Ci troviamo in un’epoca di grandi mutamenti e di veloce evoluzione della comunicazione scientifica. Alla chiusura e inaccessibilità di testi, dati e processi di qualità si sostituisce la richiesta corale di trasparenza, equità e democraticità. All’idea di una scienza competitiva ed esclusiva si sostituisce quella di una scienza collaborativa in cui la condivisione dei risultati è il valore fondante e punto di forza per un più veloce sviluppo. Cambia e viene messo in discussione il ruolo degli editori commerciali che devono (...) reinventarsi in questo nuovo contesto, cambiano gli equilibri di potere fra editor, revisori ed autori. Gli strumenti per rispondere a questa richiesta corale di trasparenza sono tutti a nostra disposizione, ma ancora da parte delle comunità scientifiche si avverte qualche difficoltà a recepire le nuove modalità di pratica, validazione e disseminazione della ricerca. Ancora si assiste a una certa diffidenza e forse sgomento di fronte ai pubblici possibili e ad un ciclo di vita delle ricerche che è potenzialmente infinito. Sulle spalle dei giganti, citava Newton. E ciò è soprattutto vero se vengono eliminate le barriere economiche e legali che hanno fino ad ora rappresentato un ostacolo, o per lo meno un rallentamento per lo sviluppo della ricerca scientifica. "Doctor Virtualis" è una rivista umanistica, di settore, che ha abbracciato in tempi piuttosto lontani la filosofia dell’apertura promossa dall’ateneo che oggi si è rivelata vincente. La sua storia è la storia della piattaforma di riviste che la ospita alla quale la rivista ha aderito fin dal primo anno. We are in an era of rapid evolution of scholarly communication. The inaccessibility of quality texts, data, and processes is being replaced by a choral demand for transparency, equity, and democraticity. The idea of a competitive and exclusive science is replaced by that of a collaborative science in which the sharing of results is the founding value and strength for faster development. The role of commercial publishers who must reinvent themselves in this new context changes and is challenged; the balance of power between editors, reviewers and authors changes. The tools for responding to this choral demand for transparency are all at our disposal, but still from the scientific communities there is some difficulty in taking on board the new ways of practicing, validating and disseminating research. There is still some distrust and perhaps dismay in front of possible audiences and a research life cycle that is potentially never-ending. On the shoulders of giants, Newton quoted. And this is especially true if the economic and legal barriers that have hitherto been an obstacle, or at least a slowdown to the development of scientific research are removed. Doctor Virtualis is a humanistic journal that embraced in rather distant times the philosophy of openness promoted by the university that has proved successful today. Its story is the story of the journal platform that hosts it to which the journal has joined since its first year. (shrink)

Il volume si presenta come un manuale di riferimento sul pensiero di Umberto Galimberti, una miscellanea di studi cui ha contribuito un alto numero di studiosi di diverse discipline. Questo libro indaga il lungo arco del lavoro galimbertiano: dal pensiero simbolico, dalla fenomenologia alla psichiatria, fino ad approdare alla riflessione sull'età della tecnica e alla consulenza filosofica.

This volume addresses the intriguing issue of indirect reports from an interdisciplinary perspective. The contributors include philosophers, theoretical linguists, socio-pragmaticians, and cognitive scientists. The book is divided into four sections following the provenance of the authors. Combining the voices from leading and emerging authors in the field, it offers a detailed picture of indirect reports in the world’s languages and their significance for theoretical linguistics. Building on the previous book on indirect reports in this series, this volume adds an empirical (...) and cross-linguistic approach that covers an impressive range of languages, such as Cantonese, Japanese, Hebrew, Persian, Dutch, Spanish, Catalan, Armenian, Italian, English, Hungarian, German, Rumanian, and Basque. (shrink)

