The work of scientists and doctors in advancing genetic research and its applications has been accompanied by plenty of discussion in the popular press—from Good Housekeeping and Forbes to Ms. and the Congressional Record—about such ...

In our rapidly changing environment, both profit and non-profit organizations confront an increasing demand for technological, economic, and social innovation. In response to this demand, organizations are taking on the role of “change agents” by transforming existing practices into innovative action. Libraries, as centers that accumulate and disperse knowledge, can support these organizations in their “change agent” roles. This paper delineates the way public libraries can help organizations meet the increasing need for external information associated with innovation. Policy issues concerned (...) with efficient information transfer to user organizationss are specified, and two concrete examples of information transfer systems are described. In order to best utilize existing knowledge,personal-professional assistance in selecting potentially innovative,impersonal written materials is recommended. (shrink)

Writing about loneliness has been a struggle in the midst of the pandemic. Characterized by loneliness, isolation, anxiety, and fear, the COVID-19 pandemic is an exceptionally challenging time. At various points while navigating this loneliness project amid a particularly lonely time, we lamented the seeming futility of it all. A main goal of developing a Feminist Loneliness Studies in this introduction is to understand the ways that systems of oppression – white supremacy, settler colonialism, anti-queer bias, misogyny, neoliberal capitalism, and (...) so on – create our lonely world. To date, there remains no comprehensive feminist analysis of the structural conditions that both produce and intensify experiences of loneliness. We aim to remedy this gap. That is, we seek to address what a Feminist Loneliness Studies can contribute to understanding the complexities of this complicated emotion. For example, what is the unique loneliness of the feminist killjoy who calls out, or calls in, existing forms of queerphobia, racism, and sexism? What does it mean to be a politicized person and how does that result in both alienation and isolation? What might the relationship be between white supremacy and loneliness? How is loneliness both individual and systemic, and what is the relationship between the two? What distinctive forms of loneliness are created by ableism, sanism, neoliberalism, capitalism, globalization, and the gig economy? Ought loneliness be avoided at all costs? What are the ethics of loneliness? In our introduction to this special issue, we unpack and theorize the potential perils and generative possibilities offered up by this profound emotion. Establishing a Feminist Loneliness Studies provides us with the space we need to begin addressing and comprehending loneliness. (shrink)

Research misconduct is an alarming concern worldwide, and especially in Italy, where there is no formal training of young researchers in responsible research practices. The main aim of this study was to map the perceptions and attitudes about RM in a sample of young researchers attending a one-week intensive course on methodology, ethics and integrity in biomedical research, held at the University of Insubria. To this end, we administered the Scientific Misconduct Questionnaire to all attendees at the beginning of the (...) course. Thereafter, SMQ-R was re-administered at the end, to assess the impact of the course on the responsiveness of study participants, which is intended as the frequency of responses other than “don’t know”. Results show that respondents rate as high their own understanding about rules and procedures related to scientific misconduct, as well as the effectiveness of their institution’s measures for reducing it. Most of them perceive as low the chances of getting caught for RM. Some respondents believe that cases of misconduct occur in their workplace and that the integrity of a research is not solely the responsibility of the principal investigator. Among the main factors contributing to research misconduct, the need for publications, unclear definition of what constitutes misconduct and pressure for external funding do stand out. Respondents are concerned about the amount of misconduct and express a pressing need for training on research ethics. Remarkably, the responsiveness of participants tends to increase with course attendance. This finding may be useful to support education programmes devoted to research methodology, ethics and integrity among young researchers. (shrink)

This article explores the prospects for a eudaimonist moral theory that is both feminist and Aristotelian. Making the moral philosophy developed by Aristotle compatible with a feminist moral perspective presents a number of philosophical challenges. Lisa Tessman offers one of the most sustained feminist engagements with Aristotelian eudaimonism. However, in arguing for the account of flourishing that her eudaimonist theory invokes, Tessman avoids taking a stand either for or against the role Aristotle assigned to human nature. She draws her account (...) of flourishing instead from the beliefs about flourishing implicit in the feminist and black freedom movements. I examine the implicit conception of flourishing in the writings of two prominent leaders of the black freedom movement—Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X—and argue that Tessman's attempt to avoid the “sticky issue” of human nature is not successful. Tessman's defense of the burdened virtues depends on a particular reading of human nature as does a eudaimonist account of the virtues more generally. (shrink)

