The 1830s and 1840s are the formative years of modern public health in Britain, when the poor law bureaucrat Edwin Chadwick conceived his vision of public health through public works and began the campaign for the construction of the kinds of water and sewerage works that ultimately became the standard components of urban infrastructure throughout the developed world. This book first explores that vision and campaign against the backdrop of the great "condition-of-England" questions of the period, of what rights and (...) expectations working people could justifiably have in regard to political participation, food, shelter and conditions of work. It examines the ways Chadwick's sanitarianism fit the political needs of the much-hated Poor Law Commission and of Whig and Tory governments, each seeking some antidote to revolutionary Charitism. It then reviews the Chadwickians' efforts to solve the host of problems they met in trying to implement the sanitary idea: of what responsibilities central and local units of government, and private contractors, were to have; of how townspeople could be persuaded to embark on untried public technologies; of where the new public health experts were to come from; and of how elegant technical designs were to be fitted to the unique social, political and geographic circumstances of individual towns. Rejecting the view that Chadwick's program was a simple response to an obvious urban problem Professor Hamlin argues that at the time a "public health" focusing narrowly on sanitary public works represented a retreat of public medicine from involvement with the great social issues of the Industrial Revolution. In exploring the views of medical men who were critical of Chadwick, Hamlin suggests the parameters of a public health that might have been, in which concern for health and well-being becomes the foundation of a public medicine that is a principal guarantor of social justice. This book offers modern public heatlh professionals elements of a forgotten professional heritage that might be useful in responding to the bewildering range of health problems we now confront. (shrink)

The 1830s and 1840s are the formative years of modern public health in Britain, when the poor law bureaucrat Edwin Chadwick conceived his vision of public health through public works and began the campaign for the construction of the kinds of water and sewerage works that ultimately became the standard components of urban infrastructure throughout the developed world. This book first explores that vision and campaign against the backdrop of the great "condition-of-England" questions of the period, of what rights and (...) expectations working people could justifiably have in regard to political participation, food, shelter and conditions of work. It examines the ways Chadwick's sanitarianism fit the political needs of the much-hated Poor Law Commission and of Whig and Tory governments, each seeking some antidote to revolutionary Charitism. It then reviews the Chadwickians' efforts to solve the host of problems they met in trying to implement the sanitary idea: of what responsibilities central and local units of government, and private contractors, were to have; of how townspeople could be persuaded to embark on untried public technologies; of where the new public health experts were to come from; and of how elegant technical designs were to be fitted to the unique social, political and geographic circumstances of individual towns. Rejecting the view that Chadwick's program was a simple response to an obvious urban problem Professor Hamlin argues that at the time a "public health" focusing narrowly on sanitary public works represented a retreat of public medicine from involvement with the great social issues of the Industrial Revolution. In exploring the views of medical men who were critical of Chadwick, Hamlin suggests the parameters of a public health that might have been, in which concern for health and well-being becomes the foundation of a public medicine that is a principal guarantor of social justice. This book offers modern public heatlh professionals elements of a forgotten professional heritage that might be useful in responding to the bewildering range of health problems we now confront. (shrink)

According to Lynne Baker we need to investigate the performances to understand if someone has a first-person perspective. My claim is that language has not the main role in the formation of epistemic states and self-consciousness. In children’s performances, we have evidence for a self-consciousness without “I” thoughts. We investigate if it is possible to understand the difference between a case of false belief and one of pretense. My aim is to demonstrate that pretense is not a proto-concept but a (...) first-person fact, endowed with a rich phenomenology. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to argue that, in order for the debate in Computing and philosophy to move forward with respect to its current state, the advances of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence of the last decades must be taken into account. Computational reflection, one of these advances, is presented in detail and its philosophical implications are discussed, in contrast with old-fashioned views of computational systems such as those presented by Lucas’ papers on Minds and Machines.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that, in order for the debate in Computing and philosophy to move forward with respect to its current state, the advances of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence of the last decades must be taken into account. Computational reflection, one of these advances, is presented in detail and its philosophical implications are discussed, in contrast with old-fashioned views of computational systems such as those presented by Lucas’ papers on Minds and Machines.

