L’articolo intende sondare la fondatezza ontologica di una categoria personologica fondamentale, in particolare in ambito ecclesiologico: il “noi”. Tale ricerca si sviluppa soprattutto nella sua rilevanza trinitaria, a partire dall’apporto offerto dal teologo tedesco Heribert Mühlen, il quale, nella sua opera pneumatologica Der Heilige Geist als Person. In der Trinität, bei der Inkarnation und im Gnadenbund: Ich-Du-Wir, approfondisce questo tema insieme ad altre tre parole-chiave: “io”, “tu”, “tra”.

La ontología trinitaria indica el pasaje de un ser in se, que se auto-construye y se auto-realiza, a uno que es desde el momento en que se desplaza el propio baricentro existencial del in se al “para” y “en” el otro. Esta dinámica, reveladora del ser Dios de Dios, se manifiesta de un modo fundamental en el evento pascual e imprime una novedad decisiva, mediante la introducción de lo negativo, en las estructuras mismas de pensamiento.

How and to what extent do people take into account the intentions of others? Alessandro Duranti sets out to answer this question, showing that the role of intentions in human interaction is variable across cultures and contexts. Through careful analysis of data collected over three decades in US and Pacific societies, Duranti demonstrates that, in some communities, social actors avoid intentional discourse, focusing on the consequences of actions rather than on their alleged original goals. In other cases, he argues, (...) people do speculate about their own intentions or guess the intentions of others, including in some societies where it was previously assumed they avoid doing so. To account for such variation, Duranti proposes an 'intentional continuum', a concept that draws from phenomenology and the detailed analysis of face-to-face interaction. A combination of new essays and classic re-evaluations, the book draws together findings from anthropology, linguistics and philosophy to offer a penetrating account of the role of intentions in defining human action. (shrink)

En février 2024, le Parlement européen a voté l’autorisation partielle d’utilisation des NGT ( New Genomic Techniques ). À la différence des OGM, interdites, les NGT ne visent pas à injecter dans une plante les gènes d’une autre, mais à modifier le séquençage de son propre génome en imitant l’évolution génétique « spontanée » qui ne prend plus des milliers d’années, mais quelques minutes. Du coup, elles sont peu « traçables ». Les techniques d’hybridation ont, depuis les années 50, été (...) imposées aux agriculteurs du Nord puis du Sud au prétexte de meilleurs rendements pour nourrir le monde et, aujourd’hui, de la protection de l’environnement. En fait, les semences hybrides sont brevetées et constituent une rente exceptionnelle pour les industries chimiques et pharmaceutiques, tout en maintenant dans la dépendance de leur utilisation les paysans du monde entier astreints à l’industrialisation agricole, ce qui provoque de profondes inégalités. Il s’agit de briser le lien mortel qui soumet les États (qui leur accordent un soutien massif) aux entreprises privées qui s’approprient les brevets. (shrink)

Elaborating on the notions that humans possess different modalities of decision-making and that these are often influenced by moral considerations, we conducted an experimental investigation of the Trolley Problem. We presented the participants with two standard scenarios (‹lever’ and ‹stranger’) either in the usual or in reversed order. We observe that responses to the lever scenario, which result from (moral) reasoning, are affected by our manipulation; whereas responses to the stranger scenario, triggered by moral emotions, are unaffected. Furthermore, when asked (...) to express general moral opinions on the themes of the Trolley Problem, about half of the participants reveal some inconsistency with the responses they had previously given. (shrink)

This article addresses the issue of how to develop a theory of interpretation of social action that takes into consideration culture-specific claims about intentions while simultaneously allowing for a pan-human, universal dimension of intentionality. It is argued that to achieve such a goal, it is necessary to agree on a basic definition of intentionality and on the conditions that allow for its investigation. After briefly discussing the limitations of applying an ‘narrow’ notion of intention to the analysis of other languages (...) and cultures, a more general and basic analytic notion of intentionality is proposed, that is, as aboutness. By applying this more general notion of intentionality, we can then examine both the content of intentional acts and the conditions that allow for their study across cultural contexts through ‘bracketing’. This is made possible by the social ontology of intentions, which is what enables the analysis of human conduct and its interpretation. Our methods and hypotheses must be evaluated over and against such an existential premise. (shrink)