This paper aims to investigate the importance of literature in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s reflections concerning two strictly connected phenomenological themes: 1) the virtuality of objects and of existence itself; 2) the genesis of truth and the intuition of essences. According to Merleau-Ponty, modern novelists have adopted a phenomenological method: instead of ‘explaining’ the world through words, they ‘show’ the lifeworld and its paradoxes indirectly. In his view, and against Jean-Paul Sartre’s position, analyzing literature means developing a theory integrating perception and the (...) imagination. Moreover, at the beginning of the 1950’s, this perspective led Merleau-Ponty to a deep revision of the Sartrian concepts of spontaneity and engagement in literary practice in favour of a theory of expression as style. As a conclusion, the paper argues for the key-role of literature in Merleau-Ponty’s indirect ontology as a way of rediscovering unity and harmony behind the metamorphosis of reality. (shrink)

En este trabajo se realiza una propuesta de comunicación transdisciplinar entre las ciencias cognitivas y la educación, tal y como se perfilan en el siglo XXI. En un primer lugar se contextualizan estos procesos de comunicación en el continuum histórico que transita desde los inicios del siglo pasado, con la configuración de la psicología educativa dentro del constructo de las ciencias educativas; pasando por la constitución de las ciencias cognitivas, a mediados del siglo XX que propició la emergencia de la (...) síntesis disciplinar entre las ciencias del cerebro y de la mente, para posibilitar un encuadre arraigado en el presente, y en las propuestas de consiliencia entre neurociencia cognitiva y educación. Desde este presente histórico, se efectúa una propuesta de diálogo entre las distintas epistemes (educativas y cognitivas), en relación con el fenómeno de la educación bilingüe, y en concreto en el contexto intercultural ecuatoriano. La integración de los distintos niveles de análisis que configuran un fenómeno complejo, como lo es todo fenómeno educativo, refleja cómo los intentos transdisciplinares orientados a reconocer la complejidad ontológica de un mismo objeto de estudio, requiere del diálogo entre las distintas epistemologías y metodologías implicadas. La apertura del campo educativo a las dimensiones mentales y cerebrales en su expresión cognitiva, requiere en este s. XXI procesos de apertura recíproca respecto de la influencia que el eje cultura-educación ejerce en el modelamiento de los procesos de cognición y aprendizaje. (shrink)

We invited five Cavell scholars to write on this topic. What follows is a vibrant exchange among Paola Marrati, Andrew Norris, Jörg Volbers, Cary Wolfe and Thomas Dumm addressing the question whether, in the contemporary political context, Cavell’s skepticism and his Emersonian perfectionism amount to a politics at all.

This text was first published in Theory, Culture & Society, May 13, 2015. For a special issue of Body & Society on ‘Rhythm, Movement, Embodiment', Paola Crespi presents two previously untranslated texts, Rudolf Bode's ‘Rhythm and its Importance for Education' and Rudolf Laban's ‘Eurhythmy and Kakorhythmy'. In the following interview she uncovers further unpublished and untranslated sources and she discusses some of the main themes of these texts in relation to the more widely known text - Danse, théâtre et (...) spectacle vivant – GALERIE – Nouvel article. (shrink)

Although remote working can involve positive outcomes both for employees and organizations, in the case of the sudden and forced remote working situation that came into place during the COVID-19 crisis there have also been reports of negative aspects, one of which is technostress. In this context of crisis, leadership is crucial in sustainably managing and supporting employees, especially employees with workaholic tendencies who are more prone to developing negative work and health outcomes. However, while research on the role of (...) the positive aspects of leadership during crises does exist, the negative aspects of leadership during the COVID-19 crisis have not yet been studied. The present study aimed to explore the role of authoritarian leadership in a sample of 339 administrative university employees who worked either completely from home or from home and the workplace. The study examined the moderating effect of a manager on this relationship and the connections between workaholism and technostress through conditional process analysis. Results pointed out that high authoritarian leadership had an enhancing effect, whereas low authoritarian leadership had a protective effect on the relationship between workaholism and technostress, only in the group of complete remote workers. Thus, authoritarian leadership should be avoided and training leaders to be aware of its effect appears to be essential. Limitations, future directions for the study, and practical implications are also discussed. (shrink)

