In this paper we argue that questions about which mathematical ideas mathematicians are exposed to and choose to pay attention to are epistemologically relevant and entangled with power dynamics and social justice concerns. There is a considerable body of literature that discusses the dissemination and uptake of ideas as social justice issues. We argue that these insights are also relevant for the epistemology of mathematics. We make this visible by a journalistic exploration of relevant cases and embed our insights into (...) the larger question how mathematical ideas are taken up in mathematical practices. We argue that epistemologies of mathematics ought to account for questions of exposure to and choice of attention to mathematical ideas, and remark on the political relevance of such epistemologies. (shrink)

People often make less risky decisions for themselves than others. We examined how people allocated risks (i.e., determining the ratio of uncertain outcomes to certain outcomes) between themselves and others. We also investigated gain (vs. loss) domain and social value orientation as predictors of risk allocations. The results of three experiments demonstrated that participants were more likely to share their risks equally between themselves and others than distribute risk unequally. In the gain (vs. loss) domain, participants allocated fewer risks to (...) themselves and more risks to the other person for unequal risk allocations. Compared to proselfs, prosocials were more likely to allocate risks equally. We also found stronger domain effects on unequal risk allocations for proselfs than for prosocials. Therefore, our findings clarify the effects of risk distribution, domain, and social value orientation on interpersonal allocation decisions and highlight equal risk distribution between oneself and others. (shrink)

This paper examines whether the modern bioethical principles of respect for autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice proposed by Beauchamp and Childress are existent in, compatible with, or acceptable to the leading Chinese moral philosophy—the ethics of Confucius. The author concludes that the moral values which the four prima facie principles uphold are expressly identifiable in Confucius’ teachings. However, Confucius’ emphasis on the filial piety, family values, the “love of gradation”, altruism of people, and the “role specified relation oriented ethics” will (...) inevitably influence the “specification” and application of these bioethical principles and hence tend to grant “beneficence” a favourable position that diminishes the respect for individual rights and autonomy. In contrast, the centrality of respect for autonomy and its stance of “first among equals” are more and more stressed in Western liberal viewpoints. Nevertheless, if the Confucian “doctrine of Mean” and a balanced “two dimensional personhood” approach are properly employed, this will require both theorists and clinicians, who are facing medical ethical dilemmas, of searching to attain due mean out of competing moral principles thus preventing “giving beneficence a priority” or “asserting autonomy must triumph”. (shrink)

According to the universality thesis, the epistemic properties referred to by the English epistemic verb “know” contained in the expressions of the form “S knows that p” or “S knows how to φ‎” are shared by the translations of the epistemic verb in all other languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and so on. Some doubt that there is reason to think the universality thesis is true because little or nothing is shown about the meanings and uses of the (...) epistemic terms in languages other than English. Critics of the universality thesis find counterevidence to the thesis; that is, the evidence demonstrates that translations of the epistemic verb “know” are used differently in some languages from the way “know” is used in English. In this chapter, the authors examine the effectiveness of such counterevidence. (shrink)

Based on key passages in The Analects, I develop a Confucian account of agency: more precisely, an account of the relation between agent and deed (action). The Confucian view is contrasted with "standard" causal accounts of action (e.g., Davidson, Searle), which hold that what makes an event an action is that it is intended. According to the Confucian account, the defining mark of action is not the causal involvement of a (prior) intention, but instead the expressive relation between agent and (...) action. What's distinctive about an action is that it is expressive of who the agent is; the action expresses one's character or self. For the Confucians, what one really intends (the content of one's intention) is not a prior state to the action, but is rather determined or settled by the action as it is completed. I then explore the implications of the Confucian account for our understanding of three moral-psychological phenomena: weakness of will, self-deception, and moral regret. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose a virtue-theoretic approach to semantics, according to which the study of linguistic competence in particular, and the study of meaning and language in general, should focus on a speaker's interpretative virtues, such as charity and interpretability, rather than the speaker's knowledge of rules. The first part of the paper proffers an argument for shifting to virtue semantics, and the second part outlines the nature of such virtue semantics.

