Emotion-processing impairment represents a risk factor for the development of somatic illness, affecting negatively both health-related quality of life and disease management in several chronic diseases. The present pilot study aims at investigating the associations between alexithymia and depression, anxiety, and HRQoL in patients with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis ; examining the association between these three psychological conditions together with HRQoL, and thyroid autoantibodies status as well as thyroid echotexture in patients with HT; and comparing the intensity of all these clinical psychological (...) features in patients with HT versus controls. Twenty-one patients with serologically or ultrasonographically verified HT and 16 controls with non-toxic goiter or postsurgical hypothyroidism were recruited for this study. Serum thyrotropin and free thyroxine, as well as thyroid autoantibodies, were assayed. Alexithymia, depression, anxiety, and HRQoL were assessed with Toronto Alexithymia Scale; Beck Depression Inventory, second edition; Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale; and Health Survey Short-Form 36, respectively. A negative relationship between the difficulty to describe feelings and the cognitive component of depression was found. Besides, patients with seronegative HT had lower somatic anxiety than patients with HT who tested positive. Besides, no statistically significant difference was found between patients with HT and controls with regard to somatic anxiety. The present study suggests the relevance of alexithymia in patients suffering from HT, which may be intertwined with a possible state of underreported depression that is mainly expressed through physical complaints. Promoting the capability to describe and communicate feelings could contribute to psychological elaboration and coping with the disease and, consequently, to the improvement of self-management and perceived HRQoL. (shrink)

L'application de la notion de structure à l'analyse des systèmes philosophiques est sans doute l'un des développements les plus fructueux de ce qu'on a appelé le structuralisme. La tradition inaugurée par Martial Gueroult et poursuivie par Victor Goldschmidt, Jules Vuillemin et d'autres a conduit à une fondation critique de la notion de système philosophique et a renouvelé profondément la méthode de l'histoire de la philosophie. En cherchant à reconstituer les orientations principales de cette tradition, nous essayons d'abord de distinguer le (...) structuralisme en philosophie du structuralisme en mathématique et en linguistique. Nous prenons comme base de discussion de cette question l'analyse de Gilles-Gaston Granger donnée en 1967, dans Pensée formelle et sciences de l'homme. Ensuite, nous abordons trois problèmes centraux de l'application de la notion de système en philosophie. La question de la clôture des concepts philosophiques ; la question de la vérité ; la question des rapports entre science et philosophie. (shrink)

This article is an attempt to present Gödel's discussion on concepts, from 1944 to the late 1970s, in particular relation to the thought of Frege and Russell. The discussion takes its point of departure from Gödel's claim in notes on Bernay's review of ?Russell's mathematical logic?. It then retraces the historical background of the notion of intension which both Russell and Gödel use, and offers some grounds for claiming that Gödel consistently considered logic as a free-type theory of concepts, called (...) intensions, considered as the denotations of predicate names. (shrink)

NOVO CÓDIGO DE PROCESSO CIVIL: REFLEXÕES SOBRE LIBERDADE, IGUALDADE E MUDANÇAS DE PARADIGMAS.

Although organizational and situational factors have been found to predict burnout, not everyone employed at the same workplace develops it, suggesting that becoming burnt out is a complex, multifaceted phenomenon. The aim of this study was to elucidate perceptions of conscience, stress of conscience, moral sensitivity, social support and resilience among two groups of health care personnel from the same workplaces, one group on sick leave owing to medically assessed burnout (n = 20) and one group who showed no indications (...) of burnout (n = 20). The results showed that higher levels of stress of conscience, a perception of conscience as a burden, having to deaden one’s conscience in order to keep working in health care and perceiving a lack of support characterized the burnout group. Lower levels of stress of conscience, looking on life with forbearance, a perception of conscience as an asset and perceiving support from organizations and those around them (social support) characterized the non-burnout group. (shrink)

In The Leviathan in the state theory of Thomas Hobbes, Carl Schmitt puts forward the claim that there is a ?barely visible crack? in Hobbes's theory of the state that opened the door to liberal constitutionalism. This essay claims that Schmitt's ?thesis of the crack? is composed of two elements: first, Schmitt argues that Hobbes makes a concession to individual conscience in his discussion of miracles; second, Schmitt points out that Hobbes's individualism undermines his notion of the absolute state. As (...) Schmitt relies on an unconvincing critique of Hobbes's discourse on miracles in order to justify his more general claim against Hobbes's authoritarianism, this essay suggests that Schmitt's ?thesis of the crack? is untenable in the form that Schmitt presented it in 1938. An attempt, however, is made to salvage ?the thesis of the crack? by turning to concepts found in Schmitt's Concept of the political and in Political theology. Although Schmitt openly approved of the so?called protection/obedience principle, this essay claims that there are a number of crucial differences between Schmitt's formulation of that principle and Hobbes's own version; an examination of these differences enables us (i) to appreciate the consequences of Hobbes's individualism on his theory of the state and (ii) to shed new light on Howard Warrender's famous claim that Hobbes's sovereign is inherently weak. The essay concludes that in spite of Schmitt's fallacious formulation of the ?thesis of the crack? of 1938, his political theory affords us a rare vantage point from which we can clearly see a case against the association of Hobbes with authoritarianism. (shrink)