The present study aims at exploring whether the level of well-being vary as a function of fertility status in different phases of the ovulatory cycle. We investigated the multidimensional well-being, including the cognitive component of subjective well-being related to judgments about one’s life satisfaction, the psychological well-being concerning the full growth and self-realization of the individual, and self-esteem, that is the personal judgment of overall self-worth and is recognized as one indicator of well-being. On the basis of the cycle phase (...) estimation at the moment of the experiment, one hundred and sixteen normally cycling women were divided into “fertile” and “non-fertile” groups and were administered the Psychological Well-Being Scale, the Basic Self-Esteem Scale and the Satisfaction with Life Scale. A Multivariate Analysis of Variance has been performed to examine whether there were differences between groups according to their ovulatory phase. All dimensions of psychological well-being, self-esteem and satisfaction with life were found to be stable in the different phases of the menstrual cycle. The implications of these results are discussed. (shrink)

Cross-situational statistical learning of words involves tracking co-occurrences of auditory words and objects across time to infer word-referent mappings. Previous research has demonstrated that learners can infer referents across sets of very phonologically distinct words, but it remains unknown whether learners can encode fine phonological differences during cross-situational statistical learning. This study examined learners’ cross-situational statistical learning of minimal pairs that differed on one consonant segment, minimal pairs that differed on one vowel segment, and non-minimal pairs that differed on two (...) or three segments. Learners performed above chance for all pairs, but performed worse on vowel minimal pairs than on consonant minimal pairs or non-minimal pairs. These findings demonstrate that learners can encode fine phonetic detail while tracking word-referent co-occurrence probabilities, but they suggest that phonological encoding may be weaker for vowels than for consonants. (shrink)

The assumption that origins can be defined as a hermeneutic paradigm in the humanities and in the sciences is explored in relation to specific theoretical ...

In this study, Paola Marrati approaches—in an extremely insightful, rigorous, and well-argued way—the question of the philosophical sources of Derrida's thought through a consideration of his reading of both Husserl and Heidegger. A central focus of the book is the analysis of the concepts of genesis and trace as they define Derrida's thinking of historicity, time, and subjectivity. Notions such as the contamination of the empirical and the transcendental, dissemination and writing, are explained as key categories establishing a guiding (...) thread that runs through Derrida's early and later works. Whereas in his discussion of Husserl Derrida problematizes the relationship between the ideality of meaning and the singularity of its historical production, in his interpretation of Heidegger he challenges the very idea of the originary finitude of temporality. This book is essential reading not only for those interested in the philosophical roots of deconstruction, but for all those interested in the central questions of history and temporality, subjectivity and language, that pervade contemporary debates in cultural, literary, and visual theory alike. (shrink)

A pesar de los innumerables beneficios, hay varias críticas y preocupaciones en relación con el uso de la Inteligencia Artificial (IA), especialmente en Brasil, donde no hay ninguna legislación federal en vigor hasta el momento. Las legislaciones estatales existentes y los proyectos de ley que se están votando en el Congreso, como el PL 21/20, son defectuosos e incompletos, especialmente en lo que respecta a algunas aplicaciones de la IA que implican altos riesgos para los derechos y libertades fundamentales, además (...) de traer a menudo un sesgo potencial, duplicando o potenciando el racismo institucionalizado existente en la sociedad u otras formas de discriminación. Existe una inequidad codificada que propicia infraestructuras injustas, sinembargo, donde hay poder hay resistencia, y en este sentido es necesario señalar la importancia de las contra codificaciones basadas en la solidaridad y que repiensan la justicia, es decir, un enfoque emancipador de la tecnología. Este es el cambio paradigmático necesario, y siendo necesario, tiene que ser posible y debe buscarse con el máximo esfuerzo. Se trata de verdaderas formas de resistencia, como instrumentos abolicionistas para el “Nuevo Código Jim”, nuevas formas de discriminación de raza, género y clase existentes a través del uso de las nuevas tecnologías, en el sentido de prácticas de diseño orientadas a la justicia. (shrink)

