Deferred prosecution agreements (DPAs) are legal means, alternative to trial, for the resolution of criminal business cases. Although DPAs are increasingly used in the US and are spreading to other jurisdictions, the ethics of DPAs has hardly been subjected to critical scrutiny. We use a multidisciplinary approach straddling the line between philosophy and law to examine the ethics of DPAs used to resolve cases of multinational enterprises’ (MNEs) foreign corruption. Deontologically, we argue that the normativity of DPAs raises critical concerns (...) related to the notion of justice as punishment, with serious cases of international corruption resolved with minimal retribution for offending MNEs. Taking a utilitarian ethical perspective, we also evaluate the effect of DPAs on MNEs’ tendency to self-regulate or re-offend. Our conclusion, supported by critical analysis of the juridical literature and case evidence on MNEs’ recidivism, is that DPAs do not foster ethical behavior. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Stories of Families with Chronically Ill Pediatric Patients during the War in UkraineVita VoloshchukFebruary 24th was a day that has left a mark in the memory and on the lives of every Ukrainian person. My husband and I work together [End Page E5] in a hospital. He had gone into work early to conduct a kidney transplant that had been scheduled for that day. Suddenly, whilst on my way (...) to work that morning, I heard a strange sound—it was an air-raid siren. Before that, I had never heard such a sound. I went through all the possible options of what it could be. Of course, watching the morning news had never been a habit either. The next thing that astonished me was that the taxi I had ordered was taking an unnaturally long time to turn up. When I got into the taxi, I noticed that the taxi driver was really upset and silent for half of the journey. He then said, “A war has begun...”“War? So? The war has been going on since 2014.”“You don’t understand,” he said. “Russia is launching missile attacks all over the territory of Ukraine; Russian troops are coming from the east and north of Ukraine. They want to capture the capital of Ukraine.” (Kyiv).Arriving at the hospital, I saw confused faces everywhere. The morning meeting began with a discussion of how we were to act in any possible situation that may occur. We were to discharge patients from the hospital, as many as possible. The arrangement of a bomb shelter began (although I didn’t even think that such a thing existed in our hospital), along with the strengthening of the hospital’s windows, and the increase of supplies such as medicine and food. Of course, the boy who expected a kidney transplant did not receive it because no one knew what to expect at any second or where a hostile Russian missile might hit, as Russian missiles hit not only military objects but residential buildings, hospitals, and memorials as well.Children who had to continue therapy remained in the hospital. As soon as we heard the sound of an air-raid siren, we had to go down into the bomb shelter. This happened 5-10 times per day. Families with palliative and chronically ill children began to call and ask for advice on how to proceed in such a situation. As many children were on artificial respiration devices, others needed oxygen therapy, and sputum of mucus from the upper respiratory tract. All this required uninterrupted power supplies and appropriate equipment. Later that day, a doctor from Poland called me and asked if our pediatric patients needed help, saying it would be better if they were moved to Poland, where they would be safer and have the correct equipment. We started organizing evacuations for chronically ill and palliative patients.Seven days after the war began, parents from other regions, where the situation was more dangerous, began calling, asking for help evacuating. The hospital began to work intensively round the clock. Some patients moved in, and others were evacuated abroad. Some did not want to go. They continued treatment in the hospital, which turned into a hub for patients who had come from more dangerous, occupied territories; patients who were forced to leave their motherland to continue treatment.Since the beginning of the war, I have been responsible for transferring palliative patients and other patients with gastrointestinal diseases abroad. After the massive invasion, everything changed in our country. It is important to say that during the war, Lviv is safer than any other Ukrainian city, still air-raid sirens often go off, and everyone needs to run immediately to shelters for their safety. Palliative patients need special care. It is very difficult to run with patients several times per day during an air-raid siren or live with these children for a long time (2-3 weeks) in shelters because of the explosions occurring around them.It is impossible to move some patients to safety because they need appropriate medical equipment or mechanical ventilation is necessary. In shelters, there are crowds, and the high risk of... (shrink)

