During a Barolo en primeur tasting session, a seasoned wine taster is assailed by a procedural unease which leads him to question the foundations on which his work rests. Sparked off by his reading of Michel Le Gris’ pamphlet Dionysos crucifié, the taster’s objections and perplexities are directed towards teasing out the rules and coordinates of a tasting aesthetic which has become tamed and domesticated, at the service of a narcissistic “tyranny of instant gratification”. Such an approach translates into wines (...) that are beaten into submission by interventionist winemakers, wines that derive from a tasting model that has been pre-emptively cleansed of tension or dissonance so as to exalt products that are easy, reassuring, docile to marketing logic, and increasingly similar. What sort of doubts, what interpretative friction can hope to reacquaint wine criticism with its true and original aims? What relations between the tongue that tastes and the tongue that speaks can respond to the needs of a new approach to wine appreciation, a ‘tasting different’? (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2015 Heft: 206 Seiten: 13-35.

When we use secure computer systems, we engage with carefully orchestrated and ordered interactions called “security ceremonies”, all of which exist to assure security. A great deal of attention has been paid to improving the usability of these ceremonies over the last two decades, to make them easier for end-users to engage with. Yet, usability improvements do not seem to have endeared end users to ceremonies. As a consequence, human actors might subvert the ceremony’s processes or avoid engaging with it. (...) Here, we consider whether beautification could be one way of making ceremonies more appealing. To explore beautification in this context, we carried out three studies. Study 1 surveyed 250 participants to derive a wide range of potential dimensions of “beautiful ceremonies”. These statements were sorted into dominant themes and converted into statements, which fed into the second study, with 309 respondents, to reveal the dominant dimensions constituting beauty. Study 3 asked 41 participants to carry out a Q-sort, which revealed the ways that people combine the identified dimensions when characterising security ceremonies as “beautiful”. These studies have allowed us to pin down the perceived dimensions of beauty in the context of security ceremonies, and also to understand how people combine these dimensions in different ways in judging security ceremonies to be beautiful, confirming the old adage of beauty being “in the eye of the beholder”. We conclude by highlighting the constraints imposed by the overarching requirement for security to be maintained in the face of any usability improvements and beautification endeavours. (shrink)

‘Nomofanie’ sta per “manifestazioni del nómos”. Nel libro si presentano configurazioni concettuali, problemi teoretici e contesti empirici che sono altrettanti dispositivi nomofanici, cioè produttivi di varie e molteplici manifestazioni di quel nómos che la filosofia del diritto è chiamata ad indagare. Quattro i filosofi più richiamati: Aristotele, Tommaso d’Aquino, Kant e Hegel, che costituiscono una sorta di “quadratura” per pensare alcune questioni critiche del vivere-insieme anche nelle società presenti.

Il volume analizza e commenta le lezioni inedite che Cosmo Guastella, docente di Filosofia teoretica nell’Università di Palermo, tenne tra il 1903 e il 1915. Il testo contribuisce a colmare un aspetto inedito per la ricostruzione dell’intera produzione de.

The recent global outspread of the COVID-19 pandemic has influenced the lives of people across multiple countries including athletes, coaches, and supporting staff. Along with everybody else, coaches found themselves constrained to an at-home self-isolation, which limited their ability to normally engage with their profession and to interact with their athletes. This situation may also have impacted their own psychological well-being. With this study, we explored coaches’ perceptions of stress in relation to their emotion regulation strategies depending upon their gender (...) and competitive level. A sample of 2272 Italian coaches were surveyed during the period of lockdown. Mean values for perceived stress and emotion regulation strategies were compared to normative data of the two instruments as reported in the original studies. Furthermore, two Multivariate analyses of variance were completed to observe the potential differences in the coaches’ emotion regulation strategies and perception of stress. Finally, a blockwise regression analysis was run to assess how coaches’ emotion regulation strategies impacted upon their perception of stress. Both women and men reported higher levels of perceived stress than those reported in the normative data. Similarly, average scores for emotion regulation strategies were significantly different from those reported for normative data, in particular, coaches reported slightly higher use of emotion regulation strategies than participants in the original study. Significant gender-based differences emerged in terms of emotional regulations, with men adopting more suppression than women. No differences by competitive level were found. In terms of perceived stress, male coaches and elite coaches showed to be more in control of the situation than female coaches and non-elite coaches, respectively, while women experienced more negative stress than men. The blockwise regression evidenced how reappraisal resulted to be predictive in helping coaches to reduce their perception of stress, while suppression predicted higher stress perceptions. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2016 Heft: 213 Seiten: 123-164.

Aristotle�s account on natural slavery is neither misleading nor paradoxical, but plausible even though controversial, unlike many commentators think of. On his view natural masters are essentially the virtuous people, viz. those who have been perfected in their process of growing, and natural slaves are essentially the vicious people, viz. those who have been injured or corrupted in some way in their growing up so as to suffer from a lack of autonomous practical rationality. Of course, many barbarians are in (...) this state, but there is no need to presume that all of them are. More to the point, some Greeks will be in this state, especially the many and he who the many have a high regard for. Because of this state, slavery is for the better allowing a slave�s life to become more worthwhile as an instrumental part of the master�s living a good life. Particularly, nature requires that some humans will be able to attain happiness some other will not. Masters and slaves are linked through the rational pursuit of happiness by the political community where they play different roles but equally required. Thus, master and slave will form a single system whose working unity does confirm that a clear separation between that which dominates and that is being dominated must always take place for natural things to be according the best standard. (shrink)

