This paper is an attempt to think through paranoia’s epistemic and affective features, which pervade both the worldview presented in Senecan tragedy and the inner life of many of its protagonists. Drawing upon recent literary-critical work, I argue that paranoia is temporally and epistemically ambivalent: subjects simultaneously attempt to “get ahead” of a looming cataclysm—looking to the future in an attempt to avert disaster—while inevitably “falling behind,” failing to predict or preempt the future in time to protect themselves. Much of (...) Senecan tragedy plays out paranoia’s future-oriented vigilance on the formal level. Foreshadowing, allusions, and meta-literary flourishes serve to render both readers and characters hyperaware of the earth-shattering horrors to come; however, in doing so, they also reveal that this forward-oriented bracing only serves to dredge up negative affect in advance. By contrast, I argue that Seneca’s Phoenissae thematizes in the character of Oedipus not only paranoia’s future-looking vigilance but also its inherent lagging, the failure to know and act in advance. These elements of slowness, stuckness, and delay open a space for stillness, relief, and intimacy, even within a narrative which hurtles toward cataclysm. (shrink)

Abstract:In many of his works, Seneca puts a philosophical premium on the ability to see through the deceptive appearances of words and things, identifying the hidden truths that underlie these appearances. In this paper, I turn to a passage that casts doubt upon the efficacy of this interpretive method: Seneca's excursus on flattery in the preface to Book 4a of the Natural Questions. Seneca locates in flattery a pleasure that listeners cannot eradicate by exposing its insincerity. By undermining a hermeneutic (...) practice at the heart of many of his therapeutic methods, Seneca draws out, and invites us to dwell within, a contradiction in his system of thought. Furthermore, in his transition from his discussion of flattery to the scientific content of Nat. 4a, Seneca suggests an alternative approach to treacherous pleasures, which locates therapeutic potential not in the ability to look beyond appearances, but in the "surface-level" experiences of distraction and amazement. (shrink)

Here I present the first version of the transcription of the Commentarius in Metaphysicam by Konrad Graf from Cod. Pp 183 4°, Teil 2, Zentral- und Hochschulbibliothek Luzern [ZHB], Sondersammlung (ff. 1r-56v), which collects Graf's lectures in metaphysics, held at the Lucerne Gymnasium in 1635-36. The transcription of the text was carried out at the Lucerne Faculty of Theology within the SNSF project "Zwischen monastischer und reformierter Metaphysik. Die schweizerische 'Wiege' der Ontologie im Zeitalter der Reformation" (SNSF project (...) 100012_192559 - applicant: Prof. Dr. Giovanni Ventimiglia (TF- University of Lucerne), Employees: Marco Lamanna, Chiara Paladini. The project aimed to redefine the "cartography" of the Reformation in Switzerland on the traces of metaphysics teaching (Reportationes) in Swiss educational institutions and monastic poles, and thereby to gain a precise place for Swiss studies in the panorama of research on metaphysics and ontology in the early modern period. The project was based on a preliminary investigation that made it possible to recover new texts transmitting lessons on metaphysics held in Lucerne and Engelberg. The method was 1. to produce a systematic and comprehensive documentation based on an index of manuscripts and printed texts, most of them already identified, which testify to the existence of a cultural flourishing in Switzerland that has so far remained unexplored. 2. this documentation should be placed on a solid textual basis by transcribing and eventually critically editing those texts judged to be of interest in terms of their content and influence, in order to make them accessible to the scholarly community and to readers. 3. finally, we will examine the specific aspects of the teachings transmitted in these manuscripts. (shrink)

Drawing on philosophy, law and political science, and on a wealth of practical experience delivering emergency medical services in conflict-ridden settings, Lepora and Goodin untangle the complexities surrounding compromise and complicity.