In the last third of the twentieth century, humanists and social scientists argued that attention to genetics would heighten already‐existing genetic determinism, which in turn would intensify negative social outcomes, especially sexism, racism, ableism, and harshness to criminals. They assumed that laypeople are at risk of becoming genetic essentialists. I will call this the “laypeople are genetic essentialists model.” This model has not accurately predicted psychosocial impacts of findings from genetics research. I will be arguing that the failure of the (...) model can be traced to its inability to recognize the complexity of laypeople’s attitudes; its incorrect theory of how beliefs, attitudes, and discourse function; and its blindness to how academics’ own interests can override the available evidence. More specifically, I suggest that the substantial data about laypeople’s deployment of genetics supports what I will call the “laypeople are strategic essentialists model” better than the “laypeople are genetic essentialists model.” The strategic essentialists model holds that people tend to store multiple categories, including multiple causal forces, that they deploy “strategically” to serve context‐dependent goals. It will be difficult for academics to reorient ourselves to model laypeople as sophisticated strategic essentialists rather than as naïve genetic essentialists. Perhaps a little shift, however, will be of value. (shrink)

The International Conference "Tra rito e mito: il Carnevale nella cultura europea" was held online on the 16th and 17th of November 2020. We present twenty-two contributions coming from various fields of the Humanities and written in Italian, French, and German. This proceedings’ foreword traces back the thread that links these essays one with another, i.e., carnivalesque imagery between ritual and mythological dimensions. Moreover, this introduction provides a key to an interpretation of Carnival as a founding instance, both regenerative and (...) conservative, of the European identity. Recovering this instance today, in the midst of a pandemic, responds to the problem of its partial loss in contemporary society, in the hope to rebuild a “free and familiar contact among people”. (shrink)

Many are the correspondences between Nature and Society, Kingdom of the Nature and World of the Politics, in the works of the French writer Alphonse Toussenel. Well known for his anti-semitic volume Les Juifs, rois de l’époque, Toussenel is also the author of books about animals and about hunting. Such part of his production – built on the idea that animals are “logogriphs” of human virtues and vices – is ambiguous, especially in its relationships with violence: as when Toussenel, socialist (...) and pacifist, invokes the extermination of animal races which represent human groups. (shrink)

Many are the correspondences between Nature and Society, Kingdom of the Nature and World of the Politics, in the works of the French writer Alphonse Toussenel. Well known for his anti-semitic volume Les Juifs, rois de l’époque, Toussenel is also the author of books about animals and about hunting. Such part of his production – built on the idea that animals are “logogriphs” of human virtues and vices – is ambiguous, especially in its relationships with violence: as when Toussenel, socialist (...) and pacifist, invokes the extermination of animal races which represent human groups. (shrink)

The main goal of this paper will be to analyze the relationship between the phenomenon of conceptual relativity and the speaking-sensitive semantics. My paper will be divided into three parts. In the first part I will present Putnam's the phenomenon of conceptual relativity, in the second part I will exhibit the main ideas that characterize the speaking-sensitive semantics defended by Putnam and, finally, in the last part I will connect Putnam's semantics with the doctrine of conceptual relativity.

The main aim of this brief paper is to present in which sense both Putnam's internal realism and his natural realism are realist. In order to do that I will take into consideration the notion of "reality" that Putnam uses in his defense of his internalist perspective as well in his present natural realism. Although there exist significant differences between Putnam's two different realist stances, the notion of "reality" present in each of them remains the same. In this paper I (...) will clarify what Putnam understands by that notion. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine the metaphilosophical relevance of the phenomenon of sleep, suggesting that it has the potential to not only enrich the analysis of limit cases but also to test some of the ideas concerning the possibility of naturalizing phenomenology and its limits. Insofar as sleeping allows for both a first personal and a third personal description and challenges the usual primacy of the first-person point of view, exploring sleeping under the prism of its import for the phenomenological (...) method allows to illuminate the relationships between a first personal transcendental phenomenology and a third personal naturalized one. We do this by examining Husserl’s treatment of sleep as a limit-case, and the problem of accounting for deep sleep from a first-personal perspective. Drawing from a Heidegger-inspired account of sleep, we argue that sleep demands for a type of approach that can be fairly described as ontological, and which reveals a new understanding of subjectivity as a dynamic unity of different modes of being. Although this approach challenges a first-personal based approach, it does not, however support the naturalization of phenomenology or undermine the project of a transcendental philosophy of experience. (shrink)

The Artificial Kingdom is the first book to provide a cultural history of kitsch, an immensely popular aesthetic phenomenon that has always been disdained as "bad taste," or a cheap imitation of art. Proposing instead that kitsch is the product of a larger sensibility of loss, Celeste Olalquiaga shows how it enables the momentary re-creation of experiences that exist only as memories or fantasies. Simultaneously exposing and celebrating this process, Olalquiaga gives us a bold, trenchant analysis of what and (...) how we see when we look at kitsch. Tracing its beginnings to the nineteenth century--when industrialization transformed nature into an artificial kingdom of miniature scale--Olalquiaga describes the at once exhilarated and melancholic atmosphere where kitsch came to life. In an arresting mix of theory and anecdote, she examines objects from both the past and the present, probing the fluid boundaries between reality and fantasy, and finding in kitsch a phenomenon as relevant to our own time as it was to the era that made it a massive experience. (shrink)