Our study examines how a company’s engagement in corporate social responsibility influences word of mouth about the company on Twitter, particularly during a service delay. We use the airline industry as the study context. On the popular social medium Twitter, people post tweets about airline services and raise concerns about service delays when flights are delayed, canceled, or diverted. Drawing on the literature on legitimacy and the halo effect, we argue that a company’s CSR engagement enhances its corporate image, which (...) in turn, influences WOM about the company on Twitter. We predict and find that airlines with better CSR engagement receive more positive word of mouth and less negative word of mouth on Twitter. We also find that service delays reduce PWOM and increase NWOM, with the additional finding that the positive relationship between service delays and NWOM is less strong for airlines with better CSR engagement. We conduct additional analyses to investigate the effects of environmental, social, and governance CSR on PWOM and NWOM. Our study has practical implications in informing companies about the benefits of CSR engagement in relation to public opinion during service delays. (shrink)

In the present article, the role of Gestalt concepts in clarifying the issues of perception is evaluated. Grounded in anti-atomism, Gestalt assumed organizing forces intrinsic to perception. Insofar these were identified with singularity preference, Gestalt is criticized for having failed to distinguish between perception and thought.

Il libro ripercorre alcune fra le tappe fondamentali del pensiero di Gian Vincenzo Gravina, inquadrandole all' interno dei generi letterari maggiormente praticati dall' autore calabrese e facendo emergere la sua capacità di padroneggiare vari aspetti della cultura del suo tempo. Il panorama intellettuale, politico e sociale del periodo compreso fra la fine del Seicento e i primi anni del Settecento, con la sua complessità, traspare dai dialoghi e dai trattati del pensatore, per il quale si fa strada l' esigenza di (...) tornare a quei valori della tradizione classica che coincidono con il bisogno di recuperare le virtù tipiche della letteratura antica per promuovere un rinnovamento culturale, politico e civile della società. (shrink)

This essay emphasizes how Vico was one of the modern philosophers to set himself the goal to reconstruct the history of the primitive world. Differently from several authors who preceded him and also other contemporary thinkers, the Neapolitan philosopher showed that the world of the origin wasn’t idyllic, but it was affected by fear, anguish and basic needs. What mainly characterizes Vico, however, is the fact that he represented the primitive world not as a unitary and fixed block, but as (...) a world made of different historical phases and of class and social conflicts. As there were no written documents, Vico elaborated a reconstruction of history, basing it on a new and revolutionary theory of myths which, being based on creativity induced by fantasy, are called “universali fantastici”. (shrink)

Transformer is a neural machine translation model which revolutionizes machine translation. Compared with traditional statistical machine translation models and other neural machine translation models, the recently proposed transformer model radically and fundamentally changes machine translation with its self-attention and cross-attention mechanisms. These mechanisms effectively model token alignments between source and target sentences. It has been reported that the transformer model provides accurate posterior alignments. In this work, we empirically prove the reverse effect, showing that prior alignments help transformer models produce (...) better translations. Experiment results on Vietnamese-English news translation task show not only the positive effect of manually annotated alignments on transformer models but also the surprising outperformance of statistically constructed alignments reinforced with the flexibility of token-type selection over manual alignments in improving transformer models. Statistically constructed word-to-lemma alignments are used to train a word-to-word transformer model. The novel hybrid transformer model improves the baseline transformer model and transformer model trained with manual alignments by 2.53 and 0.79 BLEU, respectively. In addition to BLEU score, we make limited human judgment on translation results. Strong correlation between human and machine judgment confirms our findings. (shrink)

The determination of philosophy is the work of those who cooperate in the construction of knowledge, in its disparate fields, and at the same time preserve the very sense of indeterminacy. There are no areas of knowledge that cannot be also philosophical, nor can the themes, lines of research and styles of thought be limited a priori. The philosophy, it is said, is the search for truth. This is the most common definition, and therefore also the more covering than a (...) possible new point of view, which could have its roots in the ancient tradition. Philosophy is that search for truth which gave rise to our science and that critical attitude which it brings in doubt, limits and determines this same spirit of research. (shrink)

