The global pandemic has levied a heavy toll on humanity, but in its wake appears a great opportunity. Amidst what he calls a crisis of modernity, Giulio Maspero points to a phenomenon that can be seen in plain sight. "The absence of personal relationships highlighted by the health crisis exposes the consequences of the modern matrix, which, having lost its Christian element, now risks transforming itself into a digital matrix, substantially configuring itself as a technognosis." Without Trinitarian framework (...) ancient and new idols emerge, as the Covid-19 tragedies have shown. Yet post-pandemic must be a moment of clarity and realism, as we can see how necessary it is that humanity place itself in relation to something beyond. The post-modern journey, however, must be in the spirit of Christian humanism or else any so-called progress will no longer be unable to speak authentically of our humanity. That is to say, the relational dimension of human life will be erased right along with the other ills that plague our earth. (shrink)

The paper applies Christian Humanism to management highlighting the role of relations in business and the entrepreneurial life. The claim is that such a dimension is important for everybody even from a secular point of view regardless of one’s belief. The first part shows how Biblical tradition inspired a rereading of relation in the first Christian thinkers, who had to recognize it in God. But this made possible to perceive that the relationships can be a real source of being, as (...) the example of a family shows. The thesis proposed is that within every Gesellschaft there is a Gemeinschaft, that is constituted by its relational dimensions, connecting the common good and profit also to relational goods. The second part draws consequences for management, recognizing through the example of the Inner Game three relational dimensions relevant for management: the one interior to the person; the relationships between coworkers; the interaction with the culture of the company. All of them should be considered to improve the Gemeinschaft dimension within the Gesellschaft. The last part of the article explains how Christian Humanism helps also to avoid an idealistic reading of the proposal, which always has to take into account the demands of confrontation with the external system intrinsic to the Gesellschaft, as the very etymology of management reveals. (shrink)

This in-depth study of the apophatic dimension crafted by Gregory of Nissa is the translation on the epistemological level of a new ontology, developed in debates with Arianism, and intended to expand classical metaphysics on the meaning of relationship. In Neoplatonic philosophy silence protects the absolute nature of the First Principle leaving expressive mediation to degrees of intermediate ontologies. Through trinitarian revelation God is manifested as a communion of love within which the external Logos is identified with the divine essence (...) itself, in a unity founded upon relationship and will. Beginning from this new trinitarian ontology, Gregory sees in contemplation and in adoration, made up of silence and word, the human response to a free creative act of divine love and thus cognitive instruments, paths of access to the personal relationship of union with the Beloved. (shrink)

This in-depth study of the apophatic dimension crafted by Gregory of Nissa is the translation on the epistemological level of a new ontology, developed in debates with Arianism, and intended to expand classical metaphysics on the meaning of relationship. In Neoplatonic philosophy silence protects the absolute nature of the First Principle leaving expressive mediation to degrees of intermediate ontologies. Through trinitarian revelation God is manifested as a communion of love within which the external Logos is identified with the divine essence (...) itself, in a unity founded upon relationship and will. Beginning from this new trinitarian ontology, Gregory sees in contemplation and in adoration, made up of silence and word, the human response to a free creative act of divine love and thus cognitive instruments, paths of access to the personal relationship of union with the Beloved. (shrink)

This book shows how the Church Fathers, especially the Cappadocians in the 4th century, rethought Greek metaphysics, in particular relation, an extremely topical category. It offers a perspective to those who study philosophy, particularly in Late-Antiquity, and to those who study patristics and systematic theology.

Two problems about rights have received so far little attention. One is the problem of identifying a general value in the practice of rights. The second is to see when, if at all, rights violations wrong the right-holder, in a morally significant sense. In the present essay, I address the first question by investigating the second. I first show that if we commit to the two ideas, common in the contemporary philosophy of rights, that claim-rights always correlate with directed duties (...) and that rights aspire to protect interests of the right-holder, we make it hard to explain why rights violations, in general, wrong right-holders. In the final section, I present what I see as a promising solution to the puzzle. I describe a particular social environment (the society of equals) where interacting with others through rights is indeed valuable because respecting rights communicates that one takes seriously others’ equal moral status. In such a society and only in such a society, I conclude, moral agents are required to treat all rights violations as wrongs perpetrated against the right-holder. (shrink)

There are two main meanings in Kant’s concept of moral certainty (moralische Gewissheit, certitudo moralis): first, it applies to the kind of certainty embodied in rational faith in the existence of God and a future life; second, it applies to the conscientiousness (Gewissenhaftigkeit) required of an agent in the practice of moral judgement. Despite the growing attention to Kant’s theory of conscience and his concept of conscientiousness, this article is the first to discuss ‘moral certainty’ as the aim of ‘conscientiousness’ (...) and to highlight the relevance of both notions in regard to moral education and the purposes of Kant’s ethical doctrines of method. (shrink)