This article concerns sound aesthetic preferences for European foreign languages. We investigated the phonetic-acoustic dimension of the linguistic aesthetic pleasure to describe the “music” found in European languages. The Romance languages, French, Italian, and Spanish, take a lead when people talk about melodious language – the music-like effects in the language (a.k.a., phonetic chill). On the other end of the melodiousness spectrum are German and Arabic that are often considered sounding harsh and un-attractive. Despite the public interest, limited research has (...) been conducted on the topic of phonaesthetics, i.e., the subfield of phonetics that is concerned with the aesthetic properties of speech sounds (Crystal, 2008). Our goal is to fill the existing research gap by identifying the acoustic features that drive the auditory perception of language sound beauty. What is so music-like in the language that makes people say “it is music in my ears”? We had 45 central European participants listening to 16 auditorily presented European languages and rating each language in terms of 22 binary characteristics (e.g., beautiful – ugly and funny – boring) plus indicating their language familiarities, L2 backgrounds, speaker voice liking, demographics, and musicality levels. Findings revealed that all factors in complex interplay explain a certain percentage of variance: familiarity and expertise in foreign languages, speaker voice characteristics, phonetic complexity, musical acoustic properties, and finally musical expertise of the listener. The most important discovery was the trade-off between speech tempo and so-called linguistic melody (pitch variance): the faster the language, the flatter/more atonal it is in terms of the pitch (speech melody), making it highly appealing acoustically (sounding beautiful and sexy), but not so melodious in a “musical” sense. (shrink)

In the article by Vita Titarenko «Experience and prospects of religious organizations in Ukraine: prisma of independence» on the basis of the analysis of the newest sociological researches the features of the post-Soviet religious society in Ukraine are considered. The formation of a specific model of religiosity of modern Ukrainian society, its new value matrix is noted. The distinctive characteristic is the nonconfessional self-determination of Ukrainians, the development of extra-religious religiosity during complex socio-political events in the country, the formation (...) of such a phenomenon as a civil religion and a civil "ecclesia". (shrink)

A natural extension theorem for strongly continuous mappings, the morphisms in the category of apartness spaces, is proved constructively.

Every artistic practice implies, either explicitly or implicitly, a metaphysical framework within which its specialized activity can be understood. In furthering communication and sensorial connections, telematic arts interface with computer systems, biotechnological arts interface with biological systems, and sculpted prims interface with metaverse systems. In this article, I review artistic practices that engage preliminary aspects of human enhancement and, in some instances, begin to extend personal existence over space and time. Specifically, this article asks: what is the perception of human (...) enhancement that permeates these artistic works and gives them meaning? Answering this question suggests where artistic media of the cyborg, transhuman and posthuman are potentially headed. (shrink)

This article will address an overview of BioArt, biomedia and its practitioners, developed through a series of semi-structured, qualitative interviews and openended discussions with more than fifteen experts in the field. BioArt is approached from the perspective of scientific exploration, visual design in interactivity and installation, and social commentary and political activism. Of consequence is the fact that BioArt is relatively new, its nomenclature is without a codified definition, and bioartists have varied views on the parameters of its biomedia. Regardless, (...) BioArt has been escalating as a fecund medium with the potential for spawning visionary and critical practices and theories. In lieu of a slippery slope in which artists rely on freedom of expression in substantiating artworks, the burden of proof is placed on artists to be creative and objective in understanding what it means to tamper with biology and alter life forms. Issues of ethics have already affected artists' practices and venues for exhibition, and as BioArt continues to develop, research practice has become a necessary field of study. In addition, as biomedia evolve and emergent technologies partner with current biotechnologies, there is concern if the concept of BioArt is ambiguous in light of the fact that biotechnology is dovetailing nanotechnology, artificial general intelligence and cognitive science. Herein there is a need for practice-based scenarios for questioning constructive and destructive viewpoints about BioArt and, more particularly, concerning the future of life forms. (shrink)

The paper deals with proximal convergence and Leader's theorem, in the constructive theory of uniform apartness spaces.

