The COVID-19 virus is severely testing the Italian healthcare system, as the requests for intensive treatment are greater than the real capacity of the system to receive patients. Given this emergency situation, it follows that citizens are limited in their freedom of movement in order to limit infection, and that in hospitals a significant number of critical situations must be faced. This brief contribution aims to offer a reflection on the public and clinical role of the bioethicist: a figure able (...) to promote dialogue between the world of medicine and the community, and to face ethical dilemmas even in emergent clinical settings. (shrink)

Friedrich Nietzsche has emerged as one of the most important and influential modern philosophers. For several decades, the book series Monographien und Texte zur Nietzsche-Forschung (MTNF) has set the agenda in a rapidly growing and changing field of Nietzsche scholarship. The scope of the series is interdisciplinary and international in orientation reflects the entire spectrum of research on Nietzsche, from philosophy to literary studies and political theory. The series publishes monographs and edited volumes that undergo a strict peer-review process. The (...) book series is led by an international team of editors, whose work represents the full range of current Nietzsche scholarship. (shrink)

Consequential historical decisions that shaped transportation systems and their influence on society have many valuable lessons. The decisions we learn from and choose to make going forward will play a key role in shaping the mobility landscape of the future. This is especially pertinent as artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more prevalent in the form of autonomous vehicles (AVs). Throughout urban history, there have been cyclical transport oppressions of previous-generation transportation methods to make way for novel transport methods. These cyclical oppressions (...) can be identified in the baroque and modernist periods, and a third oppression may occur in the contemporary period. To explore the idea of a third oppression, we focus on the bicycle and outline the history of cycling to understand how historical mode oppression unfolded. We then present several social and political factors that contributed to the oppression of cycling and share recommendations for how to avoid future oppressions including political, social, and design actions for researchers and policymakers to take. This paper argues that priorities for AI-enabled mobility and cyclist needs be advanced in proportion to the extent that they contribute to societal goals of urban containment, public realm, and proximal cities. Additionally, future mobility evolutions should prioritise mobility justice and mode choice over inducing a singular transportation method. (shrink)

Welches Verhältnis besteht zwischen „Bild" und menschlichem Denken? Welche Rolle spielt das Konzept der „Form" im menschlichen Wissen? Forscher aus Philosophie, Kulturwissenschaften, Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Ästhetik, Literatur, Anthropologie, Mathematik und Biologie untersuchen aus historischer und theoretischer Perspektive den Zusammenhang zwischen der Aktivität des Denkens und den Konzepten von Bild und Form.

Background Machine learning (ML) is utilized increasingly in health care, and can pose harms to patients, clinicians, health systems, and the public. In response, regulators have proposed an approach that would shift more responsibility to ML developers for mitigating potential harms. To be effective, this approach requires ML developers to recognize, accept, and act on responsibility for mitigating harms. However, little is known regarding the perspectives of developers themselves regarding their obligations to mitigate harms.Methods We conducted 40 semi-structured interviews with (...) developers of ML predictive analytics applications for health care in the United States.Results Participants varied widely in their perspectives on personal responsibility and included examples of both moral engagement and disengagement, albeit in a variety of forms. While most (70%) of participants made a statement indicative of moral engagement, most of these statements reflected an awareness of moral issues, while only a subset of these included additional elements of engagement such as recognizing responsibility, alignment with personal values, addressing conflicts of interests, and opportunities for action. Further, we identified eight distinct categories of moral disengagement reflecting efforts to minimize potential harms or deflect personal responsibility for preventing or mitigating harms.Conclusions These findings suggest possible facilitators and barriers to the development of ethical ML that could act by encouraging moral engagement or discouraging moral disengagement. Regulatory approaches that depend on the ability of ML developers to recognize, accept, and act on responsibility for mitigating harms might have limited success without education and guidance for ML developers about the extent of their responsibilities and how to implement them. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship between AI urbanism and sustainability by drawing upon some key concepts of Bruno Latour’s philosophy. The idea of a sustainable AI urbanism - often understood as the juxtaposition of smart and eco urbanism - is here critiqued through a reconstruction of the conceptual sources of these two urban paradigms. Some key ideas of smart and eco urbanism are indicated as incompatible and therefore the fusion of these two paradigms is assessed (...) as an unstable basis for shaping sustainable AI urbanism. The concepts in question - modernity, science and nature – are subsequently redefined following Latour’s philosophical perspective, in an attempt to define a different theoretical basis for a sustainable AI urbanism in the Anthropocene. Finally, the principles of a design philosophy shaped by Latour are used to change the design culture that informs AI urbanism towards a more sustainable practice. This paper constructs and promotes a dialogue between the disciplines of philosophy and urban theory with urban design in the conviction that the principles produced by the former and the practices carried out by the latter must start a biunivocal relationship. The paper reveals that in order to change design culture in the field of AI urbanism, it is necessary to rethink some of the key ideas that inform the Western and modern worldview through novel philosophical reflections. (shrink)

