This Handbook offers a broad yet unified treatment of many philosophical issues connected with climate change, ranging from foundational puzzles to detailed applications. It extends to many branches of philosophy that are relevant to the understanding of the premises and implications of the impacts of climate change on human and nonhuman life on Earth. More specifically, the handbook examines the scientific accounts of climate change as well as its causes. It explores the tools offered by social sciences and humanities to (...) study the societal premises and impacts of climate change as well as delving deeper into the ethical and political issues connected with and resulting from climate change. By doing so, it puts it all in an ecological and historical context. In addition, the book offers solutions to some important philosophical puzzles and problems, and indicates paths of interaction between philosophy and other disciplines. The discussion about climate change and the mitigation/adaptation policies spans many areas and levels – from abstract science and philosophy to current on-the-ground politics. However, climate change is also a great a philosophical puzzle. Indeed, its existential and practical relevance can be thought to largely derive from the philosophical complications it engenders. Climate change is applied philosophy par excellence. Preventing dangerous anthropogenic climate change needs very good philosophy applied to concrete and specific practical issues. Climate change is an area where scholars from very different provenances should cooperate on equal terms, having in view a common, and really important, purpose – contribute to preventing great burdens and even the extinction of humankind and the destruction of hospitable and valuable non-human nature. (shrink)

In this paper we analyse the conditions for attributing to AI autonomous systems the ontological status of “artificial moral agents”, in the context of the “distributed responsibility” between humans and machines in Machine Ethics (ME). In order to address the fundamental issue in ME of the unavoidable “opacity” of their decisions with ethical/legal relevance, we start from the neuroethical evidence in cognitive science. In humans, the “transparency” and then the “ethical accountability” of their actions as responsible moral agents is not (...) in contradiction with the unavoidable “opacity” (unawareness) of the brain process by which they perform their moral judgements on the right action to execute. In fact, the moral accountability of our actions depends on what is immediately before and after our “moral judgements” on the right action to execute (formally, deontic first order logic (FOL) decisions). I.e., our moral accountability depends on the “ethical constraints” we imposed to our judgement before performing it in an opaque way. Anyway, our moral accountability depends overall on the “ethical assessment” or explicit “moral reasoning” after and over the moral judgement before executing our actions (deontic higher order logic (HOL) assessment). In this way, in the light of the AI “imitation game”, the consistent attribution of the status of ethically accountable artificial moral agents to autonomous AI systems depends on two similar conditions. Firstly, it depends on the presence of “ethical constraints” to be satisfied in their Machine Learning (ML) supervised optimization algorithm during its training phase, to give the system ethical skills (“competences”) in its decisions. Secondly – and definitely—, it depends on the presence in an AI autonomous system of a deontic HOL “ethical reasoner” to perform an automatic, and fully transparent assessment (metalogical deontic valuation) about the decisions taken by the ethically skilled ML algorithm about the right action to execute, before executing it. Finally, we show that the proper deontic FOL and HOL for this class of artificial moral agents is Kripke’s modal relational logic, in its algebraic topological formalization. This is naturally implemented in the dissipative QFT unsupervised deep learning of our brains, based on the “doubling of the degrees of freedom” (DDF), and then in the so-called “deep-belief” artificial neural networks for the statistical data pre-processing. This unsupervised learning procedure is also compliant with the usage of the “maximin fairness principle”, used as a balancing aggregation principle of the statistical variables in Sen’s formal theory of fairness. (shrink)

The meaning of spontaneous skin conductance activity, and its relevance to appraisal theory, are examined. Spontaneous skin conductance activity is hypothesised to reflect task engagement, and thus to be correlated with appraisals of problem-focused coping potential. In a within-subjects design, subjects solved anagrams in which task difficulty was manipulated by varying both the difficulty of the anagrams and the amount of time available to solve them. In the most difficult condition, appraisals of coping potential were expected, and observed, to be (...) especially low, and these appraisals were predicted to produce selective disengagement from the task, yielding reduced skin conductance activity. Within trials, skin conductance activity increased at the start of the trials in all conditions, but decreased by the end of the trials in the most difficult condition only. At the end of the trials, both spontaneous response rate and maximum response amplitude were positively correlated, within-subjects, with appraisals of coping potential, and, even after controlling for task difficulty, with solving the anagram. These findings support the hypothesised relation between appraised coping potential and spontaneous skin conductance activity, and the interpretation of this activity as reflecting task engagement. (shrink)