John Searle’s account of collective intentions in action appears to have all the theoretical pros of the non-reductivist view on collective intentionality without the metaphysical cons of committing to the existence of group minds. According to Searle, when we collectively intend to do something together, we intend to cooperate in order to reach a collective goal. Intentions in the first-person plural form therefore have a particular psychological form or mode, for the we-intender conceives of his or her intended actions as (...) singular contributions by means of which – or: by way of which – a collective goal is pursued. Accordingly, we-intentions are held to have a psychological mode with a “collective goal by means of singular contribution” structure, which makes them primitive and irreducible to intentions in the I-form. It is further contended that, albeit primitive and irreducible, we-intentions are not the mental states of an alleged group mind but always of an individual’s mind. This paper targets Searle’s claim of irreducibility by developing an argument whose aim is to show that, pace Searle, it is possible to track the idea of intentions with a psychological mode structured in terms of “collective goal by means of singular contribution” back to the concept of intentions in the I-form. The argument mainly relies on the idea that Searle’s technical expressions “being a collective goal by means of singular contribution intention in action” or “being a collective goal by way of singular contribution intention in action” are susceptible to conceptual analysis. The upshot of this analysis is that we-intentions can be reduced to complex bundles of mental states, all of which come in the first-person singular form. If this argument is sound, Searlean we-intentions do not belong to a primitive kind of mental states. (shrink)

Keenan (1987) observed that trivial determiners built from basic existential determiners (e.g.,either zero or else more than zero) are allowed inthere-insertion contexts, and that trivial determiners built from basic non-existential determiners (e.g.,either all or else not all) are not. This result is unexpected under the analyses ofthere-sentences proposed in Barwise and Cooper (1981), Higginbotham (1987), and Keenan (1987). I argue that the class of NPs barred from the postverbal position ofthere-sentences (strong NPs) is correctly characterized in presuppositional terms, as suggested (...) in de Jong and Verkuyl (1985) and Lumsden (1988). According to this characterization, strong NPs share one of the defining components of definiteness proposed in Heim (1982), namely the Descriptive Content Condition (DCC). How to derive the prohibition against strong NPs inthere-insertion contexts (definiteness effect) from the fact that strong NPs meet the DCC is not obvious, however. I argue that accounting for this prohibition involves regarding the XP-coda in [there be NP XP] as providing the contextual domain for the interpretation of the postverbal NP. (shrink)

According to a widespread view in metaphysics and philosophy of science, all explanations involve relations of ontic dependence between the items appearing in the explanandum and the items appearing in the explanans. I argue that a family of mathematical cases, which I call “viewing-as explanations”, are incompatible with the Dependence Thesis. These cases, I claim, feature genuine explanations that aren’t supported by ontic dependence relations. Hence the thesis isn’t true in general. The first part of the paper defends this claim (...) and discusses its significance. The second part of the paper considers whether viewing-as explanations occur in the empirical sciences, focusing on the case of so-called fictional models. It’s sometimes suggested that fictional models can be explanatory even though they fail to represent actual worldly dependence relations. Whether or not such models explain, I suggest, depends on whether we think scientific explanations necessarily give information relevant to intervention and control. Finally, I argue that counterfactual approaches to explanation also have trouble accommodating viewing-as cases. (shrink)