In _Life-Destroying Diagrams_, Eugenie Brinkema brings the insights of her radical formalism to bear on supremely risky terrain: the ethical extremes of horror and love. Through close readings of works of film, literature, and philosophy, she explores how diagrams, grids, charts, lists, abecedaria, toroids, tempos, patterns, colors, negative space, lengths, increments, and thresholds attest to formal logics of torture and cruelty, violence and finitude, friendship and eros, debt and care. Beginning with a wholesale rethinking of the affect of horror, (...) orienting it away from entrenched models of feeling toward impersonal schemes and structures, Brinkema moves outward to consider the relation between objects and affects, humiliation and metaphysics, genre and the general, bodily destruction and aesthetic generation, geometry and scenography, hatred and value, love and measurement, and, ultimately, the tensions, hazards, and speculative promise of formalism itself. Replete with etymological meditations, performative typography, and lyrical digressions, _Life-Destroying Diagrams_ is at once a model of reading without guarantee and a series of generative experiments in the writing of aesthetic theory. (shrink)

This article explores the role of disgust in Kant’s aesthetic philosophy, Derrida’s deconstruction of Kant’s third Critique in his article 'Economimesis,' and the figure of vomit in two films by David Lynch in order to argue for the ethical possibilities of not giving ground relative to one’s disgust—what I term an ethics of the worse than the worst.

(2009). To cut, to split, to touch, to eat, as of a body or a text. Angelaki: Vol. 14, shadows of cruelty sadism, masochism and the philosophical muse – part one, pp. 131-145.

Human embryonic stem cell research can bring about major biomedical breakthroughs and thus contribute enormously to human welfare, yet it raises serious moral problems because it involves using human embryos for experiment. The “moral status of the human embryo” remains the core of such debates. Three different positions regarding the moral status of the human embryo can be categorised: the “all” position, the “none” position, and the “gradualist” position.The author proposes that the “gradualist” position is more plausible than the other (...) two positions. Confucius’s moral principle of jen, which proposes a unique theory of “love of gradation”, and the principle of yi, which advocates “due treatment for persons”, are then explored. The author then argues that our moral obligations to do good to other living organisms, persons, and our families are different.Putting together the “gradualist” position on the human embryo, and Confucius’s theories of “love of gradation” and “due treatment for persons”, the author concludes that the early embryo has less ethical significance than the later fetus and adult human. The moral obligation we have toward persons is clearer and stronger than that which we have toward human embryos. Embryo research is justifiable if it brings enormous welfare to human persons that cannot be otherwise achieved. The “love of gradation” requires us, however, to extend love and respect towards other entities according to their different status. We should therefore be very cautious in using human embryos for research, acknowledging the gradualist nature of their moral status. (shrink)

In July 2002, I had the honour to be invited to give a 15 minute presentation on behalf of my country, Taiwan, on the topic of “Current system of national guidance on human subject protection in medical research” in a panel discussion of the Forum for Ethical Review Committees in Asia and the Western Pacific , World Health Organization international conference held in Chin-Mai, Thailand. In that conference, four delegates from Taiwan had a rare and therefore very precious opportunity to (...) share Taiwan’s experience in establishing and promoting “human subject protection system” with delegates from 27 WHO member countries of the region. Through the vigorous exchanges of opinion in those four …. (shrink)

Volume 10, Issue 3, September 2019, Page 457-461.

La réflexion sur l’éthique et la déontologie des médias en Afrique de l’Ouest suscite diverses questions. Il convient d’abord de clarifier les concepts pour alimenter le débat qui a ses moments forts, notamment pendant les périodes électorales.D’un côté, les professionnels de l’information, les acteurs des médias mettent l’accent sur la nécessaire liberté de la presse et peuvent être en porte-à-faux dans leur pratique avec la philosophie et les règles de la profession. D’un autre côté, différentes institutions, que ce soit les (...) institutions gouvernementales, la société civile ou de « simples » citoyens, s’appuient sur les médias, mais les interpellent au sujet d’une liberté qui ne saurait être sans responsabilité.Il s’agira donc de contextualiser l’environnement d’intervention des médias et d’examiner les réponses données aux problèmes posés y compris par les citoyens dans leurs rapports aux médias. La mise en place d’une législation et de structures institutionnelles – que ce soit les organes de régulation, dans leur diversité, ou de manière plus problématique, les organes d’autorégulation ou le tribunal des pairs – montre qu’il existe une dynamique à prendre en compte dans le dévelop­pement des médias en Afrique de l’Ouest.Enfin, nous nous attaquerons à quelques défis, qu’il s’agisse de la formation des professionnels, de la pratique des médias en période de conflit ou des technologies de l’information et de la communication, pour montrer que l’éthique et la déontologie sont au cœur du développement démocratique en Afrique de l’Ouest et en sont un élément constitutif. (shrink)

Steroid hormone receptors are ligand‐inducible transcription factors that exhibit potent effects on gene expression in living cells. Precise dissection of their mode of action at the molecular level can best be carried out in functional cell‐free systems. This article will describe the benefits of such systems and review their development up to the recent establishment of steroid receptor‐dependent in vitro transcription. Subsequent advances in our knowledge of receptor function arising from the exploitation of this powerful experimental tool will be described. (...) Particular emphasis will be placed upon two key problems: the role of steroid hormone in receptor action and the mechanisms by which steroid receptors activate gene transcription. (shrink)