A metainference is usually understood as a pair consisting of a collection of inferences, called premises, and a single inference, called conclusion. In the last few years, much attention has been paid to the study of metainferences—and, in particular, to the question of what are the valid metainferences of a given logic. So far, however, this study has been done in quite a poor language. Our usual sequent calculi have no way to represent, e.g. negations, disjunctions or conjunctions of inferences. (...) In this paper we tackle this expressive issue. We assume some background sentential language as given and define what we call an inferential language, that is, a language whose atomic formulas are inferences. We provide a model-theoretic characterization of validity for this language—relative to some given characterization of validity for the background sentential language—and provide a proof-theoretic analysis of validity. We argue that our novel language has fruitful philosophical applications. Lastly, we generalize some of our definitions and results to arbitrary metainferential levels. (shrink)

This contributed volume aims to reconsider the concept of individuation, clarifying its articulation with respect to contemporary problems in perceptual, neural, developmental, semiotic and social morphogenesis. The authors approach the ontogenetical issue by taking into account the morphogenetical process, involving the concept of individuation proposed by Gilbert Simondon and Gilles Deleuze. The target audience primarily comprises experts in the field but the book may also be beneficial for graduate students. The challenge of the genesis and constitution of "units" has always (...) been at the center of philosophical and scientific research. This ontogenetical issue is common to every discipline but it is articulated in different ways: in phenomenology of perception the constitution of perceptual units is at the base of gestalt field theories, in theoretical neuroscience synchronized neural assemblies are considered as correlates of conscious processes, in developmental embryogenesis the constitution of organs is the principle outcome of morphodynamic evolution while in social morphogenesis the constitution of coherent units is common to segmentary, gerarchic and functional differentiation. (shrink)

The debate over the question whether quantum mechanics should be considered as a complete account of microphenomena has a long and deeply involved history, a turning point in which has been certainly the Einstein-Bohr debate, with the ensuing charge of incompleteness raised by the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen argument. In quantum mechanics, physical systems can be prepared in pure states that nevertheless have in general positive dispersion for most physical quantities; hence in the EPR argument, the attention is focused on the question whether (...) the account of the microphysical phenomena provided by quantum mechanics is to be regarded as an exhaustive description of the physical reality to which those phenomena are supposed to refer, a question to which Einstein himself answered in the negative. However, there is a mathematical side of the completeness issue in quantum mechanics, namely the question whether the kind of states with positive dispersion can be represented as a different, dispersion-free kind of states in a way consistent with the mathematical constraints of the quantum mechanical formalism. From this point of view, the other source of the completeness issue in quantum mechanics is the no hidden variables theorem formulated by John von Neumann in his celebrated book on the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics, the preface of which already anticipates the program and the conclusion concerning the possibility of ‘neutralizing’ the statistical character of quantum mechanics. (shrink)

We introduce type-theoretic algebraic weak factorisation systems and show how they give rise to homotopy-theoretic models of Martin-Löf type theory. This is done by showing that the comprehension category associated with a type-theoretic algebraic weak factorisation system satisfies the assumptions necessary to apply a right adjoint method for splitting comprehension categories. We then provide methods for constructing several examples of type-theoretic algebraic weak factorisation systems, encompassing the existing groupoid and cubical sets models, as well as new models based on normal (...) fibrations. (shrink)

This book reports on theoretical and practical analyses of the ethical challenges connected to driving automation. It also aims at discussing issues that have arisen from the European Commission 2020 report “Ethics of Connected and Automated Vehicles. Recommendations on Road Safety, Privacy, Fairness, Explainability and Responsibility”. Gathering contributions by philosophers, social scientists, mechanical engineers, and UI designers, the book discusses key ethical concerns relating to responsibility and personal autonomy, privacy, safety, and cybersecurity, as well as explainability and human-machine interaction. On (...) the one hand, it examines these issues from a theoretical, normative point of view. On the other hand, it proposes practical strategies to face the most urgent ethical problems, showing how the integration of ethics and technology can be achieved through design practices. All in all, this book fosters a multidisciplinary approach where philosophy, ethics, and engineering are integrated, rather than just juxtaposed. It is meant to inform and inspire an audience of philosophers of technology, ethicists, engineers, developers, manufacturers, and regulators, among other interested readers. (shrink)