The paper discusses ten philosophical problems in deontic logic: how to formally represent norms, when a set of norms may be termed ‘coherent’, how to deal with normative conflicts, how contraryto-duty obligations can be appropriately modeled, how dyadic deontic operators may be redefined to relate to sets of norms instead of preference relations between possible worlds, how various concepts of permission can be accommodated, how meaning postulates and counts-as conditionals can be taken into account, and how sets of norms may (...) be revised and merged. The problems are discussed from the viewpoint of input/output logic as developed by van der Torre & Makinson. We argue that norms, not ideality, should take the central position in deontic semantics, and that a semantics that represents norms, as input/output logic does, provides helpful tools for analyzing, clarifying and solving the problems of deontic logic. (shrink)

Ethical dilemmas in critical care may cause healthcare practitioners to experience moral distress: incoherence between what one believes to be best and what occurs. Given that paediatric decision-making typically involves parents, we propose that parents can also experience moral distress when faced with making value-laden decisions in the neonatal intensive care unit. We propose a new concept—that parents may experience “moral schism”—a genuine uncertainty regarding a value-based decision that is accompanied by emotional distress. Schism, unlike moral distress, is not caused (...) by barriers to making and executing a decision that is deemed to be best by the decision-makers but rather an encounter of significant internal struggle. We explore factors that appear to contribute to both moral distress and “moral schism” for parents: the degree of available support, a sense of coherence of the situation, and a sense of responsibility. We propose that moral schism is an underappreciated concept that needs to be explicated and may be more prevalent than moral distress when exploring decision-making experiences for parents. We also suggest actions of healthcare providers that may help minimize parental “moral schism” and moral distress. (shrink)

Internationally recognized logicians present current thinking on the understanding of the role of deduction in human reasoning.

The Affective grounding hypothesis suggests that affective experiences play a crucial role in abstract concepts’ processing (Kousta et al. 2011). Vigliocco and colleagues test the role of affective experiences as well as the role of language in learning words denoting abstract concepts, comparing children with typical and atypical development. They conclude that besides the affective experiences also language plays a critical role in the processing of words referring to abstract concepts.

After considering the main theses of Alain Richardson's analysis of Carnap's Aufbau, and in particular Richardson's motivation for criticising the Quinean naturalisation of epistemology, we focus on the alleged neo-kantian influence on Carnap work. There is something lacking in Richardson rational reconstruction of Camap's work before 1939: the German logical tradition of Frege and Hilbert which Carnap was evidently confronted with. The themes of this tradition appear and disappear here and there in Richardson's book, but the real weight of its (...) epistemological consequences on the nature of logic and mathematics seems misplaced. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to consider both Schmitt’s polemical and his analytical claims in dealing with a concept which is central to his theory and yet strangely overlooked by the secondary literature: the concept of friendship. The essay proceeds in three steps; first it makes some textual claims about the meaning and role of friendship in Schmitt’s writings; secondly its puts forward an interpretation of the significance of friendship in Schmitt’s political thought; finally, it tries to disentangle polemics (...) from diagnostics in Schmitt’s discourse and draws some tentative conclusions. (shrink)

Hobbes's philosophical discourse is deconstructed as the interplay of the drama of individual behavior as perceived by rational agents and the detached analysis of conflict a by a political geometer . The author solves some long-standing problems in Hobbesian political philosophy (e.g., the role of glory, Hobbes' pessimism) and shows the consistency of Hobbes's attempt to derive absolutism as the only stable political association.

Au Moyen Âge, la théorie médicale de la complexio n’est pas confinée dans le domaine restreint de la théorie ou de la pratique de la médecine. Elle implique une anthropologie déterminée, qui ne concerne pas seulement la santé et le bien-être de l’homme, mais, dans certaines limites, la nature même de celui-ci ou, pour mieux dire, la manière dont la nature spécifique de l’homme s’articule avec la variété et la différence des tempéraments et des dispositions individuelles : ce qu’est chaque (...) individu dépend de la complexion qui lui est propre. Cette anthropologie médicale dépasse les limites de sa discipline et pénètre aussi la théologie, par une série d’implications, pas toujours prévisibles, qui concernent la place de l’homme dans l’univers, l’eschatologie, la démonologie et aussi la christologie. Le but de cette étude est de rendre compte de certaines de ces implications en regard de la pensée de Thomas d’Aquin. Les différents lieux où Thomas étudie la complexion corporelle – il en considère les implications dans les domaines intellectuel et moral – montrent une sorte d’assimilation de l’anthropologie médicale (indirectement galénique, mais surtout avicennienne) à l’intérieur de son horizon de pensée, constitué par la philosophie naturelle aristotélicienne et par les exigences propres à sa théologie. (shrink)