A number of companies allocate ownership rights to stakeholders different from shareholders, despite the fact that the law attributes these rights to the equity holders. This article contributes to an understanding of this evidence by developing a contingency model for the allocation of ownership rights. The model sheds light on why companies, despite pressures from the law, vary in their allocation of ownership rights. The model is based on the assumption that corporations increase their chance to survive and prosper if (...) the stakeholders supplying “critical contributions” receive the ownership rights. According to the model, “critical” contributions involve (1) contractual problems due to specific investments, long-term relationships, and low measurability; (2) the assumption of the uncertainty resting on the company; and (3) the supply of scarce and valuable resources. The model is dynamic because it also provides a basis for understanding why the allocation of ownership rights changes with time. Finally, the article presents the strategies companies can use to realize an efficient distribution of ownership rights among their stakeholders. (shrink)

Philosophers have rightly condemned lookism—that is, discrimination in favor of attractive people or against unattractive people—in education, the justice system, the workplace and elsewhere. Surprisingly, however, the almost universal preference for attractive romantic and sexual partners has rarely received serious ethical scrutiny. On its face, it’s unclear whether this is a form of discrimination we should reject or tolerate. I consider arguments for both views. On the one hand, a strong case can be made that preferring attractive partners is bad. (...) The idea is that choosing partners based on looks seems essentially similar to other objectionable forms of discrimination. (In particular, the preference for attractive partners is arguably both unfair and harmful to a significant degree.) One can try to resist this conclusion in several ways. I consider three possible replies. The first has to do with the possibility of controlling our partner preferences. The second pertains to attractiveness and “good genes”. The last attempts to link certain aspects of attractiveness to a prospective partner’s personality and values. I argue that the first two replies fail conclusively, while the third only amounts to a limited defense of a particular kind of attractiveness preference. So the idea that we should often avoid preferring attractive partners is compelling. (shrink)

An influential theory has it that metaphysical indeterminacy occurs just when reality can be made completely precise in multiple ways. That characterization is formulated by employing the modal apparatus of ersatz possible worlds. As quantum physics taught us, reality cannot be made completely precise. I meet the challenge by providing an alternative theory which preserves the use of ersatz worlds but rejects the precisificational view of metaphysical indeterminacy. The upshot of the proposed theory is that it is metaphysically indeterminate whether (...) p just in case it is neither true nor false that p, and no terms in ‘p’ are semantically defective. In other words, metaphysical indeterminacy arises when the world cannot be adequately described by a complete set of sentences defined in a semantically nondefective language. Moreover, the present theory provides a reductive analysis of metaphysical indeterminacy, unlike its influential predecessor. Finally, I argue that any adequate logic of a language with an indeterminate subject matter is neither compositional nor bivalent. (shrink)

On the basis of the results of an ongoing research project on the activities of the Chinese media company StarTimes in Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire, this paper analyses the fluid and fragmentary dimension of the engagements between Chinese media and African publics, while equally emphasizing the power dynamics that underlie them. Focusing on a variety of ethnographic sources, it argues for an approach to the study of Chinese media expansion in Africa able to take into account, simultaneously, the macro-political and (...) macro-economic factors which condition the nature of China–Africa media interactions, the political intentions behind them, and the micro dimension of the practices and uses of the media made by the actors in the field. (shrink)

The way we represent the world in thought and language is shot through with indeterminacy: we speak of red apples and yellow apples without thereby committing to any sharp cutoff between the application of the predicate ‘red’ and of the predicate ‘yellow’. But can reality itself be indeterminate? In other words, can indeterminacy originate in the mind-independent world, and not only in our representations? If so, can the phenomenon also arise at the microscopic scale of fundamental physics? Section 1 of (...) this Element provides a brief overview of the question of indeterminacy. Section 2 discusses the thesis that the world is comprised of indeterminate objects, whereas Section 3 focuses on the thesis that there are indeterminate states of affairs. Finally, Section 4 is devoted to the case study of indeterminacy in quantum physics. (shrink)