Este artículo se propone retomar los conceptos de problemática y ruptura epistemológica presentados por Althusser en diversos artículos de La revolución teórica de Marx, a los que se busca poner en relación con las consideraciones de Lacan en el Seminario IX acerca del cogito cartesiano. En discusión con algunas de las lecturas contemporáneas de ambos autores, busca dar cuenta de cierta afinidad en sus planteos en torno a la posibilidad de un encuentro con lo real y del planteo de lo (...) verdadero distinto de la garantía de Verdad. Por último, presenta la conceptualización althusseriana de práctica teórica como proceso de trabajo que pone en relación Generalidades y la concepción de una ética de la práctica dada por la posibilidad de dar cuenta de sí. (shrink)

Trust is morally basic. It makes cooperation between persons, to whatever degree, possible. In Chapter One, I define trust as being the relation between people bound by genuine goodwill, competency and vulnerability to each other. ;In Chapter Two, I criticize Thomas Hobbes's understanding of society as founded upon a social contract which exclusively self-interested persons have reason to make in order to escape from the state of nature. I argue that on Hobbes's assumptions about the nature of persons, such a (...) contract cannot be viable. Without the assumption that, prior to the contract, persons have some reason to trust one another, no contract can be expected to be made or survive. ;David Gauthier, who presents a contemporary version of Hobbesian social contract theory in his Morals by Agreement, is vulnerable to a similar argument. In Chapter Three, I argue that given Gauthier's description of persons there does not exist the trust necessary to construct, even hypothetically, the social contract. ;Chapter Four examines the very basic role which trust plays in both personal and civic friendship. I argue that trust is what distinguishes "end friendship" from the instrumental friendships in which we are "used" or taken advantage of by others. I discuss civic friendship and argue that the trust which is basic to it, namely social trust, is a form of trust which can exist between people who are otherwise strangers to one another. ;In Chapter Five I go on to prescribe trust. I argue first, that we should never be untrustworthy, as this implies treating people instrumentally, and hence violates Kant's Categorical Imperative. I argue, however, that we should not always trust, maintaining that trust, for normative purposes, is best understood as an Aristotelian mean, and can be described by the extremes of naivete and cynicism and that we should trust in a way which avoids both these extremes. (shrink)

While executive functions and self-regulated learning strategy use have been found to be related in several populations, this relationship has not been studied in adult online distance education. This is surprising as self-regulation, and thus using such strategies, is very important here. In this setting, we studied the relation between basic executive functions and reported SRL-strategy use within a correlational design with 889 adult online distance students. In this study, we performed regression analyses and took age and processing speed into (...) consideration, as processing speed and EFs decrease with age, whereas self-regulation is reported to increase with age. Cognitively measured working memory was not related to reported SRL-strategy use in adult ODE students. Thus, even though the SRL-components within the strategies seem to elicit working memory, reported SRL-strategy use is not related to the functioning of this basic EF. This means that if SRL-strategy use needs to be increased in adult ODE students, training of working memory might not be an effective manner for achieving that goal. Better shifting and processing speed were related to less reported SRL-strategy use, which might suggest that SRL-strategies might be used to compensate for lower shifting and lower processing speed. With increasing age, the number of contacts with peers or teachers decreases. This latter finding might be of relevance during the pandemic since contacts with others is importance during lockdown. (shrink)

Este artículo se propone analizar la producción tecnopolítica del cuerpo en la era farmacopornográfica, siguiendo las propuestas teóricas de Paul B. Preciado. En primer lugar se presenta el régimen disciplinario donde los procedimientos de vigilancia y control son exteriores al cuerpo. En un segundo momento, se analiza la constitución de un régimen somatopolítico de subjetividad, denominado farmacopornográfico, en el cual se utilizan tecnologías microprostéticas de control. A continuación, se señalan las principales tecnologías que crean, reproducen y consolidan un determinado sujeto (...) y corporalidad en la era farmacopornográfica. Finalmente, se plantea la hipótesis de que, a pesar de la producción biopolítica masiva de ideales heteronormativos, es posible una salida desde el interior de las identidades sexuales. (shrink)

