Research represents an essential component of the response to infectious disease outbreaks and to other public health emergencies, whether they are localised, of international concern, or global. Research conducted in such contexts also comes with particular ethics challenges, the awareness of which has significantly grown following the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, the Zika outbreak in Latin America and the COVID-19 pandemic. These challenges include the need for implementing meaningful community engagement with the researched communities, not just to build unidirectional (...) trust towards the research team, but to achieve a genuine and mutually respectful partnership before, during and after the research. Here, we describe the real-life experience of 10 well-established research clinics in Nairobi, where a successful experience of community engagement linking prevention and care to research was interrupted during the COVID19 pandemic. We contrast this experience with the concept and processes of community engagement as described in selected scientific manuscripts and guidelines, to formulate some conclusions and recommendations. We contend that more action is needed, from research ethics committees and other key-research stakeholders, to align policies and practices with ethics guidance and with evidence-based recommendations from the academic literature, to achieve meaningful community engagement during emergency research, irrespective of the scale and location of an outbreak or public health crisis. Failure to do so, will aggravate the (postcolonial) asymmetries of power in global health and local systems. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe quality of medicines is generally adequately assured by manufacturers and regulatory authorities for well-resourced settings, while the implementation of existing quality standards is challenged in many low- and middle-income countries. This situation of multiple pharmaceutical standards raises the question whether it could ever be ethically justified to compromise on the quality assurance of medicines depending on what individuals, communities, or societies can afford. In this paper, we contend that ethically, any unjustified exceptions to medicines’ quality assurance represents a violation (...) of the principles of beneficence and non-maleficence. Exceptions are only acceptable in exceptional and temporary circumstances, if based on a meaningful quality risk assessment, guided by a rigorous ethical framework built on the principles of independence, technical competence, transparency, and accountability. We also discuss how such exceptional and temporary circumstances should be defined/justified.... (shrink)

The essay analyses utopia as a key concept to investigate modern politics. It argues that looking at the works of Machiavelli and More in order to retrace the utopia-realism nexus permits to develop a valuable analytical tool to interpret the outset of political modernity.

Current research on choice overload has been mainly conducted with choice options not associated with specific brands. This study investigates whether the presence of brand names in the choice set affects the occurrence of choice overload. Across four studies, we find that when choosing among an overabundance of alternatives, participants express more positive feelings (i.e., higher satisfaction/confidence, lower regret and difficulty) when all the options of the choice set are associated with familiar brands, rather than unfamiliar brands or no brand (...) at all. We also find that choice overload only appears in the absence of brand names, but disappears when all options contain brand names—either familiar or unfamiliar. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. (shrink)

In this article, I deal with the concept of aesthetics in its broader sense: the ability of feeling, thinking, and creating. My theory is that this aesthetics was born 40,000 years ago in the Paleolitical caves and that it has been characterizing human creativity from its remote origins up to now. Following this theory, we should not define human creativity as a greater cleverness than that of other living species; however, we should think of it as a refined aesthetic ability (...) of mind in connecting different worlds, enacting different levels of communication, and creating images and symbols. (shrink)

A theater that heals is not a theater that offers answers and ?medicines? that guarantee to cure weaknesses and fragilities people meet but it is an open organization, which questions itself, which brings out ambivalence and ambiguity, diversity, weaknesses, and which leaves room for possible interpretations and narratives, the play of imagination, and the development of innovative and creative processes of people in society.

Alison Simmons, in Simmons (1999), argues that Descartes in Meditation Six offered a teleological account of sensory representation. According to Simmons, Descartes’ view is that the biological function of sensations explains both why sensations represent what they do (i.e., their referential content) and why they represent their objects the way they do (i.e., their presentational content). Moreover, Simmons claims that her account has several advantages over other currently available interpretations of Cartesian sensations. In this paper, I argue that Simmons’ teleological (...) account cannot be sustained for both theoretical and textual reasons and that it does not have the advantages it is claimed to have. (shrink)

This article focuses on the assessment of mechanistic relations with specific attention to medicine, where mechanistic models are widely employed. I first survey recent contributions in the philosophical literature on mechanistic causation, and then take issue with Federica Russo and Jon Williamson’s thesis that two types of evidence, probabilistic and mechanistic, are at stake in the health sciences. I argue instead that a distinction should be drawn between previously acquired knowledge of mechanisms and yet-to-be-discovered knowledge of mechanisms and that both (...) probabilistic evidence and manipulation are essential with respect to newly discovered mechanisms. (shrink)

A partire dal corpus degli Scritti sulla donna, l'articolo intende mostrare come nel pensiero di Edith Stein vi sia il ricorrere di alcuni nuclei tematici soggetti a un sempre maggiore lavoro di scavo e di approfondimento, nella consapevolezza - maturata alla scuola di Husserl -della inesauribilitÀ della realtÀ. In particolare, dopo aver ricordato la funzione ontologica della filosofia nell'indagine sull'essere umano, che consente di parlare di specie e di individualitÀ, vengono qui toccate le questioni del rapporto fra specie e tipo, (...) della mutabilitÀ o meno della specie, della peculiaritÀ dell'anima femminile, e viene evidenziato come esse o siano il risultato di ricerche condotte in precedenza o contengano in nuce elementi di una riflessione portata avanti dalla filosofa tedesca in tempi e opere successivi. (shrink)