This article explores the link between CEOs’ language and hubristic leadership. It is based on the precepts that leaders’ linguistic utterances provide insights into their personality and behaviours; hubris is associated with unethical and potentially destructive leadership behaviours; if it is possible to identify linguistic markers of CEO hubris then these could serve as early warnings sign and help to mitigate the associated risks. Using computational linguistics, we analysed spoken utterances from a sample of hubristic CEOs and compared them with (...) non-hubristic CEOs. We found that hubristic CEOs’ linguistic utterances show systematic and consistent differences from the linguistic utterances of non-hubristic CEOs. Demonstrating how hubristic leadership manifests in CEO language contributes to wider research regarding the diagnosis and prevention of the unethical and potentially destructive effects of hubristic leadership. This research contributes to the wider study of hubris and unethical leadership by applying a novel method for identifying linguistic markers and offers a way of militating against the risk of unethical and destructive CEO behaviours induced or aggravated by hubristic leadership. (shrink)

Life expansion means increasing the length of time a person is alive and diversifying the matter in which a person exists. For human life, the length of time is bounded by a single century and its matter is tied to biology.

The aim of this work is to investigate the problem of Logical Omniscience in epistemic logic by means of truthmaker semantics. We will present a semantic framework based on $$\varvec{W}$$ W -models extended with a partial function, which selects the body of knowledge of the agents, namely the set of verifiers of the agent’s total knowledge. The semantic clause for knowledge follows the intuition that an agent knows some information $$\varvec{\phi }$$ ϕ, when the propositional content that $$\varvec{\phi }$$ ϕ (...) is contained in her total knowledge. We will argue that this idea mirrors the philosophical conception of immanent closure by Yablo (2014), giving to our proposal a strong philosophical motivation. We will discuss the philosophical implications of the semantics and we will introduce its axiomatization. (shrink)

The main purpose of this paper is to investigate constructively the relationship between proximal convergence, uniform sequential convergence and uniform convergence for sequences of mappings between apartness spaces. It is also shown that if the second space satisfies the Efremovic axiom, then proximal convergence preserves strong continuity.

In the rhetorical tradition of Late Antiquity, Socrates’ legend has a good fortune in the works of different rhetoricians and philosophers. In the following pages I am going to deal with some examples of this phaenomenon, through the works of Themistius and Julian the emperor : two intellectuals of the IV century who are, under many aspects, the exact opposites.They both try to ‘actualize’ Socrates’ figure, highlighting different aspects of the Athenian philosopher, on the grounds of their personal purposes of (...) self-advertisement. So Themistius, a skilled politician working as princeps’ advisor, sees in Socrates a symbol of the ‘politikos philosophos’, who speaks plainly in public with people of all ranks, in a simple and direct way ; for Julian, emperor and philosopher of the new Hellenism, Socrates, instead, is mainly the saviour of the souls, addressing all men towards the true knowledge of themselves and the true faith in pagan gods. These portraits are complementary and both attest the ability of Late Antique intellectuals in their imitatio/aemulatio of figures and myths of Classical Antiquity. (shrink)

This article regards a particular way through which adults take children into consideration and listen their voices. Reflections have sprung from a research context, focused on existential questions that children pose during their preschool years in early education settings. The research explored the meanings of these questions for children and adults involved in their education. The questions of meaning emerged by children’s discourses are considered through the representations of childhood that subtend parents and teachers’ educational practices. The article discusses one (...) of these representations, that of philosopher child, with regard on his various internal perspectives. Lipman, Kyle, Martens and Matthews are some of the authors taken into consideration in order to examine briefly some traditional approaches of doing philosophy with children and to understand the practices that teachers operate everyday in early childhood education and care services. (shrink)