O presente artigo busca pensar os limites entre Filosofia e Ciências Sociais, e que, apesar de serem conhecimentos distintos, estão muito mais imbricadas do que separadas, devido ao seu caráter reflexivo e lógico sobre os temas que intrigam a humanidade. Um problema conjunto é o próprio caráter do que fundamentaria a sociedade. Tal motivação provém de um exemplo particular, que é pensar a existência de um ente superior e anterior aos indivíduos, capaz de dar sentido à existência, mas também de (...) moldá-los, pelo seu poder coercitivo. O exercício é pensar como Plotino, no século III, chamou a existência dessa força superior de Inteligência (Noûs). E Durkheim, no final do século XIX, que marcou o início da sociologia científica, chamou-a de Sociedade. Este exercício quer demonstrar como as Ciências Sociais, tendo como referência Durkheim, utiliza da Filosofia para explicar o significado da vida em sociedade. (shrink)

Starting from the assumption that the ability to see patterns and thus abstract from actual events and properties of specific objects is universal, the article reviews different conceptualizations of and attitudes toward the terms ‘theory’ and ‘model’, identifying two co-existing and opposing tendencies: the love for details and the attraction to generalizations that can cover a wide range of phenomena. Using as a backdrop seven theses here reproduced in the Appendix, the article also examines the implications of taking the notion (...) of interaction as primary in the analysis of language and culture. Such implications involve the need to identify useful units of analysis and evaluative measures for competing theories and models. (shrink)

No comprehensive theory of development is available yet. Traditionally, we regard the development of animals as a sequence of changes through which an adult multicellular animal is produced, starting from a single cell which is usually a fertilized egg, through increasingly complex stages. However, many phenomena that would not qualify as developmental according to these criteria would nevertheless qualify as developmental in that they imply nontrivial (e.g., non degenerative) changes of form, and/or substantial changes in gene expression. A broad, comparative (...) approach is badly needed. In the Cnidaria, for example, even the boundary between generations is problematic. Describing their life cycle in terms of metagenesis (alternation between polyp generation and medusa generation) or in terms of metamorphosis (polyp as larva or juvenile) are matters of semantics more than biology. The life cycle of other metazoans, described in textbooks in terms of larva-to-adult metamorphosis, is hardly different from a typical metagenetic life cycle of cnidarians. This applies to holometabolous insects and to marine invertebrates like sea urchins, where most of the larval cells are discarded at metamorphosis. The uncertain temporal and spatial boundaries of individual development are also shown by the widespread lack of a strict correspondence between adult and mature. A comprehensive theory of development should start with a zero principle of “developmental inertia,” corresponding to an indeterminate local self-perpetuation of cell-level dynamics. Indeterminate growth, scale-invariance, segmentation, and regeneration provide examples of developmental dynamics close to that. (shrink)

Gauss’s quadratic reciprocity theorem is among the most important results in the history of number theory. It’s also among the most mysterious: since its discovery in the late 18th century, mathematicians have regarded reciprocity as a deeply surprising fact in need of explanation. Intriguingly, though, there’s little agreement on how the theorem is best explained. Two quite different kinds of proof are most often praised as explanatory: an elementary argument that gives the theorem an intuitive geometric interpretation, due to Gauss (...) and Eisenstein, and a sophisticated proof using algebraic number theory, due to Hilbert. Philosophers have yet to look carefully at such explanatory disagreements in mathematics. I do so here. According to the view I defend, there are two important explanatory virtues—depth and transparency—which different proofs (and other potential explanations) possess to different degrees. Although not mutually exclusive in principle, the packages of features associated with the two stand in some tension with one another, so that very deep explanations are rarely transparent, and vice versa. After developing the theory of depth and transparency and applying it to the case of quadratic reciprocity, I draw some morals about the nature of mathematical explanation. (shrink)