Who is Pulcinella? What does his laughter have to say about the "end of time" and the end of life of Giandomenico Tiepolo? How can the end of a life make anyone laugh like Carnival’s popular mask does? This article tries to answer such questions. By unfolding the tools that come from the realm of Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy – notably the notion of "recapitulation of time" in its relation to comedy – we will trace a path which links Michail Bachtin’s (...) theories on the carnivalesque culture together with a recognition in the aesthetics of "character". In this encounter, the consistency of Pulcinella-King Carnival’s form of life will appear in the light of an “escape route”: it winks at a kind of general and anonymous beatitude, which pairs with the experience of the destitution of time. (shrink)

The human propensity for casting our social worlds as "us against them" is perhaps the primary impediment to deep and broadly inclusive understandings of the workings of rhetoric. Many decades ago, Kenneth Burke assailed that barrier with regard to Adolf Hitler. Surrounded by the satisfactions of vituperation against the leader of one of the world's most heinous social movements, Burke begged his readers to make space for understanding how Hitler's rhetoric brought about what it did. Philippe-Joseph Salazar's Words Are Weapons (...) makes a similar contribution for our era. He asks us to resist the gratifications generated by dismissing as "Islamaphobic" any critical analysis of what he calls "caliphal"... (shrink)

Come mostrare quel che non deve essere predicato, né fondato? Che vuol dire convertirsi da un modo di vita a un altro? Può un’etica dell’accettazione significare qualcosa di diverso da un’etica della rassegnazione? L’autrice dell’articolo cercherà di offrire una risposta a simili domande, centrali per la riflessione di Wittgenstein sulla "forma di vita", a partire da una sua certa somiglianza con l’interrogativo metodologico sollevato dall’universo della credenza religiosa.

L'etica, secondo Wittgenstein, ha a che fare con la mostrazione di un modo di vivere, inteso vuoi come disposizione complessiva del soggetto, vuoi come "habitus". In questo libro, Marta Cassina ripercorre le forme di questa mostrazione nell'opera del filosofo, argomentando, in primo luogo, che il modo di vivere indicato nel "Tractatus" come il contrassegno indicibile della vita giusta e felice debba essere compreso, man mano che il pensiero di Wittgenstein matura, come un "fare" e un uso condiviso della vita; (...) che questo uso, inoltre, possa essere letto nelle sue implicazioni teoretiche e nella maniera della sua genesi attraverso le "lenti" della credenza religiosa e della grammatica del voto di fede. (shrink)

In the face of documented difficulties in the public understanding of genetics, new metaphors have been suggested. The language of information coding and processing has become deeply entrenched in the public representation of genetics, and some critics have found fault in the blueprint metaphor, a variant of the dominant theme. They have offered the language of the recipe as a preferable metaphor. The metaphors of the blueprint and the recipe are compared in respect to their deterministic implications and other associations. (...) The likelihood of the recipe metaphor framing cognition in more useful ways is called into question. (shrink)

With modern technological advances, distance education has become an increasingly important education delivery medium for, for example, the higher education provided by open universities. Among predictive factors of successful learning in distance education, the effects of non-cognitive skills are less explored. Grit, the dispositional tendency to sustain trait-level passion and long-term goals, has raised much research interest and gained importance for predicting academic achievement. The Grit Questionnaire, measuring Perseverance of Effort and Consistency of Interests, has been shown to be a (...) reliable instrument in traditional university student populations. However, the measurement and predictive validity of this questionnaire is still unknown for adult distance education university students who differ from traditional students in various ways. Based on a sample of 2,027 students from a distance education university, this study assessed the psychometric properties of the two-factor structure grit measured by the Grit Questionnaire. The findings suggest that the short form of the Grit Questionnaire is a potentially useful assessment tool for measuring the grit construct for distance learning higher education and that the Consistency of Interests factor is especially relevant to consider the improvement of learning performance for distance education in terms of courses credit and exam attempts. The measurement precision of the Perseverance of Effort factor, however, should be improved in future research to provide higher measurement accuracy and broader item coverage. (shrink)

Film-Philosophy International Salon-Journal (ISSN 1466-4615) Vol. 9 No. 38, July 2005 Reni Celeste Love and Catastrophe: Filming the Sublime in _Hiroshima Mon Amour_ [1] This essay studies two scenes from Alain Resnais's film _Hirsoshima Mon Amour_ (1959) alongside the concept of the sublime in order to take film from a discussion of desire to one of love. Love is understood, according to philosopher Emmanuel Levinas's description, as an infinite alterity, rather than as totality or unity. Though Levinas insists on (...) a separation between love and tragedy, and argues that the work of art cannot achieve the ethical, I argue that Resnais's film expresses a sublime achievement by staging, or representing, the infinite tragically through failure and betrayal. (shrink)