Mereological theories are based on the binary relation “being a part of”. The systematic investigations of mereology were initiated by Leśniewski. More recent authors (including Simons, Casati and Varzi, Hovda) formulated a series of first‐order mereological axioms. These axioms give rise to a plenitude of theories, which are of great philosophical interest. The paper considers first‐order mereological theories from the point of view of computable (or effective) algebra. Following the approach of Hirschfeldt, Khoussainov, Shore, and Slinko, we isolate two important (...) computability‐theoretic properties P (namely, degree spectra of structures, and effective dimensions), and consider the following problem: for a given mereological theory T, is it true that its models can realize every possible variant of the property P? If the answer is positive, then we say that the theory T is ‐universal. We obtain the following results about known mereological theories. Any theory T which is weaker than Extensional Closure Mereology (CEM) is ‐universal. A similar fact is true for the theory GM2. On the other hand, any theory stronger that CEM + (C) + (G) is not ‐universal. In particular, General Extensional Mereology is not ‐universal. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 11.1 (2004) 87-94 [Access article in PDF] Talk and the Nature of Delusions:Defending Sociocultural Perspectives on Mental Illness Eugenie Georgaca Keywords discourse, social constructionism, delusions, psychosis, mental illness, context It is very pleasing to see writers from philosophy, psychiatry and psychology, the three disciplines represented by this journal, debating the issue of delusions. The majority of the papers in this volume set out to (...) determine the underlying mechanisms responsible for delusions. As such, they offer themselves as discussions of the etiological factors of the formation and maintenance of delusions. My paper analyzes the interactional presentation and negotiation of statements that would be considered as delusional. This led some commentators (Ghaemi 2004; Sass 2004) to argue that the analysis of talk about delusions is useful, but cannot be extended to claims about the nature of delusions. In the following section, I discuss the ways in which analyzing interactions can be useful in clinical research and practice. Subsequently, I identify and critically discuss the assumptions about the nature of delusions that underlie these criticisms and the majority of the papers in this volume. The Usefulness of the Study of Interaction My paper can be seen as part of a growing body of studies that attempt to elucidate the role of interactional and discursive processes in the identification and management of disorders (Barrett 1988; Coulter 1975; Hak 1989; Pollner 1975; Smith 1978; Soyland 1994). Microsociological and ethnographic studies look at the properties of client-professional interaction with the aim of clarifying the tacit skills and knowledges used in such encounters. Palmer (2000), for example, argues that the recognition of disorder is a social and interactional issue both in the sense that the judgment of disorder is based on social criteria and in the sense that diagnosis is an interpersonal process with its own inherent social order. The aim, therefore, of analyzing professional-client interactions would be to articulate the properties of this implicit social order. Other researchers argue that diagnosis is not a process of identification or recognition of disorder, but rather a process of active construction of disorder and of transforming the person to a mental patient. Barrett's (1988) analysis of the transformation of a [End Page 87] person to a "person suffering from schizophrenia" and subsequently a "schizophrenic" through interviewing and report writing is an excellent example of this kind of work.The application of this approach to the field of delusions would attempt to address the issue of how delusions are diagnosed and managed through the interactions between the delusional patient and the clinician. In this paper and in previous work (Georgaca 1996, 2000) I showed that statements that have been diagnosed as delusional are presented and argued through using appropriate conversational strategies, drawing on socially meaningful systems of knowledge and applying appropriate rules of evidence. Moreover, I argued that there was no way in which these disagreements over competing versions of reality could be definitely settled conversationally, and that instances of breakdown in communication were due not to the delusional version being proven wrong, but to lack of explanatory frameworks within which the competing versions could be negotiated. At least in the exchanges analyzed, the criteria of implausibility, conviction, and incorrigibility were shown not to apply.Clinicians do not customarily investigate the truth of patient claims against empirical data (Maher 1992), which means that they have to judge claims on the basis of the patient's presentation in the diagnostic interview. Because there are no technical guidelines for the assessment of truth and falsity, plausibility and implausibility, rationality and irrationality, clinicians have to rely on personal judgment. The question then is on what grounds the clinician's personal judgment is granted the status of determining the truth of someone else's claim and in what capacity clinicians are called to make such decisions. I will not pursue this argument any further here. The point I want to make is that the analysis of professional-client interactions foregrounds the active role of professionals in clinical decisions and questions the criteria upon which decisions are... (shrink)