There is a vast class of things that science has so far almost entirely neglected. They are central to the understanding of physical reality both at an everyday level and at the level of the most fundamental phenomena in physics, yet have traditionally been assumed to be impossible to incorporate into fundamental scientific explanations. They are facts not about what is--the actual--but about what could be: counterfactuals. According to physicist Chiara Marletto, laws about things being possible or impossible may (...) generate an alternative way of providing explanations. This fascinating, far-reaching approach holds promise for revolutionizing the way fundamental physics is formulated, but also for providing essential tools to face existing technological challenges, from delivering the next generation of information-processing devices, beyond the universal quantum computer, to designing AIs. Each chapter in the book delineates how an existing vexed open problem in science can be solved by this radically different approach; and it is augmented by short fictional stories that explicate the main point of the chapter. As Marletto demonstrates, contemplating what is possible can give us a more complete and hopeful picture of the physical world. (shrink)

Within collective epistemology, there is a class of theories that understand the epistemic status of collective attitude ascriptions, such as ‘the college union knows that the industrial action is going to plan’, or ‘the jury justifiedly believes that the suspect is guilty’, as saying that a sufficient subset of group member attitudes have the relevant epistemic status. In this paper, I will demonstrate that these summativist approaches to collective epistemology are incompatible with epistemic permissivism, the doctrine that a single body (...) of evidence may rationalize multiple doxastic attitudes. In particular, I will make use of epistemic permissivism to provide a general recipe for generating so-called divergence cases, which demonstrate situations in which rationality requires group-level and member-level attitudes to diverge. I will call this class of cases permissive divergence cases. While other divergence cases have been discussed in the literature, permissive divergence cases prove themselves to be less susceptible to many of the worries raised against their competitors, while being directly built on an often-defended epistemological thesis. (shrink)

Between the radical, creative capacity of our imagination and the social imaginary we are immersed in is an intermediate space philosophers have termed the imaginal, populated by images or (re)presentations that are presences in themselves. Offering a new, systematic understanding of the imaginal and its nexus with the political, Chiara Bottici brings fresh perspective to the formation of political and power relationships and the paradox of a world rich in imagery yet seemingly devoid of imagination. Bottici begins by defining (...) the difference between the imaginal and the imaginary, locating the imaginal's root meaning in the image and its ability to both characterize a public and establish a set of activities within that public. She identifies the imaginal's critical role in powering representative democracies and its amplification through globalization. She then addresses the troublesome increase in images now mediating politics and the transformation of politics into empty spectacle. The spectacularization of politics has led to its virtualization, Bottici observes, transforming images into processes with an uncertain relationship to reality, and, while new media has democratized the image in a global society of the spectacle, the cloned image no longer mediates politics but does the act for us. Bottici concludes with politics' current search for legitimacy through an invented ideal of tradition, a turn to religion, and the incorporation of human rights language. (shrink)

This paper investigates Philomela's metamorphosis into a swallow as inferred from Sophocles’ fragmentary Tereus. The first part focusses on the association between the swallow and barbaric language, casting new light on Philomela's characterization in the play. The second investigates the shuttle, the weaving tool which prompts the recognition of Philomela, arguing that the mention of its ‘voice’ in fr. 595 Radt refers not only to the tapestry which it created, but also to the actual sound of the shuttle, which ancient (...) Greeks associated with the swallow, and thus anticipates Philomela's metamorphosis. The representation of Philomela as a speech-impeded and yet vocal character supports the Dionysiac background of the act of vengeance which she and her sister commit. (shrink)