Ma quei 500 cittadini che un complicato sorteggio aveva autorizzato a prendere posto sulle scalee del dikasterion non potevano essere in condizione di comprendere se quelle elevate a carico di Socrate davvero cogliessero il suo comportamento e la realtàche lo riguardava o invece fossero imputazioni speciose e strumentali. Non potevano intendere la discrasia tra i fatti attribuiti e una realtà fattuale vagamente somigliante ai medesimi, ovvero tra i suoi giovanili interessi naturalistici, il daimonion e l'amore per il filosofico dialeghestai. Non (...) potevano capire che nell'animo dell'Ateniese non c'era affatto un nuovo credo religioso né la smania di introdurlo in città, se mai il bisogno di una più consapevole religiosità accompagnato da una tensione sincera verso il vero e il giusto. Bisogni di spiritualità che difficilmente potevano trovare in delle menti - specie quelle dei meno giovani - ferme alle tradizioni, ai riti sacerdotali, alla sacralità degli oracoli, alla parola degli indovini, alle processioni, ai sacrifici votivi, e non ancora pronte a recepire la bellezza del pensare libero e l'urgenza etica di sottoporre a verifica ogni asserto di rilievo"--Page 2 of cover. (shrink)

Dream is a state of consciousness characterized by internally-generated sensory, cognitive and emotional experiences occurring during sleep. Dream reports tend to be particularly abundant, with complex, emotional, and perceptually vivid experiences after awakenings from rapid eye movement sleep. This is why our current knowledge of the cerebral correlates of dreaming, mainly derives from studies of REM sleep. Neuroimaging results show that REM sleep is characterized by a specific pattern of regional brain activity. We demonstrate that this heterogeneous distribution of brain (...) activity during sleep explains many typical features in dreams. Reciprocally, specific dream characteristics suggest the activation of selective brain regions during sleep. Such an integration of neuroimaging data of human sleep, mental imagery, and the content of dreams is critical for current models of dreaming; it also provides neurobiological support for an implication of sleep and dreaming in some important functions such as emotional regulation. (shrink)

Humans make decisions about social information efficiently, despite – or perhaps because of – the sheer scale of data available. Of these various signals, sex cues are vitally important, yet understanding whether participants perceive them as static or dynamic is unknown. The present study addressed the related question of how expertise impinges on sex judgements. Participants were asked to target female and male exemplars from a set of own- or other-race hand images. Data show: that the own-race sex categorisation advantage (...) observed previously using face stimuli can occur in relation to hands, and sensitivity of Asian participants, but not Caucasian participants, is dynamic relative to how many fe/males there are in a set. Implications of these findings are discussed as further evidence that there exists a pan-stimulus sex processor, and as fresh evidence that human sex perception can change probabilistically. (shrink)

Catholic theologians after Trent saw the Protestant teaching about the remnants of original sin in the justified as one of the ‘chief ’ errors of Protestant soteriology. Martin Luther, John Calvin, Martin Chemnitz, and many Protestant theologians believed that a view of concupiscence as sinful, strictly speaking, did away with any reliance on good works. This conviction also clarified the Christian’s dependence on the imputed righteousness of Christ. Catholic theologians condemned this position as detracting from the work of Christ who (...) takes away the sins of the world. The rejection of this teaching—and the affirmation of Trent’s statement that original sin is taken away and that the justified at baptism is without stain or ‘immaculate’ before God—is essential for understanding Catholic opposition to Protestant soteriology. Two Spanish Dominican Thomists, Domingo de Soto and Bartolomé de Medina, rejected the Protestant teaching on imputation in part because of its connection with the view on the remnants of original sin in the justified. Adrian and Peter van Walenburch, brothers who served as auxiliary bishops of Cologne in the second half of the seventeenth century, argued that the Protestants of their time now agreed with the Catholic Church on a number of soteriological points. They also drew upon some of their post–Tridentine predecessors to offer a Catholic account of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness. Nonetheless, the issue of sin in the justified remained a point of serious controversy. (shrink)