In this paper, in line with the general framework of value-sensitive design, we aim to operationalize the general concept of “Meaningful Human Control” in order to pave the way for its translation into more specific design requirements. In particular, we focus on the operationalization of the first of the two conditions investigated: the so-called ‘tracking’ condition. Our investigation is led in relation to one specific subcase of automated system: dual-mode driving systems. First, we connect and compare meaningful human control with (...) a concept of control very popular in engineering and traffic psychology, and we explain to what extent tracking resembles and differs from it. This will help clarifying the extent to which the idea of meaningful human control is connected to, but also goes beyond, current notions of control in engineering and psychology. Second, we take the systematic analysis of practical reasoning as traditionally presented in the philosophy of human action and we adapt it to offer a general framework where different types of reasons and agents are identified according to their relation to an automated system’s behaviour. This framework is meant to help explaining what reasons and what agents play a role in controlling a given system, thereby enabling policy makers to produce usable guidelines and engineers to design systems that properly respond to selected human reasons. In the final part, we discuss a practical example of how our framework could be employed in designing automated driving systems. (shrink)

Contemporary brain reading technologies promise to provide the possibility to decode and interpret mental states and processes. Brain reading could have numerous societally relevant implications. In particular, the private character of mind might be affected, generating ethical and legal concerns. This paper aims at equipping ethicists and policy makers with conceptual tools to support an evaluation of the potential applicability and the implications of current and near future brain reading technology. We start with clarifying the concepts of mind reading and (...) brain reading, and the different kinds of mental states that could in principle be read. Subsequently, we devise an evaluative framework that is composed of five criteria-accuracy, reliability, informativity, concealability and enforceability-aimed at enabling a clearer estimation of the degree to which brain reading might be realistically deployed in contexts where mental privacy could be at stake. While accuracy and reliability capture how well a certain method can access mental content, informativity indicates the relevance the obtainable data have for practical purposes. Concealability and enforceability are particularly important for the evaluation of concerns about potential violations of mental privacy and civil rights. The former concerns the degree with which a brain reading method can be concealed from an individual’s perception or awareness. The latter regards the extent to which a method can be used against somebody’s will. With the help of these criteria, stakeholders can orient themselves in the rapidly developing field of brain reading. (shrink)

The term ‘recalcitrant emotions’ refers to those cases where we feel an emotion that apparently contradicts our better judgements. For instance, one may be afraid of flying while claiming not to believe that it is dangerous. This phenomenon is commonly conceived as an objection to cognitivism, according to which emotions are based on the subject's beliefs, insofar as it would force us to ascribe to the subject who feels them an excessive degree of irrationality, comparing recalcitrant emotions to contradictory beliefs. (...) For this reason, many philosophers have developed perceptual theories which describe emotions as forms of perception, allowing us to explain recalcitrant emotions without attributing to the subject contradictory beliefs, treating them as perceptual illusions. Facing the most compelling of these attempts, the article shows that perceptual accounts fail to explain in what sense recalcitrant emotions (and people who feel them) are irrational, keeping the comparison with optical illusions, which are not. Having rebutted three popular perceptual proposals, I conclude that the analogy between emotions and perceptions is flawed and that the appeal of these theories lies on a surreptitious shift in the meaning of the term ‘perceive’. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article analyses the abbé de Saint-Pierre as a mediator of ideas between France and England. The political proposal of the Projet pour rendre la paix perpétuelle en Europe circulated in Great Britain just before the signing of the peace treaties of Utrecht and Aachen, attesting the influence that Saint-Pierre’s proposal exerted on British thought and politics. The abbé was engaged in dialogue with Quaker pacifists and, in particular, with the projects put forward by William Penn and John Bellers, (...) both theorists of a ‘European State’. After examining the relationship between Penn’s Essay and Saint-Pierre’s ideas, the article will demonstrate how elements of Bellers’s Some Reasons found their way into the Projet with numerous convergences of lexicon and content suggesting that the abbé had drawn inspiration from Bellers. Quaker ideas on politics had a greater effect on Saint-Pierre’s conception of peace and international relations than is commonly recognized. In fact, there was a constant intellectual exchange between the abbé and British political, economic and philosophical thought. (shrink)

It is argued that, of the three distinct approaches usually adhered to in discussions of this controversy, none will produce an adequate reconstruction of the episode. The philosophical-methodological type of approach leads to a glossing over of the intricacies of deductive and inductive procedures inhering in the writings of both antagonists (§ 1). The metaphysical approach leads to oversimplification as to the thinking of either scientist on the problem of the continuous or discontinuous character of Nature(§ 2). The epistemological (theory (...) of knowledge) type of approach, finally, leads authors to posit a Linnaean realism vs. a Buffonian nominalism, whereas the true position was much more complex than what transpires(§ 3). The paper proceeds, therefore, to provide a novel reconstruction of this wellknown controversy (§ 4-5), concentrating on the differing choices made by the two naturalists in their work of botanical or zoological classification : thus seeking to show that the clash came about because Buffon rejected the rigid principle of character subordination put forward by Linnaeus, and, on a more general level, because the two protagonists were proceeding from deeply diverging views of what natural history, and what the naturalist's function, should be. (shrink)

In the proem of the “Theogony” Hesiod describes the conception and birth of the Muses. At ll. 58-60 he specifies that Mnemosyne’s pregnancy lasted one entire year, ένιαντός. This unusual one-year pregnancy puzzles Hesiod’s commentators; West, for example, translates ένιαντός as ‘due time’ rather than ‘year’. The purpose of this article is to argue that Hesiod intended ένιαντός to mean ‘year’.