Bergson's engagement with evolutionary theory was remarkably up to date with the science of his time. One century later, the scientific and social landscape is undoubtedly quite different, but some of his insights remain of critical importance for the present. This paper aims at discussing three related aspects of Bergson's philosophy of evolution and their relevance for contemporary debates: first, the stark distinction between the affirmation of the reality of change and becoming, on the one hand, and any notion of (...) progress on the other; second, the insistence on the intimate interplay between forms of knowledge and forms of life; third, his idea that machines and organisms, technology and biology, are not separate domains but, rather, stem from and answer to the same problems and needs that living beings express. Such a Bergsonian framework may prove very helpful in reassessing the implicit assumptions of several contemporary debates on the ethical and political stakes of evolution, biosciences, and technologies, as well as the increasingly problematic boundary between “biology” and “culture.”. (shrink)

This book takes the reader on a philosophical quest to understand the dark side of emotions. The chapters are devoted to the analysis of negative emotions and are organized in a historical manner, spanning the period from ancient Greece to the present time. Each chapter addresses analytical questions about specific emotions generally considered to be unfavorable and classified as negative. The general aim of the volume is to describe the polymorphous and context-sensitive nature of negative emotions as well as changes (...) in the ways people have interpreted these emotions across different epochs. The editors speak of ‘the dark side of the emotions’ because their goal is to capture the ambivalent – unstable and shadowy – aspects of emotions. A number of studies have taken the categorial distinction between positive and negative emotions for granted, suggesting that negative emotions are especially significant for our psychological experience because they signal difficult situations. For this reason, the editors stress the importance of raising analytical questions about the valence of particular emotions and focussing on the features that make these emotions ambivalent: how – despite their negativity – such emotions may turn out to be positive. This opens up a perspective in which each emotion can be understood as a complex interlacing of negative and positive properties. The collection presents a thoughtful dialogue between philosophy and contemporary scientific research. It offers the reader insight by illuminating the dark side of the emotions. (shrink)

We study preferences over lotteries which do not necessarily satisfy completeness. We provide a characterization which generalizes Expected Utility theory. We show in particular that various sure-thing axioms are needed to guaranteee the representability in terms of utility intervals rather than numbers, and to provide a linear interval order representation which is very much in the spirit of Expected Utility theory.

Accelerating environmental uncertainty and the need to cope with increasingly complex market and social demands, combine to create high value for the intuitive approach to decision-making at the strategic level. Research on intuition suffers from marked fragmentation, due to the existence of disciplinary silos based on diverse, apparently irreconcilable, ontological and epistemological assumptions. Not surprisingly, there is no integrated interdisciplinary framework suitable for a rich account of intuition, contemplating how affect and cognition intertwine in the intuitive process, and how intuition (...) scales up from the individual to collective decision-making. This study contributes to the construction of a broad conceptual framework, suitable for a multi-level account of intuition and for a fruitful dialogue with distant research areas. It critically discusses two mainstream conceptualizations of intuition which claim to be grounded in a cross-disciplinary consensus. Drawing on the complexity paradigm, it then proposes a conceptualization of intuition as emergence. Finally, it explores the theoretical and practical implications. (shrink)

We animals have evolved a variety of mechanisms to avoid conspecifics who might be infected. It is currently unclear whether and why this “behavioral immune system” targets unfamiliar individuals more than familiar ones. Here I answer this question in humans, using publicly available data of a recent study on 1969 participants from India and 1615 from the USA. The apparent health of a male stranger, as estimated from his face, and the comfort with contact with him were a direct function (...) of his similarity to the men in the local community. This held true regardless of whether the face carried overt signs of infection. I conclude that our behavioral immune system is finely tuned to degrees of outgroupness — and that cues of outgroupness are partly processed as cues of infectiousness. These findings, which were consistent across the two cultures, support the notion that the pathogens of strangers are perceived as more dangerous. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe paper focuses on the gradual separation between materialism and mechanism in early modern German philosophy. In Germany the distinction between the two concepts, originally introduced by Leibniz, was definitively stated by Wolff who was the first to provide a definition of the new philosophical term Materialismus, and of the related philosophical sect. In the first part I describe the initial identification of mechanism and materialism in German philosophy between the last decades of the seventeenth century and 1720. Mechanism is (...) here mostly conceived within a monistic metaphysics of body, which refers mainly to Hobbes and to some interpretations of Spinoza’s pantheism. This tight connection between a mechanical explanation of nature and the Deus sive natura issue leads to a negative judgement on mechanism and its materialistic implications, both charged with a form of more or less explicit atheism. In the second part I describe the gradual emancipation in Germany of mechanism fro... (shrink)