During the twentieth century, the view that assertions and norms are valid insofar as they respond to principles independent of all local and temporal contexts came under attack from two perspectives: the partiality of translation and the intersubjective constitution of the self, understood as responsive to recognition. Defenses of universalism have by and large taken the form of a thinning out of substantive universalism into various forms of proceduralism. Alessandro Ferrara instead launches an entirely different strategy for transcending the (...) particularity of context without contradicting our pluralistic intuitions: a strategy centered on the exemplary universalism of judgment. Whereas exemplarity has long been thought to belong to the domain of aesthetics, this book explores the _other_ uses to which it can be put in our philosophical predicament, especially in the field of politics. After defining exemplarity and describing how something unique can possess universal significance, Ferrara addresses the force exerted by exemplarity, the nature of the judgment that discloses exemplarity, and the way in which the force of the example can bridge the difference between various contexts. Drawing not only on Kant's _Critique of the Power of Judgment_ but also on the work of Hannah Arendt, John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, and Jürgen Habermas, Ferrara outlines a view of exemplary validity that is applicable to today's central philosophical issues, including public reason, human rights, radical evil, sovereignty, republicanism and liberalism, and religion in the public sphere. (shrink)

The purpose of this qualitative study was to analyse nurses’ professional dignity in their everyday working lives. We explored the factors that affect nursing professional dignity in practice that emerge in relationships with health professionals, among clinical nurses working in hospitals and in community settings in central Italy. The main themes identified were: (i) nursing professional dignity perceived as an achievement; (ii) recognition of dignity beyond professional roles. These two concepts are interconnected. This study provides insights into professional dignity in (...) nursing being perceived as an achievement linked to the intrinsic dignity of every human being. The ‘nursing professional dignity perceived as an achievement’ was perceived as having declined in different social factors. Some factors of nursing professional dignity perceived as an achievement were attained more easily in community settings. ‘Recognition of dignity beyond professional roles’ underpins the intrinsic dignity as an expression of humanity, embedded in persons regardless of any profession, and values, such as: respect, moral integrity, humility, working conscientiously and kindness. (shrink)

Is it possible to explain and predict the development of living things? What is development? Articulate answers to these seemingly innocuous questions are far from straightforward. To date, no systematic, targeted effort has been made to construct a unifying theory of development. This novel work offers a unique exploration of the foundations of ontogeny by asking how the development of living things should be understood. It explores the key concepts of developmental biology, asks whether general principles of development can be (...) discovered, and examines the role of models and theories.The two editors have assembled a team of leading contributors who are representative of the scientific and philosophical community within which a diversity of thoughts are growing, and out of which a theory of development may eventually emerge. They analyse a wealth of approaches to concepts, models and theories of development, such as gene regulatory networks, accounts based on systems biology and on physics of soft matter, the different articulations of evolution and development, symbiont-induced development, as well as the widely discussed concepts of positional information and morphogenetic field, the idea of a. (shrink)

In 2011, van Dijck and Fias described a positional SNARC effect: the SPoARC. To-be-remembered items presented centrally on a screen seemed to acquire a left-to-right spatial dimension. If confirmed, this spatialization could be crucial for immediate memory theories. However, given the intricate links between visual and spatial dimensions, this effect could be due to the visual presentation, which could have probed the left-to-right direction of reading/writing. To allow a generalization of this effect, we adapted van Dijck and Fias's task using (...) an auditory version of Sternberg's paradigm. Lists of five consonants were auditorily presented at a rate of 3 s/item. A SPoARC effect was observed. The consequences are discussed first from an immediate memory perspective, putting forward the view that order could be coded through spatialization, and then in terms of similarities between SPoARC and SNARC. (shrink)