This contribution claims that the two fundamental notions of causation at work in the health sciences are manipulative and mechanistic, and investigates what kinds of evidence matter for the assessment of causal relations. This article is a development of our 2007 article, ‘Plurality of Causality’, where we argue for a pluralistic account of causation with an eye to econometrics and a single medical example. The present contribution has a wider focus, and considers the notion of evidence within a whole range (...) of disciplines belonging to the health sciences. Section 1 addresses the relations between kinds of evidence and causal accounts, and it is shown how different notions of causation can be employed in various medical cases. Section 2 calls attention to issues crucial for any adequate epistemological theory of causation, such as the distinctions between types and tokens, observational and experimental regimes, explanation and prediction. Lastly, the notion of context is articulated, highlighted in its role in the assessment of causal links. All these issues are tackled in the framework of what we label a ‘bottom–up’ epistemology. (shrink)

This paper studies the influence of an organization’s time perspective on triple bottom line deployment through sustainable innovativeness. Although academics increasingly consider sustainable innovation to be an essential element in deploying the triple bottom line, the degree of an organization’s sustainable innovativeness remains limited. Using ten inductive case studies based on the triangulation of data from multiple-respondent interviews and secondary data, this study shows that an organization’s time perspective plays a crucial role in explaining the organization’s degree of sustainable innovativeness (...) and improvement of triple bottom line outcomes. Specifically, organizations with a longer planning horizon, higher tolerance of uncertainty, and greater ability to learn from the past develop a higher and increasing degree of sustainable innovativeness, allowing trade-offs between triple bottom line dimensions to be mitigated. (shrink)

In recent years, a multitude of datasets of human–human conversations has been released for the main purpose of training conversational agents based on data‐hungry artificial neural networks. In this paper, we argue that datasets of this sort represent a useful and underexplored source to validate, complement, and enhance cognitive studies on human behavior and language use. We present a method that leverages the recent development of powerful computational models to obtain the fine‐grained annotation required to apply metrics and techniques from (...) Cognitive Science to large datasets. Previous work in Cognitive Science has investigated the question‐asking strategies of human participants by employing different variants of the so‐called 20‐question‐game setting and proposing several evaluation methods. In our work, we focus on GuessWhat, a task proposed within the Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing communities that is similar in structure to the 20‐question‐game setting. Crucially, the GuessWhat dataset contains tens of thousands of dialogues based on real‐world images, making it a suitable setting to investigate the question‐asking strategies of human players on a large scale and in a natural setting. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of computational tools to automatically code how the hypothesis space changes throughout the dialogue in complex visual scenes. On the one hand, we confirm findings from previous work on smaller and more controlled settings. On the other hand, our analyses allow us to highlight the presence of “uninformative” questions (in terms of Expected Information Gain) at specific rounds of the dialogue. We hypothesize that these questions fulfill pragmatic constraints that are exploited by human players to solve visual tasks in complex scenes successfully. Our work illustrates a method that brings together efforts and findings from different disciplines to gain a better understanding of human question‐asking strategies on large‐scale datasets, while at the same time posing new questions about the development of conversational systems. (shrink)

This is a personal recollection of Lyman Tower Sargent that stresses his enormous contribution—personal and academic—to the community of utopian studies. After a brief recollection of our academic interactions, the short contribution pays homage to a “social dreamer” who is aware that utopia can be dangerous but is equally sure that it is absolutely essential if we are to survive.

"You imagine where you cannot experiment"... John Tyndall is a 19th century Irish scientist and natural philosopher. For him, scientific imagination is thefaculty that enables scientists "to transcend the boundaries of the sense" and to connect the visible with the invisible - by forming mental images of phenomena, and tracing links among them. This article reconstructs his theory of scientific imagination, focusing on the central passages found in his works.

William Whewell is usually portraied as an anti-Hegelian. This article shows that, despite his criticism for Hegel’s philosophical system, Whewell was influenced by the Hegelian “historical” approach in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, and by the conception of the progressive development of though (philosophy for Hegel, science for Whewell) as a dialectical unity.

La revue de la Società Italiana delle Storiche Genesis est la nouvelle revue de la Società Italiana delle Storiche (Société Italienne des Historiennes). Avant de décrire les caractéristiques de la revue dont le premier numéro est à paraître dans les mois à venir, il est utile d'exposer brièvement la genèse et les caractéristiques de l'association. La Società Italiana delle Storiche (SIS) a vu le jour en 1989. Durant les années qui ont précédé sa création et en particulier lors du colloque (...) qui... (shrink)