This article aims to analyze the philosophical and religious message of Julian’s Hymn to King Helios. The emperor, using Iamblichean structures, shows how the First Cause, the Neoplatonic One, can interact with the layers or gradation below it, including the physical world ; his starting point is an original ‘pluralizing’ interpretation of the Sun analogy contained in Resp. VI 509b.However, Julian’s hymn has a political meaning, too ; it can be considered as a sort of manifesto of Julian’s imperial ideology. (...) The parallel between the emperor and the sun – already present in the ancient rhetorical tradition – is reworked by the Apostate and is part of a complex metaphysical‑cosmological system, grounded on the principles of similarity and middleness. These concepts were subject to controversy between nicene and heterodox christians in the IV century. It is possible that these controversies were largely known by Julian and that he has consciously recalled them in his panegyric to Helios intellective, mediator and saviour. (shrink)

This paper describes the Gender Equity Project at Hunter College of the City University of New York, funded by the U. S. NSF ADVANCE Institutional Transformation Award program. ADVANCE supports system-level strategies to promote gender equity in the social and natural sciences, but has supported very few teaching-intensive institutions. Hunter College is a teaching-intensive institution in which research productivity among faculty is highly valued and counts toward tenure and promotion. We created the GEP to address the particular challenges that faculty, (...) especially White women and faculty of color, face in maintaining research programs and advancing in their careers at teaching-intensive institutions. During the course of the ADVANCE award, its centerpiece was the Sponsorship Program, a multifaceted paid mentorship/sponsorship program that paired each participant with a successful scholar in her discipline. It offered extensive professional development opportunities, including interactive workshops and internal grants to support research. The GEP helped change key policies and practices by ensuring that all faculty were treated fairly in areas like provision of research start-up funds and access to guidance on how to prepare for tenure and promotion. Qualitative and quantitative evidence suggests that participation in the Sponsorship Program boosted research productivity and advanced the careers of many of the women who participated; the Program was highly rated by all participants. Some of the policy and practice changes that the GEP helped bring about were sustained at Hunter beyond the award period and some were adopted and disseminated by the central office of CUNY. However, we were not able to sustain the relatively expensive Sponsorship Program. We share the lessons we learned, including that creating a diverse, successful social and natural scientific workforce requires sustained support of female faculty employed at teaching-intensive colleges. We acknowledge the difficulties of sustaining gains, and offer ideas about how to make the case for gender equity when women seem to be doing “well enough.” We underscore the imperative of building support for women’s research in teaching-intensive institutions, where most women scientists are employed, and well over 90% of all college students—a disproportionate percentage of whom are female, minoritized, or both—are educated. (shrink)

Lyman Tower Sargent is one of the few scholars and intellectuals I have met whose research and studies are embodied in their actual life, since for him the values of utopianism constitute the base and foundation of his personal and political choices. My essay is a personal reflection on his life and scholarly work.

This paper argues that Hesiod's Myth of the Golden Race (Op. 109-126) influenced Plato's Myth of the Cicadas from the Phaedrus (258e-259d). Among other parallels, Hesiod's Golden Race and Plato's Cicadas have a similar diet and a similar rapport with the gods, they die in a similar way and enjoy similar benefits after death. The paper further argues that Plato used the inherent ambiguity of the Golden Age myths to draw attention to the ambiguity of the Cicadas themselves, who bring (...) both benefits and rewards to humans, depending on their behavior. (shrink)

The subject of bullying has received widespread academic attention, going back to pioneering studies in the 1970s. However, work in this area has tended to take a gender-neutral/male perspective that does not distinguish between male and female bullying. While retaining a dialogue with generalist literature on the subject, this article seeks to highlight the theoretical and political-social relevance of gender-specific and intersectional approaches when exploring the question of bullying between adolescent girls. Based on the study _Il bullismo femminile a scuola. (...) Un’indagine intersezionale mixed-method_ (Female bullying at school, an intersectional, mixed-method study) – conducted in medium-sized and large cities in northern, central and southern Italy – it proposes a theoretical-analytical framework in which to consider the phenomenon of female bullying in Italian schools. (shrink)