I will argue for the similarity between some aspects of Aristotle’s doctrine of causes and a particular kind of interventionist theory of causality. The interventionist account hypothesizes that there is a connection between causation and human intervention: the idea of a causal relation between two events is generated by the reflection of human beings on their own operating. This view is remindful of the Aristotelian concept of αἴτιον, which is linked to the figure of the αἴτιος, the person who is (...) responsible of an action. Aristotle conceives of the efficient cause as the active element which, in the φύσις, gives rise to movement and imposes the form, in analogy with the active element that in τέχνη operates the production: the craftsman. This analogy suggests that Aristotle conceives of the causation on the basis of the human ability to modify the environment with aims. Within the debate on the manipulative theory the classical accounts worked out by Collingwood, Gasking and von Wright have been recently criticized by Woodward. von Wright’s reductive account explains causation on the basis of human free action, while Woodward regards this reduction as a dangerous move which makes causal explanations too much anthropomorphic. I will show that Aristotle’s doctrine of causes is more similar to von Wright’s account and that the Aristotelian analysis of becoming supports von Wright’s reductive interventionism against Woodward’s criticism. Furthermore, I will draw a comparison between interventionism and dispositionalism, where the latter is another contemporary account of causation that claims Aristotelian roots. (shrink)

I will argue for the similarity between some aspects of Aristotle’s doctrine of causes and a particular kind of interventionist theory of causality. The interventionist account hypothesizes that there is a connection between causation and human intervention: the idea of a causal relation between two events is generated by the reflection of human beings on their own operating. This view is remindful of the Aristotelian concept of αἴτιον, which is linked to the figure of the αἴτιος, the person who is (...) responsible of an action. Aristotle conceives of the efficient cause as the active element which, in the φύσις, gives rise to movement and imposes the form, in analogy with the active element that in τέχνη operates the production: the craftsman. This analogy suggests that Aristotle conceives of the causation on the basis of the human ability to modify the environment with aims. Within the debate on the manipulative theory the classical accounts worked out by Collingwood, Gasking and von Wright have been recently criticized by Woodward. von Wright’s reductive account explains causation on the basis of human free action, while Woodward regards this reduction as a dangerous move which makes causal explanations too much anthropomorphic. I will show that Aristotle’s doctrine of causes is more similar to von Wright’s account and that the Aristotelian analysis of becoming supports von Wright’s reductive interventionism against Woodward’s criticism. Furthermore, I will draw a comparison between interventionism and dispositionalism, where the latter is another contemporary account of causation that claims Aristotelian roots. (shrink)

: I shall discuss the relationship between the interventionist theory of causation and free action. Interventionist accounts of causation define causation on the basis of “intervention”. These theories can be reductive, if they explain causes on the basis of free human interventions, or non-reductive, if they consider causes and interventions as two inter-defined concepts, where interventions are regarded as explicitly not human. I will show that the dilemma between reductive and non-reductive interventionist theories of causality can be overcome in favour (...) of reductive accounts, with regard to what causation is in an anthropological sense, and with regard to the causal explanation of phenomena. Non-reductive accounts, explaining causes based on interventions and defining interventions as special causes create a dangerous explanatory circularity between cause and intervention and are not able to give a general and explanatory idea of causation. Reductive interventionist theories, by contrast, do not suffer from this circularity. Keywords: Causation; Free Action; Experiment; Interventionist Theory of Causality; Anthropomorphism L’azione libera e le teorie interventiste della causalità Riassunto: Intendo discutere il rapporto tra la teoria interventista della causalità e l’azione libera. Gli approcci interventisti alla causalità definiscono la causazione sulla base dell’“intervento”. Queste teorie possono essere riduttive, se spiegano le cause in base all’intervento umano come libero intervento umano, oppure non-riduttive, se considerano cause e interventi come due concetti inter-definiti, dove gli interventi sono considerati come esplicitamente non umani. Intendo mostrare che il dilemma tra teorie interventista della causalità di tipo riduttivo e non-riduttivo può essere superato in favore degli approcci riduttivi, con riferimento a ciò che la causazione è in senso antropologico e con riferimento alla spiegazione causale dei fenomeni. Gli approcci non-riduttivi, spiegando le cause sulla base di interventi e definendo gli interventi come cause speciali, creano una perniciosa circolarità esplicativa tra cause e interventi e non sono in grado di dare un’idea generale ed esplicativa della causazione. Le teorie interventiste riduttive, al contrario, non soffrono di questa circolarità. Keywords: Causazione; Azione libera; esperimento; Teoria interventista della causalità; Antropomorfismo. (shrink)