In the present article, we introduce an ethical evaluation methodology for clinical cases. Although rejecting proceduralism as a system, we develop a procedure that eventually could be formalized as a flow chart to help carry out an ethical evaluation for clinical cases. We clarify the elements that constitute an ethical evaluation: aim, integration, and how the action is performed. We leave aside the aspect of intentions, focusing on the object of a medical action, arguing that the internal aim of a (...) clinical action carries a moral value per se. Our evaluation system takes into account only objects and circumstances and their intrinsic morality, since we are dealing with the evaluation of a clinical case, and not with a personal and complete clinical action. DOI: 10.5294/pebi.2016.20.1.5. (shrink)

In this paper we want to analyze some philosophical and epistemological connections between a new kind of technology recently developed within robotics, and the previous mechanical approach. A new paradigm about machine-design in robotics, currently defined as ‘Embodied Intelligence’, has recently been developed. Here we consider the debate on the relationship between the hand and the intellect, from the perspective of the history of philosophy, aiming at providing a more suitable understanding of this paradigm. The new bottom-up approach to design (...) is deeply rooted in a new kind of empiricism, which tries to overcome issues connected with the previous approach strongly committed with the Artificial Intelligence (AI) debate and its origin. Since Turing’s time, the AI debate showed a rationalistic bias which remained undisputed until now. The paradigm shift we are witnessing nowadays is a reply to that bias in order to achieve not only a better way to design robots, but also to understand some underlying epistemological remarks. (shrink)

Este artículo discute el comentario de Alejandro a Aristóteles, Metafísica V.8 1017b23-26. Allí Aristóteles sostiene que la sustancia se dice de dos maneras: (i) el sustrato último, y (ii) la estructura y la forma de cada cosa. En cuanto al primer significado, el comentador apropiadamente pone énfasis en el hecho de que hay una perfecta biunivocidad entre ser sustancia y ser sustrato. Esta biunivocidad, sugiere Abbate, puede verse en las tres entidades que, según el mismo Aristóteles, desde las Categorías –una (...) fórmula reescrita por Alejandro que puede llamarse, en orden creciente, materia, compuesto y forma. De hecho, tales entidades muestran cómo ser el sustrato último significa no ser predicado de nada, un carácter que la forma se realiza por completo cuando es absolutamente inmaterial, en la medida en que no está constituida por referencia de una cosa a otra, menos aún cuál es su sustrato, esto es, la forma como esencia. En cuanto al segundo significado, el comentador parece individualizar tres acepciones diferentes, según las cuales la forma puede llamarse 1) solamente puede ser tal como una forma natural que es inmanente a los cuerpos; 2) como simplemente separada, en un sentido pasivo, de la materia la que se encuentra constitutivamente vinculada. Ésta es la razón por la cual no puede subsistir separadamente, si no virtualmente; como una forma eterna de los cuerpos divinos, no subsistente en relación a cualquier sustrato. De acuerdo con la última acepción, la forma como un motor divino indica una separación completa: tanto la individualidad de una sustancia primera como la trascendencia como una forma pura en acto. Es una sustancia suprasensible, que está separada tanto como el primer motor. Abbate concluye argumentando que Alejandro, por ende, nos autoriza a pensar que el primer carácter, esto es, el carácter que más que cualquier otro acepta la distinción entre aquello que es sustancia y todo lo que no es sustancia, si es cierto que las sustancias más elevadas, las inmateriales, se distinguen de las sustancias materiales en llevar al máximo cumplimiento este carácter. (shrink)

Recent arguments claim that behavioral science has focused – to its detriment – on the individual over the system when construing behavioral interventions. In this commentary, we argue that tackling economic inequality using both framings in tandem is invaluable. By studying individuals who have overcome inequality, “positive deviants,” and the system limitations they navigate, we offer potentially greater policy solutions.

The investigation of visual categorization has recently been aided by the introduction of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which achieve unprecedented accuracy in picture classification after extensive training. Even if the architecture of CNNs is inspired by the organization of the visual brain, the similarity between CNN and human visual processing remains unclear. Here, we investigated this issue by engaging humans and CNNs in a two‐class visual categorization task. To this end, pictures containing animals or vehicles were modified to contain (...) only low/high spatial frequency (HSF) information, or were scrambled in the phase of the spatial frequency spectrum. For all types of degradation, accuracy increased as degradation was reduced for both humans and CNNs; however, the thresholds for accurate categorization varied between humans and CNNs. More remarkable differences were observed for HSF information compared to the other two types of degradation, both in terms of overall accuracy and image‐level agreement between humans and CNNs. The difficulty with which the CNNs were shown to categorize high‐passed natural scenes was reduced by picture whitening, a procedure which is inspired by how visual systems process natural images. The results are discussed concerning the adaptation to regularities in the visual environment (scene statistics); if the visual characteristics of the environment are not learned by CNNs, their visual categorization may depend only on a subset of the visual information on which humans rely, for example, on low spatial frequency information. (shrink)

The article examines the contribution of the Italian journalist and historian Giampaolo Pansa to the Italian collective memory. The definition of the concept of "collective trauma", as well as "structural violence" is given. The work also deals with the consequences of the fascist regime on Italian identity, expressed in cultural trauma. A historiographical review of two books by J. Pansa, who made a great impression on the Italians, as he was the first to decide to tell about the mutual (...) two-sided arbitrariness of winners and losers that took place in Italy during the civil War of 1943–1945. For a long time it was forbidden to talk about this conflict in Italy about what the traumatized consciousness did not allow to remember. The silence that Italy was struck by eventually played a bad role for the Italians. Having abruptly left the fascist worldview, having abruptly changed their identity from totalitarian to democratic, the Italians were afraid to work through this trauma, not wanting to remember the lynching and arbitrariness committed by many of those who were considered and rightfully considered heroes. Moreover, many families who were associated with fascism or simply adhered to these views were afraid to talk about them because of the risk of retaliation. (shrink)