The recent debate on pragmatics and the law has found ways to circumvent an important distinction, originally drawn by Dascal and Wróblewski (1991), between the historical law-maker, the current law-maker, and the ideal/rational law-maker.1 By insisting on the relationship between the rational law-maker and contextualism and textualism (see Manning 2005, 2006), I want to redress this fault in current discussions. In this paper, I start with general considerations on pragmatics, intentionality in ordinary conversation, and intentionality in the context of judiciary (...) proceedings and legal texts. I then move on to considerations on rationality as a prerequisite for understanding the law and on the rational law-maker, an ideal construct proposed by Dascal and Wróblewski (1991). I argue that contextualism (of the moderate kind) is the best way to carry out the program by Dascal and Wróblewski on interpretation and the rational law-maker (also see considerations by Fish 2005); (on contextualism see Dascal and Weizman 1987). I argue that bearing in mind the rational law-maker postulated by Dascal and Wróblewski is a guidance to interpretation of statutes whose texts create interpretative difficulties. I conclude by saying that the considerations on the rational law-maker constitute a compromise between Scalia’s (1997) textualism and contextualism (see Manning 2005, 2006 on the divide between textualism and contextualism). (shrink)

Alessandro Ferrara explains what he terms "the democratic horizon" - the idea that democracy is no longer simply one form of government among others, but is instead almost universally regarded as the only legitimate form of government, the horizon to which most of us look. Professor Ferrara reviews the challenges under which democracies must operate, focusing on hyperpluralism, and impresses a new twist onto the framework of political liberalism. He shows that distinguishing real democracies from imitations can be difficult, (...) responding to this predicament by enriching readers' understanding of the spirit of democracy; clearing readers' views of pluralism from residues of ethnocentrism; and conceiving multiple versions of democratic culture, rooted in the diversity of civilizational contexts. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction The Evolving Evolutionary Synthesis Population Genetics vs. Developmental Genetics Evo‐Devo's Central Target: The Study of Evolvability Origins? Conclusion Postscript: Counterpoint Acknowledgments References.

Joshua Knobe found that people are more likely to describe an action as intentional if it has had a bad outcome than a good outcome, and to blame a bad outcome than to praise a good one. These asymmetries raised numerous questions about lay moral judgement. Frank Hindriks recently proposed that one acts intentionally if one fails to comply with a normative reason against performing the action, that moral praise requires appropriate motivation, whereas moral blame does not, and that these (...) asymmetries are normal features of a theory of intentional action, not anomalies. I present two empirical studies revealing asymmetries in lay judgements of intentionality and moral blameworthiness; these cannot be explained by Hindriks' theory of intentional action. (shrink)

Within the author’s long-term project of updating John Rawls’s paradigm of “political liberalism” to a historical context different from the original one, this paper focuses on how political liberalism can help us understand populism and help liberal democracy survive the populist upsurge. In the first section, political liberalism is argued to be of help in directing our attention to three constitutive aspects of all sorts of populism: the conflation of “the people” with the electorate and the electorate with the nation, (...) the attribution of constituent power to the electorate, and a penchant for so-called “justified intolerance.” In the second section, enfeebled democracies and postliberal democracies are discussed as two distinctly dangerous outcomes of populist contagion. Finally, in the third section the containment of populism is argued to require targeting the socioeconomic factors undergirding the populist upsurge and the jettisoni... (shrink)

Fiery Cushman and Alfred Mele recently proposed a ‘two-and-a-half rules’ theory of folk intentionality. They suggested that laypersons attribute intentionality employing: one rule based on desire, one based on belief, and another principle based on moral judgment, which may either reflect a folk concept (and so count as a third rule) or a bias (and so not count as a rule proper) and which they provisionally count as ‘half a rule’. In this article, I discuss some cases in which an (...) agent is judged as having neither belief nor desire to bring about an action, and yet laypersons find the agent’s action to be intentional. Many lay responses apparently follow a rule, but many other seem biased. The contribution of this study is two-fold: by addressing actions performed without desire or belief, it expands Mele and Cushman’s account; it also helps discriminate between a two-rules and a three-rules theory. As a conclusion, I argue in favor of a three-and-a-half concepts theory. (shrink)