Volume 46, Issue 6, November 2020, Page 708-726.

Humans make decisions about social information efficiently, despite – or perhaps because of – the sheer scale of data available. Of these various signals, sex cues are vitally important, yet understanding whether participants perceive them as static or dynamic is unknown. The present study addressed the related question of how expertise impinges on sex judgements. Participants were asked to target female and male exemplars from a set of own- or other-race hand images. Data show: that the own-race sex categorisation advantage (...) observed previously using face stimuli can occur in relation to hands, and sensitivity of Asian participants, but not Caucasian participants, is dynamic relative to how many fe/males there are in a set. Implications of these findings are discussed as further evidence that there exists a pan-stimulus sex processor, and as fresh evidence that human sex perception can change probabilistically. (shrink)

This book offers a new and original hypothesis on the origin of modal ontology, whose roots can be traced back to the mathematical debate about incommensurable magnitudes, which forms the implicit background for Plato’s later dialogues and culminates in the definition of being as dynamis in the Sophist. Incommensurable magnitudes – also called dynameis by Theaetetus – are presented as the solution to the problem of non-being and serve as the cornerstone for a philosophy of difference and becoming. This shift (...) also marks the passage to another form of rationality – one not of the measure, but of the mediation. The book argues that the ontology and the rationality which arise out of the discovery of incommensurable constitutes a thread that runs through the entire history of philosophy, one that leads to Kantian transcendentalism and to the philosophies derived from it, such as Hegelianism and philosophical hermeneutics. Readers discover an insightful exchange with some of the most important issues in philosophy, newly reconsidered from the point of view of an ontology of the incommensurable. These issues include the infinite, the continuum, existence, and difference. This text appeals to students and researchers in the fields of ancient philosophy, German idealism, philosophical hermeneutics and the history of mathematics. (shrink)

Deleuze’s interpretation of Nietzsche, the function of biological dialectic and the symbolic value of sign and writing in “Also sprach Zarathustra”. Sexual difference and Derridian interpretation of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra.

This is my first professional philosophical essay. I wrote "The twofold meaning of being" in 1996 when I was a student of Nunzio Incardona at University of Palermo (Italy) and before my degree thesis, "The difference in Aristotle’s Metaphysics". It still waits to be published.

The aim of this study is to analyse a passage of the pseudoepigraphic Carmen de resurrectione which relates to insipientes, interpreted as those who do not accept that the rational observation of nature proves the existence of a unique creator God. Such a refusal is believed to make them worthy of eternal damnation. The resulting concept of sapientia involves both ratio and voluntas; it is also connected with gnoseology and soteriology. A similar concept can be found in the Aquitanian poetry (...) of the fifth century and in the theology of the so-called Semipelagians. This similarity calls into question the traditional dating and the supposed area of origin of the Carmen. (shrink)

The aim of this study is to determine the historical and cultural context of the pseudoepigraphic Carmen de resurrectione. The Carmen treats poetically many subjects of Christian eschatology: the second coming of Christ, the final judgement, heaven and hell, the universal conflagration. The author believes that the end time is imminent. This perception is common to all the Christians who experienced tribulations: persecutions, natural calamities, barbarian invasions. These painful events urged the Christians to undertake a path of true conversion, in (...) the religious and moral sense. Unlike other poets, the Anonymous author emphasises the virtuous value of the hope of divine reward rather than the fear of divine punishment. The same perspective can be found in the poets and in the monks of early fifth-century Gaul, who suffered the barbarian invasion of 406. (shrink)