The current situation around COVID-19 portrays a threat to us in several ways: It imposes uncertainty, a lack of control and reminds us of our own mortality. People around the world have reacted to these threats in seemingly unrelated ways: From stockpiling yeast and toilet paper to favoring nationalist ideas or endorsing conspiratorial beliefs. According to the General Process Model of Threat and Defense the confrontation with a threat - a discrepant experience - makes humans react with both proximal and (...) distal threat responses. While the proximal response manifests in behavioral inhibition that leads to heightened anxious arousal and vigilance, distal responses seek to lower behavioral inhibition and the associated state of anxiety and vigilance through engaging in distal defenses. In the present research, we propose that the reactions to COVID-19 may represent distal defense strategies to the pandemic (in the form of environmental or group related worldview defenses) and therefore can be explained and forecasted by the model. Thus we hypothesized increased perceived COVID-19 threat perception to lead to a proximal threat response in the form of heightened behavioral inhibition. This, in return, should enhance the use of distal defenses (i.e.: several ingroup biases, system justification and conspiratorial beliefs) overlapping with the reactions observed as a response to COVID-19. This hypothesized mediated effect of increased perceived COVID-19 threat on distal defenses was tested in two pre-registered studies: In Study 1 (N = 358) results showed perceived COVID-19 threat to be related to behavioral inhibition and in turn to be associated with increased distal defenses (i.e., higher entitativity, control restoration motivation, passive party support). In Study 2 (N = 348) we manipulated COVID-19 threat salience and found results suggesting the distal defenses of system justification and conspiratorial beliefs to be mediated by the proximal threat response. The results of the present research hint towards a common mechanism through which the seemingly unrelated reactions to COVID-19 can be explained. The results might help to predict future behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic and design measures to counteract detrimental effects of the pandemic. (shrink)

In this chapter, we examine Iris Murdoch’s views about art. We highlight continuities and differences between her views on art and aesthetics, and those of Plato, Kant, and Freud. We argue that Murdoch’s views about art, though traditionally linked to Plato, are more compatible with Kant’s thought than has been acknowledged—though with his ethics rather than his aesthetics. Murdoch shows Plato’s influence in her idea that beauty is the good in a different guise. However, Murdoch shows a more Kantian than (...) Platonic influence in her suggestion that the experience of beauty can be conducive to virtue, and distances herself from Plato in her claim that the enjoyment, as well as the production, of certain kinds of art can be virtuous. We also argue that her view of bad art as self-consoling fantasy is consonant with Freudian thought. Lastly, we question her view of bad art, specifically concerning her identification of bad art as self-consoling fantasy or entertainment, and her separation of the latter and good art. (shrink)

Boredom, in cinema as well as in our everyday experience, is usually associated with a generalised loss of meaning or interest. Accordingly, boredom is often perceived as that which ought to be avo...

This article re-examines the scholium on Euripides, Andromache 445, which several scholars have used to support the claim that Andromache premiered outside Athens, and concludes that both the scholium itself and a remark in the play's hypothesis rather suggest that the play was produced in Athens as part of a dramatic competition.

§ 219a of the German Penal Code (StGB) – the so-called ban on advertising abortions – has been subject of an increasing legal-political controversy since 2017 and was dropped by legislation in July 2022. This paper examines and reconstructs the extent to which the aforementioned ‘ban on advertising’ was (in–)‌compatible with recognized standards of medical ethics. For this purpose, arguments put forward in public discourse on both sides of the conflict, insofar as they go beyond basic attitudes toward abortion, will (...) be subjected to a plausibility test from the perspective of medical ethics. This will show that (I.) according to the standard understanding of autonomy in medical ethics by Beauchamp and Childress, the provision of information about abortions is not an undue influence, but a necessary precondition for autonomous decisions by pregnant women; that (II.) the feared undesirable social developments after the abolition of § 219a StGB are empirically unfounded and largely implausible; but that on the other hand (iii) a multi-perspective communication landscape with accessible expert information promises to effectively counteract the self- and external stigmatization of unintentionally pregnant women. As a result, this analysis provides two things: a coherent medico-ethical justification for the annulment of § 219a StGB and an argumentative basis for the defense against future efforts to support biopolitical positions by censoring available information. (shrink)