A goal of expanding life over time, space, and substrate requires that we look beneath the surface of technology and the universal norms placed on human nature to a vision of its future that could be realized. There is a visible fracturing of the personal and social behaviors of its hybrid users – a process that we might call data‐clatter. While life expansion seeks the continuation of persons over time and space and beyond the physical body, there is no current (...) method for backing up the brain and transferring its processes outside the biological system. The objectives of life expansion include developing a whole‐body prosthesis as both a device for mobility and sensory perception and a system that streams cognitive functions. These systems would provide the biosphere for biological systems of humans and the cybersphere for computational systems of digital persons. (shrink)

This article aims to show that Julian the Emperor had some knowledge of Middle Platonic doctrines. More specifically, the discussion focuses on the case of Plutarch of Chaeronea.We can find interesting parallels between the works of this philosopher and the Orations of Julian, especially concerning the allegorical exegesis of myths, the crucial metaphysical role played by Apollo-Helios and the doctrine of the soul. It is worth considering the possibility that Plutarch's works partially inspired Julian's concept of Hellenism.

Summary What is the “fantasmatic deixis”? It is a very creative and productive cognitive–linguistic operation that allows a “transfer” to other real or fantastic times, places, and “worlds”. The underlying psychological question concerns the possibility of moving and being moved with respect to something or someone who is absent (Bühler, 1965). This “fiction game” is made possible by deictic indicators (Tenchini, 2008), terms that allow motion in time and space, always considering the here–now–I system of subjective orientation. When we refer (...) to something that can be gathered by hearing or by sight, by terms such as here, there, I, and you, the receiver can easily use natural, prelinguistic aids (e.g., gestures, voice quality, facial expressions, and body orientation) to understand what the issuer intends to communicate to him (demonstratio ad oculos). But what happens when we move from the study of “immediate” behavior to that of “mediate” behavior, i.e., the field of memories (retrospection) or the constructive fantasy (prospecting)? The fantasmatic deixis implies enfranchisement from the physical position of the body and requires the assumption of the listener’s current tactile body image. Thus, the receiver assumes an inner attitude to correctly interpret the indications given by the speaker, seeing and hearing through the “inner” or “mental” eye and ear (Raynaud, 2006). In this way, the listener can bring something absent in his/her here, now, and I or feel moved to the point where the speaker leads him/her. My paper will focus on the features and types of fantasmatic deixis, providing some examples and showing how this operation involves language, motion, and cognitive processes. (shrink)

Por que a teoria política normativa voltada para questões de justiça social e política deveria se ocupar de princípios no âmbito daquilo que John Rawls denominou “teoria ideal”, em contraste com a “teoria não ideal” da justiça? Será que necessitamos desenvolver e refinar uma teoria ideal da justiça para determinar o que a justiça requer nas condições não ideais com as quais no defrontamos? Será que a “teoria ideal” da justiça é capaz de orientar a ação – decisões políticas e (...) escolhas institucionais – em condições não ideais? Se a resposta para essas duas perguntas for “não”, então deveríamos acima de tudo nos empenhar em desenvolver uma teoria não ideal da justiça. Nas versões mais fortes dessa objeção, como a de Amartya Sen em The Ideia of Justice, podemos dispensar inteiramente a teoria ideal da justiça. Contra essa linha de objeção, que também é sustentada, de formas distintas, por autores como Onora O’Neill, Colin Farrelly e Charles Mills, este artigo desenvolve uma argumentação em duas etapas. Em primeiro lugar, sustenta-se que há razões para valorizar a teorização ideal que são independentes da relação que possa ter com a teoria não ideal. Em uma segunda etapa, sustenta-se que a teoria ideal da justiça, embora deixe enorme quantidade de trabalho (empírico e normativo) a ser feito, é imprescindível para determinar o que a justiça requer de nós aqui e agora. (shrink)