This paper provides a synthesis and translation of Le strutture speculative della dottrina della scienza; Il pensiero di J.G. Fichte negli anni 1801–1807 (Genova: Pantograf, 1995) by Gaetano Rametta. The 1807 Wissenschaftslehre offers important insight into Fichte’s mittlere Phase (1801–1807). Fichte’s text and Rametta’s work on it remain untranslated into English; this translation, the notes to which offer a running commentary and defi nitions of key terms, intends to make the former known through the latter. Rametta focuses on Fichte’s (...) analysis of vision, and the vision of vision. In his middle-period and later work, Fichte developed this theme far past the early Jena-period doctrine thereof, as treated by Dieter Henrich. Within this thematic context, Rametta also discusses the proof-structure of the 1807 WL, the distinction between Wahrheitslehre and Phänomenologie, and the concept of Weisheit or “wisdom.” The article concludes with a treatment of the significance of Fichte’s later philosophy for the philosophy of religion. (shrink)

It is well known that, from the second year of life, children engage in imaginative activities and pretend play. Pretending is changing the nature of perceptual inputs at will. In this paper I shall take up the question of young children’s knowledge about the pretend-real distinctions. According to Josef Perner, they have an immature concept, called prelief, because they do not differentiate between believing and pretending. But, we know that belief and pretense have different inputs. Imagination is at the whim (...) of our intentions, belief not. And, on the side of outputs, when children pretend, they carry out behavioral sequences “as if” they really had beliefs, but belief and pretense have different causal roles in action tendencies. So, when a boy pretends, he acts out his pretense within the scope of a supposition, but, why doesn’t he go all the way? That is, how are we to explain the limits children place on their activity? I shall answer these questions arguing that pretense is tied to conceptual knowledge. This will enable me to give a metaphysical account of this phenomenon, because it is based on the intentional manipulation of the identity of things and their properties. (shrink)

It is well known that, from the second year of life, children engage in imaginative activities and pretend play. Pretending is changing the nature of perceptual inputs at will. In this paper I shall take up the question of young children’s knowledge about the pretend-real distinctions. According to Josef Perner, they have an immature concept, called prelief, because they do not differentiate between believing and pretending. But, we know that belief and pretense have different inputs. Imagination is at the whim (...) of our intentions, belief not. And, on the side of outputs, when children pretend, they carry out behavioral sequences “as if” they really had beliefs, but belief and pretense have different causal roles in action tendencies. So, when a boy pretends, he acts out his pretense within the scope of a supposition, but, why doesn’t he go all the way? That is, how are we to explain the limits children place on their activity? I shall answer these questions arguing that pretense is tied to conceptual knowledge. This will enable me to give a metaphysical account of this phenomenon, because it is based on the intentional manipulation of the identity of things and their properties. (shrink)

Historia y elección humana van de la mano. Nuestra época ha perdido la fe incondicionada en el 'progreso' y, a la vez, en una tabla de valores cierta e incontrovertible, que si bien no ha sido nunca universalmente compartida, en cambio sí -en alguna medida al menos- prevalente sobre las otras. Es el tiempo de la espera, que de ninguna manera es resignación y descompromiso.History and human choice go together. Our age has lost unconditioned faith both in 'progress' and, at (...) the same time, in a true and undeniable set of values which, though not universally acknowledged or shared, has nonetheless enjoyed a certain recognition. It's a time for hopefulness, let alone for resignation or non comprimising. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 48, Issue 2, pp 197 - 208 The movement of New Realism, which in Italy has been launched by Maurizio Ferraris, is conceived explicitly in opposition to Kant. In his defense of the distinction between ontology and epistemology, Ferraris starts from the presupposition that it is Kant himself who is responsible for their confusion because of his transcendental philosophy and its consequent constructionism. In this paper I will defend Kant’s perspective, explaining his reasons, even against Meillasoux’s “speculative (...) realism.” The basic idea is that Kant’s transcendental philosophy requires a new philosophical attitude, which implies a shift from reality to possibility as the fundamental philosophical category, since only possibility enables a critical perspective on reality. (shrink)