Franco Eugeni remembers Bruno Rizzi: in this brief introduction, I would like to remember an afternoon spent in “ Roma Tre ” with Bruno, since we were both Ordinary Professors at that University. We passed it doing a dense program of work for the next three years. At 6.00 pm, I left for “Roseto degli Abruzzi”. At six o'clock a.m. of the next morning, I still have the voice in my ears. A phone call from the Headmaster Ciro d'Aniello, who (...) told me " The Professor is dead" In that afternoon, Emilio Ambrisi and I went to Rome; we were stunned and desperate. Not many days later, a conference was held at the University of Teramo; it was the conference that we had prepared for Bruno, to celebrate his 60th birthday, but it was his memory. In the opening conference, Prof. Antonino Giambo, also fraternal friend of Bruno, burst into a tearful cry, which expressed in a moment, the senses of friendship and love that we all had for the missing friend! Starting from this work with Fabrizio Maturo, the study of some problems left open by the works of Eugeni and Rizzi will be investigated. Sunto Ricordo di Franco Eugeni su Bruno Rizzi: in questa brevissima introduzione vorrei ricordare un pomeriggio passato a Roma Tre con Bruno, visto che allora eravamo entrambi Professori Ordinari in quella Università. Lo passammo a fare un denso programma di lavoro per i successivi tre anni. Alle 18.00 ripartii per Roseto degli Abruzzi. Alle sei del mattino successivo, ho ancora la voce nelle orecchie, una telefonata del Preside Ciro d’Aniello, che mi diceva “ Il Professore è morto” Nel pomeriggio Emilio Ambrisi ed io ci recammo a Roma, eravamo attoniti e disperati. Non molti giorni dopo si tenne presso l’Università di Teramo un Convegno, era il Convegno che avevamo preparato per Bruno, per festeggiare i suoi 60 anni, fu invece il ricordo. Nella conferenza di apertura il prof. Antonino Giambò, anche lui, come noi, fraterno amico di Bruno, scoppiò in un pianto dirotto, che espresse in un attimo, i sensi dell’amicizia e dell’amore, che tutti noi avevamo per l’amico scomparso! A partire da questo lavoro con Fabrizio Maturo verrà approfondito lo studio di alcune problematiche rimaste aperte dai lavori di Eugeni e Rizzi. (shrink)

According to social constructionism factuality, the establishment of accounts as corresponding to an objective external reality, is an interactional accomplishment ordinarily achieved in everyday conversations. In cases of disagreement regarding the interpretation and nature of events, however, not only the plausibility of the account, but also the rationality, integrity, and accountability of the participants is at stake. Delusions present extreme cases of such disagreement. This paper analyzes extracts from an interview with an individual diagnosed as delusional focusing on the factualization (...) devices used in the negotiation of accounts. The question of whether the observation of conversational rules documented in the interview is sufficient to establish the plausibility of an account and the rationality of its teller leads to arguments around the necessity of shifting the focus from the grounded micro-analysis of talk to wider social and institutional processes. (shrink)

Our goal is to prove that the golden section, however important, is not the only key to understand a mathematical-formalizing approach to the idea of beauty. Having developed, from this point of view, reading keys linked to the post-modern, it is necessary to link together the multiple rivulets of knowledge that gather in this direction. Moreover the canons of the approaches presented up to now are very indicative for the understanding of many aspects of beauty, which however depends on the (...) historical moment and the cultures created in the various civilizations. Therefore we can affirm that there is no effective definition of "beauty" that can be codified through fixed canons, but that the concept is expressed by a series of stratifications and interpretations that tend to link several major variations, expressing the various answers given by man to the question: what is the beauty? (shrink)

All logic instruments and tools in possession of, and used by researchers are generally considered as the results of bivalent logic. A common error to people interested in science is that, usually, they don’t known with certainty which things are true and which are false. But they are sure that things are true or false. No ways in the middle. The fuzzy principle asserts that this is completely a question of measure. Fuzziness is the opposite concept to bivalency, while fuzzy (...) quality means polyvalency. Fuzzy logic is able to manage uncertain knowledge and, more precisely, to manage those rules difficult to formalize. In many cases, such rules haven’t got, or cannot have, the necessary precision, required for a whole formalization. (shrink)

Awareness of illness in schizophrenia reflects complex storied understanding of the impact of the disorder upon one’s life. Individuals may be aware of their illness in different ways and this may be related to their functioning. A total of 76 adults with schizophrenia were assessed for their awareness of illness, neurocognition, social cognition, and social function concurrently and social function was also assessed at three later time points. A cluster analysis revealed 3 groups: generally full awareness, generally limited awareness, and (...) superficial awareness. Comparisons between these profiles revealed the superficial group had poorer executive function, emotion recognition ability, and capacity for social relationships than the full awareness group, yet had better verbal memory and more social contacts than the limited awareness group. These results suggest assessing the narrative qualities of awareness of illness may reveal unique links with cognition and function, and this may have implications for interventions. (shrink)