This paper argues that in Silvae 3.3, written to console Claudius Etruscus on the death of his beloved father, Statius reverses his own account of the contentious relationship between Tisiphone and Pietas in Thebaid Books 1 and 11 to present his patron's affectionate bond with his father as antithetical to Oedipus’ resentful relationship with his sons. In the Thebaid, Oedipus summons Tisiphone from the Underworld to punish his own children by stirring up civil war, and the Fury promptly obeys, banishing (...) Pietas from earth to prevent her from stopping the conflict. In Silvae 3.3, on the other hand, the poet asks Pietas to come back to earth, and urges the Furies to stay away from the deceased. The return of Pietas, also portrayed in Silvae 5.2, shows that in his collection of occasional poetry Statius rewrites his own epic to restore cosmos: while in the chaotic narrative universe of the Thebaid all fundamental values, including filial devotion, are turned upside down, the Silvae describe a more conventional and reassuring world, founded on virtue rather than vengeance. (shrink)

We study how to postpone the application of the reductio ad absurdum rule (RAA) in classical natural deduction. This technique is connected with two normalization strategies for classical logic, due to Prawitz and Seldin, respectively. We introduce a variant of Seldin’s strategy for the postponement of RAA, which induces a negative translation from classical to intuitionistic and minimal logic. Through this translation, Glivenko’s theorem from classical to intuitionistic and minimal logic is proven.

We study how to postpone the application of the reductio ad absurdum rule ) in classical natural deduction. This technique is connected with two normalization strategies for classical logic, due to Prawitz and Seldin, respectively. We introduce a variant of Seldin’s strategy for the postponement of \, which induces a negative translation from classical to intuitionistic and minimal logic. Through this translation, Glivenko’s theorem from classical to intuitionistic and minimal logic is proven.

This work investigates the relationship between goals and mitigation behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy. Study 1 identified goals ascribed to following and violating mitigation-related indications. Study 2 investigated the structure of and link between COVID-related goals and behaviors in a large community sample. Our results showed substantial relationships between goals and behaviors. Goals were best described by a bi-dimensional structure, whereas behaviors clustered into a three-component structure. Hierarchical multiple regressions demonstrated the incremental validity of goals in the prediction (...) of behaviors. Network analysis suggested that goals imbued with social content were more directly related to both risky and preventive behaviors. Motivational aspects emerged as important contributors to the organization of behaviors in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. (shrink)

Through the prism of iconography, we may be able to better understand Vecchietta's stylistic choices towards the end of his career. His last known bronze sculpture, a gaunt and pathetic Christ, executed in 1476, is widely agreed to represent the Risen Christ. Today, the sculpture stands atop the high altar of the Santissima Annunziata, the Hospital Church in Siena, but this was neither its original nor intended location. In fact, the figure was meant to be part of a larger ensemble (...) which, together, constituted Vecchietta's funerary chapel. This article demonstrates unequivocally that the present setting of the statue has fostered an iconographical misunderstanding: naturally, the subject of the statue is Christ; but he represents the Man of Sorrows, not the Risen Christ. An exploration of the significance of the iconography of the Man of Sorrows in mid-fifteenth-century Siena, and its possible antecedents, reveals connections especially with Northern European artefacts circulating in central Italy at the time. The result of these findings is to set Vecchietta's sculpture free from previous preconceptions, shedding new light on a famous artwork and triggering new questions about the artist who made it. (shrink)

Recent Libet-style experiments are of limited relevance to the debate about free action and free will, and should be understood as investigations of arbitrary actions or guesses. In Libet-style experiments, the concept of 'free action' is commonly taken to refer to a 'self-initiated voluntary act', where the self prompts an action without being prompted. However, this idea is based on the problematic assumption that the conscious self needs to be free from every constraint in order to be actually free. We (...) maintain that a fundamental condition for free action is the presence of reasons to act responsibly. By analyzing a recent neuroscientific experiment, we indicate how its results could be interpreted as indicating how free action operationalization is inappropriately focusing on arbitrary actions. Hence, the way free action has been experimentally studied may have had a misleading influence on the debate about free will. (shrink)

The brains of higher mammals are extraordinary integrative devices. Signals from large numbers of functionally specialized groups of neurons distributed over many brain regions are integrated to generate a coherent, multimodal scene. Signals from the environment are integrated with ongoing, patterned neural activity that provides them with a meaningful context. We review recent advances in neurophysiology and neuroimaging that are beginning to reveal the neural mechanisms of integration. In addition, we discuss concepts and measures derived from information theory that lend (...) a theoretical basis to the notion of complexity as integration of information and suggest new experimental tests of these concepts. (shrink)