Classical modalism about essence is the view that essence can be analysed in modal terms. Despite Kit Fine's influential critique, no general refutation of classical modalism has yet been given. In the first part of the paper, I provide such a refutation by showing that the notion of essence cannot be analysed in terms of any sentential operator definable in the language of standard quantified modal logic. As a reaction to Fine's critique, some have defended sophisticated modalism, which attempts to (...) analyse essence in an enriched modal language quantifying over both possible and impossible worlds. In the second part of the paper, I argue that sophisticated modalism falls prey to variations on Fine's counterexamples to classical modalism. I conclude that the most promising approaches to understanding the notion of essence consist in taking essence either as primitive or as analysable via a combination of modal and non-modal notions. (shrink)

In his 1923 work, Roman Catholicism and Political Form, Carl Schmitt claims that representation is a complexio oppositorum and incarnates a hierarchical form of political authority, which is alternative to liberalism. This article shows that Carl Schmitt’s interpretation of the political theology of representation is based on a misreading. Schmitt selectively overlooks some meanings of the theology of repraesentatio to build his decisionistic political agenda. An investigation of the original conceptual meanings of representation in Tertullian, the first Christian author who (...) theorized representation and established many of its subsequent theological meanings, shows a different picture. At its inception, representation already included mechanisms of plurality and participation, which anticipated, and perhaps motivated, the absorption of the representation vocabulary within democratic discourse and practice. Political theology is a valuable field of inquiry to prove the claim that the... (shrink)

A theory of nominalization should specify the relation between noun meaning and verb meaning. At least for some classes of nouns, such a theory should also provide a general and systematic way of deriving noun meanings from verb meanings. This is the case, for example, for event-denoting $ing\sb{\rm of}$-Nouns. The meaning of these nouns must be derived by a rule from the meaning of the corresponding verb, since there is evidence that they are not listed in the lexicon. ;A theory (...) of nominalization should also account for the meaning differences and the distributional differences among various kinds of nominals and that-clauses. Following Zeno Vendler, I argue that some of these differences are accounted for by the distinction between propositional entities and event-like entities, and by the semantic selection properties of predicates. ;I propose a semantics for English nominalization based on Kratzer's semantics of situations. The central notion of this semantics is the part of-relation among possible situations. This theory provides a general way of recovering the meaning of event-nouns from the meaning of the corresponding verb. Moreover, it is able to account for the distributional and semantic differences among different kinds of nominals and that-clauses. ;A compositional approach to the semantics of NPs raises the issue of the argument structure of nouns. I discuss different accounts of the role of the of-phrase and of the by-phrase with event-nouns. I provide some evidence that they have argument status. Italian infinitival NPs provide some cross-linguistic evidence for this conclusion. The semantics for English nominalization I develop serves also as a tool for investigating the difference of interpretation derived NPs show in different contexts. I address the issue of why these NPs are paraphrasable by that-clauses in some context, but not in others. (shrink)

Alessandro Iorio untersucht Heideggers "Geschichte des Seins" unter den Voraussetzungen von verschiedenen Narrativitätstheorien. Einschlägige Arbeiten von Genette, Ricœur, Bachtin und Propp werden zum Ausgangspunkt einer narrativitätslogischen Analyse verschiedener Manuskripte gemacht (darunter auch die bisher veröffentlichten "Schwarzen Hefte"). Mit dieser Methode kann Iorio Momente von Heideggers Geschichts-Verständnis verdeutlichen, die in seinen bisherigen Interpretationen ausgespart wurden. Er zeigt ein Denken, das sich seiner erzählerischen Dynamik überlässt, ohne sich für reale historische Geschehnisse zu interessieren. Gerade in der "mytho-logischen" Überbietung real-historischer Ereignisse, betont (...) Heidegger, liege der eigentliche Anspruch der Philosophie. (shrink)