The aggregation of individual judgments on logically interconnected propositions into a collective decision on the same propositions is called judgment aggregation. Literature in social choice and political theory has claimed that judgment aggregation raises serious concerns. For example, consider a set of premises and a conclusion where the latter is logically equivalent to the former. When majority voting is applied to some propositions (the premises) it may give a different outcome than majority voting applied to another set of propositions (the (...) conclusion). This problem is known as the discursive dilemma (or paradox). The discursive dilemma is a serious problem since it is not clear whether a collective outcome exists in these cases, and if it does, what it is like. Moreover, the two suggested escape-routes from the paradox—the so-called premise-based procedure and the conclusion-based procedure—are not, as I will show, satisfactory methods for group decision-making. In this paper I introduce a new aggregation procedure inspired by an operator defined in artificial intelligence in order to merge belief bases. The result is that we do not need to worry about paradoxical outcomes, since these arise only when inconsistent collective judgments are not ruled out from the set of possible solutions. (shrink)

Carl Schmitt's friend/enemy principle is exposed to in-depth philosophical analysis and historical examination with the aim of showing that the political follows hostility, violence and terror as form follows matter. The book argues that the partisan is an umbrella concept that includes the national and global terrorist.

Thorough a detailed analysis of version III of Gödel's Is mathematics syntax of language?, we propose a new interpretation of Gödel's criticism against the conventionalist point of view in mathematics. When one reads carefully Gödel's text, it brings out that, contrary to the opinion of some commentators, Gödel did not overlook the novelty of Carnap's solution, and did not criticise him from an old-fashioned conception of science. The general aim of our analysis is to restate the Carnap/Gödel debate in the (...) Fregean heritage. We stress the way both of them try to answer, from different Fregean perspectives, to the question of the nature of logic and mathematics in knowledge. (shrink)

This essay analyses the specific rhetoric of degeneration which was observable in the antisemitic polemic discourse of the last decades of 19th century. It provides an overview of the representation of Jewish art und artists as it took shape in the antisemitic literature of the Wilhelminian epoch. The growing emphasis placed by psychiatrists and racial theorists on the pathologies of the,,Jewish race“, such as hysteria or degeneration, resulted in the tendency to pathologize Jewish art and artists, which were deemed responsible (...) for the alleged decline of German culture. Mere aesthetic categories underwent a process of reduction and ideologization and were finally used for defamatory purposes, as shown in the case of the antisemitic denigration of Heinrich Heine. In order to demonstrate this, the analysis outlines the strict dichotomic logic of these argumentations, as the definition and consolidation of an ideal German essence was usually based on the construction of a degenerated Jewish identity. (shrink)

The collection Guarigioni, rinascite, metamorfosi is part of Sandro Barbera’s project to compile two volumes containing updated versions of his most incisive essays on Goethe and Schopenhauer. Unfortunately, his untimely passing left us preparatory material, but no drafts of new work. In his introduction, Stefano Busellato explains that the initial project had to be shelved in favor of a collection of essays that, to Barbera’s mind, were all but ready for publication. Four essays, each marking a major step in his (...) thought, have been added to his original selection.One of this collection’s many strengths is the wide range of themes that Barbera’s shrewd analysis explores in works by Goethe, Schopenhauer, and... (shrink)

The Ostrogorski paradox and the discursive dilemma are seemingly unrelated paradoxes of aggregation. The former is discussed in traditional social choice theory, while the latter is at the core of the new literature on judgment aggregation. Both paradoxes arise when, in a group, each individual consistently makes a judgment, or expresses a preference, (in the form of yes or no) over specific propositions, and the collective outcome is in some respect inconsistent. While the result is logically inconsistent in the case (...) of the discursive paradox, it is not stable with respect to the level of aggregation in the case of the Ostrogorski paradox. In the following I argue that, despite these differences, the two problems have a similar structure. My conclusion will be twofold: on the one hand, the similarities between the paradoxes support the claim that these problems should be tackled using the same aggregation procedure; on the other hand, applying the same procedure to these paradoxes will help clarify the strengths and weaknesses of the aggregation method itself. More specifically, I will show that an operator defined in artificial intelligence to merge belief bases can deal with both paradoxes. (shrink)

This paper provides algorithmic options for belief revision of a database receiving an infinite stream of inputs. At stage , the database is ¡£¢ , receiving the input ¤ ¢ . The revision algorithms for moving to the new database ¡ ¢¦¥¨§© ¡ ¢ ¤ ¢ take into account the history of previous revisions actually executed as well as possible revision options which were discarded at the time but may now be pursued. The appropriate methodology for carrying this out is (...) Labelled Deductive Systems. (shrink)