Il presente contributo mira a gettare luce sulla figura ebraica dello Schlemihl, per come questa è venuta ad assumere, nei discorsi di Rahel Varnhagen, Hannah Arendt e Lea Ritter Santini, la funzione extra-letteraria di dispositivo di riconoscimento e schema esistenziale. È nella triangolazione dei discorsi e delle vite di queste tre intellettuali appartenenti, ognuna a suo modo, alla cultura tedesca, che la figura dello Schlemihl ha esemplarmente dispiegato la sua forza genetica, come metafora di un destino in cui, fin dal (...) momento del suo apparire letterario nella società dei salotti berlinesi di primo Ottocento grazie ad Adelbert von Chamisso, hanno riconosciuto se stesse coloro che hanno dovuto ritagliare la propria vita sul fondamento dello sradicamento e di una esclusione primigenia. In quella che potrebbe essere compresa come una vera e propria genealogia, il riferirsi allo Schlemihl di Rahel Varnhagen, Hannah Arendt e Lea Ritter Santini restituisce il senso comune di uno sfaccettato subire e agire lo sradicamento, entro la cornice di un discorso prismatico – sotto forma di lettere, saggi e poesie – che nel nutrirsi di vita e pensiero ha saputo raccontare la marginalità nelle sue forme differenti e contigue. (shrink)

This book offers a multidisciplinary look at the much-debated concept of “personalized medicine”. By combining a humanistic and a scientific approach, the book builds up a multidimensional way to understand the limits and potentialities of a personalized approach in medicine and healthcare. The book reflects on personalized medicine and complex diseases, the relationship between personalized medicine and the new bio-technologies, personalized medicine and personalized nutrition, and on some ethical, political, economic, and social implications of personalized medicine. This volume is of (...) interest to researchers from several disciplines including philosophy, bio-medicine, and the social sciences. (shrink)

In this chapter, I will present an empirical conjecture to the effect that some bodily actions are categorically perceived. These are bodily actions such as grasping or reaching for something, which I am going to call motor actions. My conjecture builds on one recently put forward about how the categorical perception of facial expressions of some emotions works. I shall motivate my own conjecture on the basis of both theoretical and empirical considerations, describe how it could be operationalised and what (...) explanatory gain could be obtained from it. (shrink)

In this book, originally published in 2007, Chiara Bottici argues for a philosophical understanding of political myth. Bottici demonstrates that myth is a process, one of continuous work on a basic narrative pattern that responds to a need for significance. Human beings need meaning in order to master the world they live in, but they also need significance in order to live in a world that is less indifferent to them. This is particularly true in the realm of politics. (...) Political myths are narratives through which we orient ourselves, and act and feel about our political world. Bottici shows that in order to come to terms with contemporary phenomena, such as the clash between civilizations, we need a Copernican revolution in political philosophy. If we want to save reason, we need to look at it from the standpoint of myth. (shrink)

Whereas “professional vision” has been mostly analyzed in apprenticeship and other settings where knowledge is made explicit or reflected upon, I focus on how expertise tacitly plays out in task-oriented interaction among practitioners. The paper considers orientation both to the coworker’s and one’s own expertise in the collaborative accomplishment of airport security work. I show how screeners recruit action from colleagues in largely underspecified ways, based on shared access to the visibility field and expected professional vision. Requesting is tacitly accomplished (...) via “highlighting,” which also accounts for one’s request. Accepting is silently achieved via locomotion, which also serves as a display of understanding. Embodied action is systematically preferred to verbal one. Talk is employed in larger proportions when the domain of scrutiny is not equally accessible to interactants, and when “face-work” is required. (shrink)

After initially emerging in China, the coronavirus outbreak has advanced rapidly. The World Health Organization has recently declared it a pandemic, with Europe becoming its new epicentre. Italy has so far been the most severely hit European country and demand for critical care in the northern region currently exceeds its supply. This raises significant ethical concerns, among which is the allocation of scarce resources. Professionals are considering the prioritisation of patients most likely to survive over those with remote chances, and (...) this news has triggered an intense debate about the right of every individual to access healthcare. The proposed analysis suggests that the national emergency framework in which prioritisation criteria are currently enforced should not lead us to perceive scarce resources allocation as something new. From an ethical perspective, the novelty of the current emergency is not grounded in the devastating effects of scarce resources allocation, which is rife in recent and present clinical practice. Rather, it has to do with the extraordinarily high number of people who find themselves personally affected by the implications of scarce resources allocation and who suddenly realise that the principle of ‘equals should be treated equally’ may no longer be applicable. Along with the need to allocate appropriate additional financial resources to support the healthcare system, and thus to mitigate the scarcity of resources, the analysis insists on the relevance of a medical ethics perspective that does not place the burden of care and choice solely on physicians. (shrink)