In this article we firstly present a Kripke semantics for the description logic ALC which is directly inspired by the semantics for Intuitionistic logic. Moreover, we discuss why a direct translation of this kind of semantics is not adequate in the description logic context and propose a constructive semantics that differs from the previous one by the fact that we impose a condition on the partial order. We also present a tableau calculus which is sound and complete with respect to (...) our semantics. As an application of the calculus we prove that this semantics meets the disjunction property, a key criterion used in assessing whether a logic is constructive. (shrink)

Abstract. The notion of similarity has been studied in many areas of Computer Science; in a general sense, this concept is defined to provide a measure of the semantic equivalence between two pieces of knowledge, expressing how “close” their meaning can be regarded. In this work, we study similarity as a tool useful to improve the representation of arguments, the interpretation of the relations between arguments, and the semantic evaluation associated with the arguments in the argumentative process. In this direction, (...) we present a novel mechanism to determine the similarity between two arguments based on descriptors representing particular aspects associated with these arguments. This mechanism involves a comparison process influenced by the context in which the process develops, where this context provides the relevant aspects that need to be analyzed in the application domain. Then, we use this similarity measure as a quantity to compute the result of attacks and supports in the argumentation process. These valuations, applied to a Bipolar Argumentation Frameworks, allowed us to refine the argument relations, providing the tools to establish a family of new argumentation semantics that considers the similarity between arguments as a crucial part for the argumentation process. (shrink)

BackgroundInformed consent forms for clinical research are several and variable at international, national and local levels. According to the literature, they are often unclear and poorly understood by participants. Within the H2020 project CORBEL—Coordinated Research Infrastructures Building Enduring Life-science Services—clinical researchers, researchers in ethical, social, and legal issues, experts in planning and management of clinical studies, clinicians, researchers in citizen involvement and public engagement worked together to provide a minimum set of requirements for informed consent in clinical studies.MethodsThe template was (...) based on a literature review including systematic reviews and guidelines searched on PubMed, Embase, Cochrane Library, NICE, SIGN, GIN, and Clearinghouse databases, and on comparison of templates gathered through an extensive search on the websites of research institutes, national and international agencies, and international initiatives. We discussed the draft versions step-by-step and then we referred to it as the “matrix” to underline its modular character and indicate that it allows adaptation to the context in which it will be used. The matrix was revised by representatives of two international patient groups.ResultsThe matrix covers the process of ensuring that the appropriate information, context and setting are provided so that the participant can give truly informed consent. It addresses the key topics and proposes wording on how to clarify the meaning of placebo and of non-inferiority studies, the importance of individual participants’ data sharing, and the impossibility of knowing in advance how the data might be used in future studies. Finally, it presents general suggestions on wording, format, and length of the information sheet.ConclusionsThe matrix underlines the importance of improving the process of communication, its proper conditions (space, time, setting), and addresses the participants’ lack of knowledge on how clinical research is conducted. It can be easily applied to a specific setting and could be a useful tool to identify the appropriate informed consent format for any study. The matrix is mainly intended to support multicentre interventional randomized clinical studies, but several suggestions also apply to non-interventional research. (shrink)

Thirty years after the death of Michel Foucault, notwithstanding the fact that his thought has profoundly shaped the contemporary reflection and contributed to move beyond structuralism, the Urban Political Ecology in general and the Urban Political Ecology of water in particular are still dominated by Marxist-inspired theoretical frameworks. This paper aims to provide a theoretical rationale for the development and implementation of a Foucauldian ap-proach to the UPE of water. We show how a Foucauldian approach could shed light on the (...) hydro-social cycle and could be the basis of a specific form of scholarly political engagement. (shrink)