants of the resource ensemble of academia and politics. The study is based on extensive material from the political archive of the Auswärtiges Amt and the archive of the Reichsministerium für Wissenschaft, Erziehung und Volksbildung from the Bundesarchiv which to this date have been hardly explored. (shrink)

Does the recent publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks require a re-evaluation of his thought? In the present text we will deal with this question and reach the conclusion that a change of theoretical perspective on Heidegger’s work is indeed justified. The franker and less cautious style of the Black Notebooks puts in the foreground stances that were already known, but were previously relegated to the background: it becomes possible thereby to establish that Heidegger’s philosophical views host a significant lot of (...) unwarranted prejudices, which are incorporated in his picture of the ‘history of being’. We argue that in his process of radical questioning Heidegger progressively drops all available rational methods and epistemic criteria, and that this paves the way to the unwitting reception of personal prejudices in his theoretical frame: Heidegger knowingly abandons all the theoretical instruments that could enable him to discriminate between deeply felt prejudices and proper philosophical intuitions. We conclude our analysis by proposing some criticisms that should be acceptable also to scholars sympathetic with Heidegger’s thought. Heidegger’s vindication of an ‘erratic’ way of thinking, where the journey is more qualifying than the result, turns out to be incompatible with the assertiveness of the many unjustified claims disseminated across the Black Notebooks. Moreover, Heidegger wants to show the narrowness of an overwhelmingly dialectical and argumentative attitude, while his late style of thinking unwittingly discredits an alternative philosophical style, that widely appeals to a ‘principle of charity’ in the collaboration between author and reader. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Frühmittelalterliche Studien Jahrgang: 36 Heft: 2 Seiten: 286-304.

In this paper I discuss Jaspers’ theory of worldviews with regard to the contemporary problem of naturalism. In particular, I consider the frequent characterization of naturalism as a worldview. First, I situate Jaspers’ conception of worldviews in the context of the philosophical debate of his time. I then turn to Jaspers’ distinction between substantial worldviews and derivative shapes of worldviews and present his construal of naturalism as a derivative shape of what he calls the sensory- spatial Weltbild. I then argue (...) that contemporary naturalism still fits Jaspers’ description and can thus be considered a derivative shape, rather than a genuine worldview in its own right. I draw on some writings by Heinrich Rickert and Wilhelm Dilthey to further substantiate my claim. I conclude by arguing that if naturalism wishes to present itself as a worldview it should orient itself toward our human experience of nature. (shrink)

In light of the impact of work on human flourishing, an intractable problem for political theorists concerns the distribution of meaningful work in a community of moral equals. This article reviews a number of partial solutions that a well-ordered society could draw upon to provide equality of opportunity for eudemonistically meaningful work and to minimize the impact of bad work upon those who perform it. Even in view of these solutions, however, it is not likely that opportunities for meaningful work (...) can be guaranteed for all people, which carries an implication that, even in well-ordered societies, it is likely that not all people will flourish. The author argues that the limitedness of meaningful work is not a reason to reject the normative claim that meaningful work is integral in flourishing, nor is it a reason against working to transform social and political institutions to increase opportunities for meaningful work. (shrink)

In _The Boundaries of Babel_, Andrea Moro tells the story of an encounter between two cultures: contemporary theoretical linguistics and the cognitive neurosciences. The study of language within a biological context has been ongoing for more than fifty years. The development of neuroimaging technology offers new opportunities to enrich the "biolinguistic perspective" and extend it beyond an abstract framework for inquiry. As a leading theoretical linguist in the generative tradition and also a cognitive scientist schooled in the new imaging (...) technology, Moro is uniquely equipped to explore this. Moro examines what he calls the "hidden" revolution in contemporary science: the discovery that the number of possible grammars is not infinite and that their number is biologically limited. This radical but little-discussed change in the way we look at language, he claims, will require us to rethink not just the fundamentals of linguistics and neurosciences but also our view of the human mind. Moro searches for neurobiological correlates of "the boundaries of Babel" -- the constraints on the apparent chaotic variation in human languages -- by using an original experimental design based on artificial languages. He offers a critical overview of some of the fundamental results from linguistics over the last fifty years, in particular regarding syntax, then uses these essential aspects of language to examine two neuroimaging experiments in which he took part. He describes the two neuroimaging techniques used, but makes it clear that techniques and machines do not provide interesting data without a sound theoretical framework. Finally, he discusses some speculative aspects of modern research in biolinguistics regarding the impact of the linear structure of linguistics expression on grammar, and more generally, some core aspects of language acquisition, genetics, and evolution. (shrink)