An important international discussion began because of some pioneer studies carried out by Young (1996a) on the internet addiction disorder (IAD). In the fifth and most recent version of the Diagnostic, and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) there is no mention of this disorder and among researchers there are basically two opposite positions. Those who are in favor of a specific diagnosis and those who are claiming the importance of specific criteria characterizing this behavior and the precise role it (...) has in the patient’s life. The aim of the present paper is to answer the question whether it is possible or not to formulate diagnoses of internet-related disorders. We revised literature on the history of diagnostic criteria, on neurocognitive evidence, on the topic debate and on IAD instrumental measures. We found that the disorder was not univocally defined and that the construct was somehow too broad and generic to be explicative for a diagnosis. Indeed, the models are borrowed from other addiction pathologies and they are often formulated before the development of internet as intended in current society. In conclusion, we think we need a more innovative, integrated and comprehensive model for an IAD diagnosis. (shrink)

BackgroundDignity is a central human value supported by nurses’ professional ethics. In previous studies, nurses in clinical practice have experienced that dignity increased their work well-being and pride of work. Dignity is also strictly interweaved to professional identity in the different nursing’ roles, but little is known about dignity among public health nurses and primary care settings.PurposeThis study aimed to describe the perceptions of nursing's professional dignity of public health nurses in primary care in Finland.Research designAn inductive qualitative descriptive approach (...) with semi-structured focus group interviews was utilised.Participants and research contextTwenty-seven Finnish public health nurses were interviewed via eight semi-structured focus group interviews in primary health care settings.Ethical considerationsBefore data collection, research permissions were obtained from participating health care centres. This type of research in Finland, with competent adult participants, does not require ethical pre-assessment but written and oral informed consent obtained before the interviews.FindingsBased on our findings, public health nurses perceived that professional dignity was (1) part of their self-respect, an observed daily value based on their acknowledged competence. Besides, they perceived that (2) service users’ trust in public health nurses was a strong expression of professional dignity, and it could be uncovered when recipients of care utilised their services. In addition, public health nurses experienced that (3) professional dignity was an expression of different intertwined interprofessional and social factors.Discussion and conclusionProfessional dignity is simultaneously an essential prerequisite and an outcome of public health nurses’ work. In future, more information would be needed to implement strategies in primary health care to foster nurses’ professional dignity also in international public health arenas. (shrink)

On some views, we can be sure that parties to a dispute over the logic of ‘exists’ are not talking past each other if they can characterise ‘exists’ as the only monadic predicate up to logical equivalence obeying a certain set of rules of inference. Otherwise, we ought to be suspicious about the reality of their disagreement. This is what we call a proof- theoretic argument. Pace some critics, who have tried to use proof-theoretic arguments to cast doubts about the (...) reality of disagreements about the logic of ‘exists’, we argue that proof-theoretic arguments can be deployed to establish the reality of several such disagreements. Along the way, we will also utilise this technique to establish similar results about some disagreements over the logic of identity. (shrink)

Mood profiling has a long history in the field of sport and exercise. Several novel mood profile clusters were identified and described in the literature recently (Parsons-Smith, Terry, & Machin, 2017). In the present study, we investigated whether the same clusters were evident in an Italian language, sport and exercise context. The Italian Mood Scale (ITAMS; Quartiroli, Terry, & Fogarty, 2017) was administered to 950 Italian-speaking sport participants (659 females, 284 males, 7 unspecified; age range = 16–63 yr., M = (...) 25.03, SD = 7.62) and seeded k-means clustering methodology applied to the responses. Six distinct mood profiles were identified, termed the iceberg, inverse iceberg, inverse Everest, shark fin, surface, and submerged profiles, which closely resembled those reported among English-speaking participants (Parsons-Smith et al., 2017). Significant differences were found in the distribution of specific mood profiles across gender and age groups. Findings supported the cross-cultural generalizability of the six mood profiles and offer new research avenues into their antecedents, correlates and behavioral consequences in Italian-language contexts. (shrink)

Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.