The article explores the complex experiences and positions of migrant women in the `nursing profession' in a southern European country, Greece. It looks at ways in which a rudimentary welfare state and a large informal economy have created the demand for les infirmières exclusives and for `quasi-nurses'. The supply and use of their services, on the one hand, helps perpetuate this informal welfare system and, on the other, has implications for migrant women themselves as, inter alia, it contributes to their (...) deskilling, exploitation, marginalization and exclusion. The multifarious degrees and forms that these processes take, to a large extent, depend on the cross-cutting of gender, ethnicity and class, as sexism intersects with different forms of `othering' and racialization processes in the destination country. The position of these women is also located in terms of ethnic and national boundaries. (shrink)

In the ideological construction of colonialism and, more widely, of any hierarchy of human communities, a crucial role is played by discourse on language. English nationalism and imperialism, in particular, developed extensive argumentations on language as an interpretation of the encounter with the other, on the basis of internal cultural developments that assigned to language the role of social discriminator. The paper investigates a strand of such argumentations during the period from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century: the concept of (...) “primitive” languages, described in a positive or, more often, in a negative light. The former arguments employ tones related to the idea of the “good savage” and stand in connection with narratives on the “language of Adam” and of the “Welsh Indians”, the latter uses a rhetoric extolling “progress” and “civilization” against the “immaturity” and “backwardness” of primitive languages, a perspective that was later to influence Darwinism. (shrink)

This article concentrates on the rapid growth of trafficking in women from Eastern and Central Europe who end up working in the sex industry in Athens. Such movement of people is constituted around global networks of female labour. The social processes and mechanisms that produce and reproduce the somatic and social exploitation of female migrants caught in the web of the sex industry are analysed. These processes are responsible for a continuation and accentuation of women’s loss of power to represent (...) their interests, to seek viable economic alternatives. The living and working spaces of these women rest upon their isolation and individuation and total control of their everyday activities. Ethnicity, age and racialized exclusions all intersect with sexist relations and practices within Greek society and the ethnic communities under study. The interplay of these processes operates differently within different ethnic groups of women to produce different outcomes. (shrink)

In this article we present the bases for a computational theory of the cognitive processes underlying human communication. The core of the article is devoted to the analysis of the phases in which the process of comprehension of a communicative act can be logically divided: (1) literal meaning, where the reconstruction of the mental states literally expressed by the actor takes place: (2) speaker's meaning, where the partner reconstructs the communicative intentions of the actor; (3) communicative effect, where the partner (...) possibly modifies his own beliefs and intentions; (4) reaction, where the intentions for the generation of the response are produced; and (5) response, where an overt response is constructed. The model appears to be compatible with relevant facts about human behavior. Our hypothesis is that, through communication, an actor tries to exploit the motivational structures of a partner so that the desired goal is generated. A second point is that social behavior requires that cooperation be maintained at some level. In the case of communication, cooperation is, in general, pursued even when the partner does not adhere to the actor's goals, and therefore no cooperation occurs at the behavioral level. This important distinction is reflected in the two kinds of game we introduce to account for communication. The main concept implied in communication is that two agents overtly reach a situation of shared mental states. Our model deals with sharedness through two primitives: shared beliefs and communicative intentions. (shrink)

La clôture des religieuses et les rapports de genre dans les couvents italiens (fin XVIe – début XVIIe siècle). L’article examine les changements dans les rapports de genre introduits par les normes du Concile de Trente sur les religieux, en particulier celles concernant la clôture des moniales. À Florence et Bologne prises comme terrains d’observation, les correspondances de l’archevêque Alessandro de’Medici avec le monastère florentin des Murate (1579-1606) et de l’archevêque de Bologne Ludovico Ludovisi avec ses vicaires (1624-1627) permettent de (...) discuter la “perméabilité” de la clôture, un concept avancé par la critique récente. Les règles de la clôture n’ont interrompu ni les rapports étroits des monastères avec la cité et la société, ni la présence dans les couvents de filles à éduquer, veuves et femmes en rupture de ban conjugal, mais elles ont fortement réduit l’autonomie des religieuses, en déléguant aux évêques et à la Congrégation romaine sur les Religieux le contrôle de l’entrée dans les monastères. Les effets de la clôture tridentine à l’intérieur des monastères se traduisent par des changements significatifs dans la hiérarchie des offices, l’organisation de la communauté par classes d’âge et l’orientation des affects vers des personnes du même sexe. En ce qui concerne les rapports de genre, enfin, le rôle des confesseurs, référents masculins privilégiés des nonnes (que ce soit sur le plan spirituel ou sur celui des équilibres internes du monastère), se renforce. (shrink)