O positivismo jurídico é predominantemente ensinado e aplicado há décadas por profissionais da área jurídica brasileira, geralmente com referência à construção teórica de Hans Kelsen (1881-1973), deixando à margem muitos outros estudos que oferecem importantes formulações e conceitos para a compreensão do Direito contemporâneo. Este artigo se junta a algumas poucas pesquisas sobre outros referenciais teóricos acerca do positivismo jurídico, analisando a regra de reconhecimento no pensamento teórico de Herbert Hart (1907-1992), apresentando-a como incremento e superação da teoria imperativista de (...) John Austin (1790-1859). A partir de pesquisa bibliográfica, mostramos que, em Hart, a regra de reconhecimento (modalidade de regra secundária) apresenta-se indispensável para a certeza necessária ao Direito, bem como para aferir a validade do sistema jurídico. (shrink)

Under many conditions, emotional information is processed with priority and it may lead to cognitive conflict when it competes with task-relevant information. Accordingly, being able to ignore emotional information relies on cognitive control. The present perspective offers an integrative account of the mechanism that may underlie emotional conflict resolution in tasks involving response activation. We point to the contribution of emotional arousal and primed approach or avoidance motivation in accounting for emotional conflict resolution. We discuss the role of arousal in (...) individuals with impairments in visceral pathways to the brain due to spinal cord lesions, as it may offer important insights into the “typical” mechanisms of emotional conflict control. We argue that a better understanding of emotional conflict control could be critical for adaptive and flexible behavior and has potential implications for the selection of appropriate therapeutic interventions. (shrink)

Gianfranco Ravasi ha voluto "ripensare" ciò che era già stato indagato e meditato durante la lunga avventura del pensiero umano, a partire dalle culture primitive e dalle antiche civiltà. E ha analizzato le due sorgenti che alimentano il concetto occidentale di anima: le Sacre Scritture e la cultura greca, con i miti di Psiche e di Orfeo e pensatori come Platone, Aristotele e Plotino. Giunti alla fine di questa riflessione ci si rende conto che la storia dell'anima coincide con (...) la storia dell'uomo, creatura di Dio. E un dubbio affiora: che l'agitarsi febbrile dell'umanità contemporanea non sia un avanzare ma un insensibile retrocedere, o uno strano volteggiare sempre sullo stesso spazio, e che proprio “l'anima, con la sua fame di eterno e di infinito” sia ciò che invece ci costringerà a muoverci “sempre oltre, verso un Oltre illimitato”. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis study is a direct replication of gaze-liking effect using the same design, stimuli and procedure. The gaze-liking effect describes the tendency for people to rate objects as more likeable when they have recently seen a person repeatedly gaze toward rather than away from the object. However, as subsequent studies show considerable variability in the size of this effect, we sampled a larger number of participants than the original study to gain a more precise estimate of the gaze-liking effect size. (...) Our results indicate a much smaller standardised effect size than that of the original study. Our smaller effect size was not due to general insensitivity to eye-gaze effects because the same sample showed a clear gaze-cuing effect – faster reaction times when eyes looked toward vs away from target objects. We discuss the implications of our findings for future studies wishing to study the gaze-liking effect. (shrink)

In Heidegger’s thought, it is possible to recognize an accurate reflection about the pain that afflicts modern man, as well as a particular indication for its cure. In pain, man experiences his being destined to metaphysics like something incurable, which requires to think the topology of the gift of being. Pain and convalescence will be exposed in that topology, under the light of The Turn [die Kehre], The Event [Ereignis] and the line between Overcoming [Überwindung] and Twisting [Verwindung] of Metaphysics, (...) in order to recognize that, in Heidegger’s reflection, it is in pain “itself” where the cure of the incurable can be possible: the passion of human finitude, the experience of the giving of being and the care of nothingness. Before overcoming [überwunden] the Metaphysics, with its intention of appropriate the being, Metaphsyisics must be reestablished [verwunden] in its inappropriate truth. (shrink)