The classification of the sciences is one of the most discussed and analysed aspects of Peirce’s corpus of work. I propose that Peirce’s attempt at systematising the sciences is characterised by a distinctive historicity, which I construe in two complementary senses. First, I investigate Peirce’s classification as part of a broader nineteenth-century move toward classifying the sciences, a move that was at the same time motivated by social and epistemological goals. I claim that this re-contextualisation adds an entirely new layer (...) to the otherwise distinctively internalist readings of Peirce’s classification. I then look at how Peirce’s scheme, especially in the form it displayed in the early 1890s, relates to his own historical writings, particularly his history of science. Looking at Peirce as a historical actor in his own right through the lens of his classification, I claim, is indispensable to understand the contemporary relevance of his contributions to the history and historiography of the sciences. (shrink)

I develop an account of scientific representations building on Charles S. Peirce's rich, and still underexplored, notion of iconicity. Iconic representations occupy a central place in Peirce's philosophy, in his innovative approach to logic and in his practice as a scientist. Starting from a discussion of Peirce's approach to diagrams, I claim that Peirce's own representations are in line with his formulation of iconicity, and that they are more broadly connected to the pragmatist philosophy he developed in parallel with his (...) scientific work. I then defend the contemporary relevance of Peirce's approach to iconic representations, and specifically argue that Peirce offers a useful ‘third way’ between what Mauricio Suárez has recently described as the ‘analytical’ and ‘practical’ inquiries into the concept of representation. As a philosophically minded scientist and an experimentally inclined philosopher, Peirce never divorced the practice of representing from questions about what counts as a representation... (shrink)

This study analyses for the first time whether and when moral distress may be related to work-family conflict and burnout. Additionally, this study examines whether resilience and positive refocusing might protect healthcare professionals from the negative effects of moral distress. A total of 153 Italian healthcare professionals completed self-report questionnaires. Simple and moderated mediation models revealed that moral distress was positively related to burnout, directly and indirectly, as mediated by work-family conflict. Highly resilient professionals experienced low work-family conflict, regardless of (...) moral distress levels. Moreover, professionals who frequently used positive refocusing were less vulnerable to burnout following moral distress. (shrink)

This study offers a new interpretation of the poem of the founder of Western philosophy: Parmenides. It shows that there is more in his poem than the description of Being by means of negative adjectives such as ingenerated and immobile. His words ask his audience to question their habits, to modify their goals, to engage in new enterprises and to look with a critical eye at their previous attempts to get knowledge. It operates as a travel guide that leads the (...) audience on a journey that will educate them and help them to gradually become philosophically mature, to become true themselves, which can also be described as the encouragement to become Being. (shrink)

Both in scholarship on the Weimar Republic and in historical research in general, many conceptions of ‘crisis’ tend to remain vague and difficult to operationalize. These operational defects of the concept of crisis arise inevitably, we argue, from the concept’s constitutive link to human perception on the one hand and from its subsumption of complex interconnections of historical processes within different subsystems on the other. Frequently today, in both ordinary and historiographical usage, this basic openness of the concept of crisis (...) is foreclosed when it is deployed with a solely negative connotation of ‘downfall’ and ‘decline’, or of something being thrown into question or jeopardy. Such uses obscure a way in which a crisis can evoke not only the pessimistic sense of a threat to the old order but also the optimistic scenario of a chance for renewal. A one-sidedly negative understanding of crisis as prelude to calamity, we argue here, is problematic for historical research for two reasons. Firstly, it obscures comprehension of the consciousness of actors in the relevant period who at any particular moment can have had no prior knowledge of the crisis’s outcome. Secondly, it tends to reify the relevant crisis and to occlude its basic character as something narratively constructed in the accounts of both contemporaries and subsequent historiography. (shrink)

Die Evolutionstheorie hat sich in den letzten 150 Jahren von einer speziellen naturwissenschaftlichen zur universellen wissenschaftlichen Theorie entwickelt.