En gran medida, el cambio climático ha sido estructurado de manera jerárquica en escalas-niveles: local, regional y global. Sin embargo, el vínculo entre dichas escalas-niveles y la delimitación de cada una dista de ser trivial. En este trabajo nos proponemos analizar cómo es considerado el cambio climático y sus escalas-niveles por el Grupo Intergubernamental de Expertos sobre el Cambio Climático (IPCC) y en dos proyectos productivos: las plantaciones forestales de Chile y el trigo transgénico HB4. Ambos proyectos son exhibidos en (...) armonía con los objetivos de mitigación y/o adaptación al cambio climático, pero cuestionados por tener prácticas dañinas para el ambiente. En términos generales, a pesar de las múltiples causas que se asocian al cambio climático, mostramos que, en ambos proyectos productivos, la emisión de dióxido de carbono es presentada como única su causa, y la gestión del carbono a nivel global es propuesta como estrategia principal para la mitigación y/o adaptación. Por su parte, las escalas-niveles regionales y locales tienen menos importancia en el discurso público del IPCC y de las empresas asociadas a los proyectos productivos. Por su parte, elementos propios de estas últimas escalas-niveles son resaltados en las críticas ambientales a las forestales y al trigo HB4, en disonancia con los beneficios globales publicitados. Argumentamos pues que el discurso ambiental de las empresas precisa de una estrategia reduccionista en la que las escalas-niveles locales y regionales son reducidas a la escala-nivel global para mostrarse amigables con el ambiente, a la vez que justifica e invisibiliza los deterioros ambientales locales y regionales. (shrink)

Resumen: El supuesto de la constitución del yo a partir de la relación intersubjetiva que surge con el reconocimiento del otro hace emerger el problema del fundamento ontológico del yo. Por una parte, el yo no puede existir de manera aislada, pero por otra, subordinar su constitución a la relación con el otro puede debilitar el yo al hacerlo dependiente, para su constitución, en algo distinto de él. Hacer que la constitución del yo dependa de la relación intersubjetiva plantea la (...) cuestión del inicio: ¿Qué son, antes de relacionarse, aquellos que entran en relación? ¿Si el yo se reconoce a sí mismo reconociendo a otro, qué es aquello que reconoce? Estas preguntas apuntan a la búsqueda de un fundamento ontológico o metafísico para la antropología fenomenológica: el uno no puede depender del otro y a su vez este del primero. La antropología filosófica de Paul Ricoeur, con su énfasis en la corporalidad e historicidad del hombre, además de su diálogo con Aristóteles, ofrece respuesta a estas preguntas. Ricoeur estudia al hombre desde dentro, pero no olvida aquello propio del hombre que hace que el ser humano pueda ser reconocido y capaz de reconocer.: The proposition of the constitution of the self as starting from the intersubjective relationship that emerges from the recognition of the other, presents the problem of the ontological foundation of the self. On one hand, the self cannot exist in isolation, but on the other, making its constitution subordinate to the relation with the other can debilitate the self as it is made dependent, for its constitution, on something different from the self. If the constitution of the self is dependent on the intersubjective relation the question of its origin arises: What are those who enter a relation before relating? If the self only recognizes itself recognizing another, what is it that it recognizes? These questions are directed towards the search for an ontological or metaphysical foundation for the study of phenomenological anthropology. The self cannot depend on the other, and this one, in turn, on the self. Paul Ricoeur’s philosophical anthropology, with its emphasis on the corporeal and historical nature of man, and its dialogue with Aristotle, offers answers to these questions. Ricoeur studies man from his inner life but does not forget that which makes it possible for a human being to recognize and to be recognized. (shrink)

This paper is aimed to understand the state of the art and the resulting consequences of the legal framework in Europe, with regard to the protection of children's data. Especially when they interact with networked and robotic toys, like in 'My friend Cayla' case. In order to evaluate the practical implications of the use of IoT devices by children or teenager users, the first part of the paper presents an analysis of the international guiding principles of the protection of minors, (...) a category which enjoys a higher level of protection of their fundamental rights, due to their condition of lack of physical and psychological maturity. Secondly, the focus is moved upon the protection of personal data of children. Only after confronting previous data protection legal instruments and having compared them with the novelties set forth in General Data Protection Regulation, it is reasonable to assume that new provisions such as "privacy by design" principle, adequacy of security measures and codes of conduct, can support data controllers in ensuring compliance in the field of IoT toys. In conclusion, the paper supports a view of Data Protection Authorities as a relevant player in enhancing these renovated tools in order to achieve the protection of children's rights, as to ensure their substantial protection against the threats of the interconnected world. (shrink)