Explaining the emergence of life is perhaps central and the most challenging question in modern science. Within this area of research, the emergence and evolution of the genetic code is supposed to be a critical transition in the evolution of modern organisms. The canonical genetic code is one of the most dominant aspects of life on this planet, and thus studying its origin is critical to understanding the evolution of life, including life’s emergence. In this sense it is possible to (...) view the ribosome as a digital-to-analogue information converter. Why the translation apparatus evolved, is one of the enduring mysteries of molecular biology. Assuming the hypothesis that during the emergence of life evolution had to first involve autocatalytic systems, which only subsequently acquired the capacity of genetic heredity, in the present article we discuss some aspects and causes of the possible emergence of digital, discrete information arising from analogue information realized in the intra- and inter-molecular interactions throughout molecular evolution. How such reverse translation was achieved at a molecular level is still unclear. The results of such debates and investigations might shift current biological paradigms and might also have a momentous significance for modern philosophy in understanding our place in the universe. (shrink)

Este artículo explora dos vías filosóficas de acercamiento a las imágenes iniciadas el siglo pasado. La primera, que denominamos metafísica, fue abierta por Bergson y desarrollada por Deleuze. La segunda, que clasificamos como fenomenológica, es iniciada por Sartre y completada por Merleau-Ponty. La posición central que ocupa la imagen en estas teorías permite el desarrollo de una nueva ontología que resuelve los problemas del dualismo y en la que el cine desempeña un papel principal.

Alessandro Maurini's book follows in the stream of a series of recent studies that have attempted to reread Aldous Huxley's thought, highlighting the extent to which, especially in his later essays and his novel Island, he expressed ideas and proposals that were to become extremely topical in the latter half of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first. Read from this perspective, Huxley becomes a utopian writer who anticipated not just some of the fundamental principles of ecology (...) but also those of pacifism, as well as forms of ecological and pacifist communitarian thought. In his introduction, Maurini exposes his work hypothesis and his lines... (shrink)

Gilberta Golinelli's book is set within an important area of utopian studies that, from the 1990s, also via archival studies, started to focus on the numerous utopias penned by women in the early modern English period. The book, significantly titled Gender Models, Alternative Communities and Women's Utopianism, analyzes some of the utopian writings by Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, and Mary Astell. Golinelli did not choose to use the term utopianism on a whim, since the utopias of these authors are hybrids, (...) mixing other genres in their makeup: travel reports, theater, romance, letters.... (shrink)

Gilberta Golinelli’s book is set within an important area of utopian studies that, from the 1990s, also via archival studies, started to focus on the numerous utopias penned by women in the early modern English period. The book, significantly titled Gender Models, Alternative Communities and Women’s Utopianism, analyzes some of the utopian writings by Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, and Mary Astell. Golinelli did not choose to use the term utopianism on a whim, since the utopias of these authors are hybrids, (...) mixing other genres in their makeup: travel reports, theater, romance, letters.... (shrink)

The Italian tradition of utopian studies is indebted to Luigi Firpo, who investigated Thomas More’s Utopia and the utopias of the Italian Counter-Reformation. Although Firpo was a scholar of political science, he highlighted the importance of the literary aspects of utopias. The ability to combine the political aspects of utopias with their fictional and literary aspects may be seen in his important introduction to More’s Utopia. Thus, Firpo’s school has tried to keep these two aspects united, while other political and (...) social scientists who have devoted themselves to utopianism have observed how the present is opposed to a radically alternative project. Utopianism defines the specific mental attitude... (shrink)

Quando la fantascienza è donna by Eleonora Federici is a book of many merits: its theoretical framework is informed by recent perspectives from gender studies, it boasts an extensive bibliography, and it is written in captivating and accessible prose. It is an intelligent book that fills an important gap in the literature, as few works on women science fiction writers have been published in Italian. Indeed, while much has been written on women’s science fiction in the English language, such a (...) tradition has yet to develop in Italian, with one of the first exceptions being Ida Magli’s 1980 essay “L’immagine simbolica femminile e le sue costanti mitico-culturali nella fantascienza”... (shrink)

The phenomenon of charismatization, which has intensified on the territory of Ukraine since the independence of Ukraine, is constantly in the field of view of religious scholars. Unusual forms of worship, critical articles in the media, as a result, the formation of negative public opinion - all this led to an impartial, unbiased, objective study of this phenomenon by scientists.