In kritischer Distanz zu etablierten religiosen Institutionen suchen sie auf ihre spezifische Weise Lebenssinn zu generieren. Insoweit sind sie selbst zentrale Akteure der modernen Religionsgeschichte.

How should we account for the planning and performance of a bodily action in terms of the agent’s intentions? An influential answer invokes two distinct kinds of intention: intentions for the future (also known as prior intentions or distal intentions), responsible for action planning, and intentions for the present (also known as intentions in action or proximal intentions), responsible for action performance. I argue that there is something wrong with this influential answer: the notion of intention for the present is (...) either superfluous (because intentions for the future can exercise functions associated both with action planning and with action performance) or ambiguous (because it conflates temporal, functional, and content-related aspects). Developing this criticism will lead to an alternative account of action planning and performance based on intentions of just one kind. (shrink)

Medical complicity in torture is prohibited by international law and codes of professional ethics. But in the many countries in which torture is common, doctors frequently are expected to assist unethical acts that they are unable to prevent. Sometimes these doctors face a dilemma: they are asked to provide diagnoses or treatments that respond to genuine health needs but that also make further torture more likely or more effective. The duty to avoid complicity in torture then comes into conflict with (...) the doctor’s duty to care for patients. Sometimes the right thing for a doctor to do requires complicity in torture. Whether this is the case depends on: the expected consequences of the doctor’s actions; the wishes of the patient; and the extent of the doctor’s complicity with wrongdoing. Medical associations can support physicians who face this dilemma while maintaining a commitment to clear principles denouncing torture. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungSchein-Elemente in der Betreuung von Menschen mit Demenz erobern den Markt. Über deren Legitimität scheiden sich die Geister. Der Vorwurf der Täuschung wiegt schwer. Diese Arbeit analysiert, ob der Einsatz von Schein-Elementen moralisch zulässig ist. Dazu folgt einleitend eine Charakterisierung der Schein-Elemente und eine Stellungnahme zu ihrem Einfluss auf die Lebensqualität von Menschen mit Demenz. Im Analyseteil betrachte ich die Täuschung aus deontologischer und utilitaristischer Perspektive. Dazu dienen das Prinzip der Doppelwirkung, „the experience machine“ sowie Dworkins Margo. Dabei stelle ich (...) fest, dass sowohl die Täuschungsform als auch der Einsatzzweck relevant für die Legitimitätsbestimmung sind. Die Gestaltungsauthentizität beweist sich dabei als relevanter Indikator zur Bestimmung des Irreführungsgrades. Während sich aus deontologischer und aus utilitaristischer Sicht die bloß in Kauf genommene Irreführung als bedenkenlos und die Lüge in diesem Kontext als verboten zeigt, herrscht über die intendierte Irreführung Uneinigkeit. Diesen Streitfall löse ich anhand der gewonnenen Erkenntnisse über das, was MmD autonom wollen könnten. Den erarbeiteten Beurteilungsvorschlag runde ich mit einer Empfehlung an Institutionen, die Schein-Elemente einsetzen wollen, und einigen weiterführenden Gedanken ab. (shrink)

We believe that intellectual humility is an essential intellectual virtue for university students to foster. It enables them to excel as students of philosophy and other disciplines, to navigate the fast-changing world inside and outside academia, and to flourish in interaction with others. In this paper, we analyze this virtue by singling out two distinct but related aspects: the openness-aspect and the care-aspect. The former makes one value a dialogue with those who have different views from one’s own. The latter (...) aspect involves searching for implicit assumptions one brings to encounters with one’s object of inquiry and trying to study this object as unique and irreducible. We discuss four learning activities we developed for the philosophy bachelor course “Who are we? Philosophical views on humans and the gods” at University College Utrecht (the Netherlands). Throughout this paper, we show extracts from the students’ assignments, reflections, and evaluations. These extracts indicate that students developed both aspects of intellectual humility —openness to different views and care for the uniqueness of each object of inquiry— and acknowledged their importance. (shrink)