Context: Predicting security and trust vulnerabilities and issues is crucial for IoT interconnected systems and ecosystems, especially when integrating new, third-party or open-source components. Objective: One way to ensure timely predictions is by using a smart monitoring framework to continuously verify functional and non-functional property violations during the executions of the systems and their components. Method: This paper presents a set of guidelines for the Smart Monitoring Framework definition and its application process. Results and Conclusion: The paper provides the reference (...) architecture of the Smart Monitoring Framework and its possible implementation to promptly detect suspicious behavior or property violations. The paper also illustrates how the provided implementation satisfies the defined guidelines by design. (shrink)

The debate over the place of religion in secular, democratic societies dominates philosophical and intellectual discourse. These arguments often polarize around simplistic reductions, making efforts at reconciliation impossible. Yet more rational stances do exist, positions that broker a peace between relativism and religion in people's public, private, and ethical lives. _Christianity, Truth, and Weakening Faith_ advances just such a dialogue, featuring the collaboration of two major philosophers known for their progressive approach to this issue. Seeking unity over difference, Gianni Vattimo (...) and René Girard turn to Max Weber, Eric Auerbach, and Marcel Gauchet, among others, in their exploration of truth and liberty, relativism and faith, and the tensions of a world filled with new forms of religiously inspired violence. Vattimo and Girard ultimately conclude that secularism and the involvement of religion in governance are, in essence, produced by Christianity. In other words, Christianity is "the religion of the exit from religion," and democracy, civil rights, the free market, and individual freedoms are all facilitated by Christian culture. Through an exchange that is both intimate and enlightening, Vattimo and Girard share their unparalleled insight into the relationships among religion, modernity, and the role of Christianity, especially as it exists in our multicultural world. (shrink)

Growing concern about economic inequality has generated a polarized narrative regarding the causes and consequences of extreme wealth. We contend that divided ideological positions obscure a more mundane reality about the typical wealthiest 1% households. Using data from the triennial survey of consumer finance, we demonstrate that there is substantial heterogeneity within the 1%. Contrary to public discourse, the typical 1% household does not have wealth reflective of popular rich lists, but derives a significant share of its wealth from ownership (...) and active management of small- to medium-sized private enterprise. We use these findings to shed new insights on business families’ relationship to economic inequality and open promising new areas of inquiry regarding the role of the family business in society. (shrink)

Law contains many dualities, though most, if not all, of these dualities resolve into one complex puzzle: To what extent is law a matter of pure social facts, or moral value untethered to social facts? I argue that each concept of law reconciles this duality in a different way on the basis of certain beneficial consequences that might result. Instead of pitting concepts against one another universally, we should accept that the balance between law's social fact and moral value dimensions (...) is context-specific in relation to particular legal puzzles. This balance can be achieved only by considering both political theory and empirical data. (shrink)

Choice reaction tasks are performed faster when stimulus location corresponds to response location. This spatial stimulus–response compatibility effect affects performance at the level of action planning and execution. However, when response selection is completed before movement initiation, the Simon effect arises only at the planning level. The aim of this study was to ascertain whether when a precocious response selection is requested, the Simon effect can be detected on the kinematics characterizing the online control phase of a non-ballistic movement. Participants (...) were presented with red or green colored squares, which could appear on the right, left, above, or below a central cross. Depending on the square's color, participants had to release one of two buttons, then reach toward and press a corresponding lateral pad. We found evidence of the Simon effect on both action planning and on-line control. Moreover, the investigation of response conflict at the level of previous trials, a factor that might determine interference at the level of the current response, revealed a conflict adaptation process across trials. Results are discussed in terms of current theories concerned with the Simon effect and the distinction between action planning and control. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Kierkegaard's theory of change is motivated by a robust notion of contingency. His view of contingency is sharply juxtaposed with a strong notion of absolute necessity. I show that how he understands these notions explains certain of his claims about causation. I end by suggesting a compatibilist interpretation of Kierkegaard's philosophy.

Taking as its point of departure the existing critical literature on the intersections between René Girard’s and Giorgio Agamben’s anthropogenetic theories, this essay aims to add further considerations to the debate by discussing some of Agamben’s intuitions within a Girardian paradigmatic explanatory framework. I show how by regressing the archeological analysis to a pre-institutional and pre-legal moment, and by re-examining the antinomic structure of the sacred in its genetic organizing form, one can account more cogently for certain key issues relevant (...) to Agamben’s theoretical project, such as the “paradox of sovereignty,” the nature of the “state of exception,” and the dissociation between culpa and individual responsibility in archaic law, as recently discussed in Karman. I also put forward arguments concerning the limitations of Agamben’s immanent ontology to account for the zoe/bios distinction as a key structural element of his particular take on biopolitics, viewing this specifically in the light. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Kierkegaard endorses Hegel's theory of mediation, the view that relative opposites are mediated. However, I show that Kierkegaard denies Hegel's thesis that there are all and only relative opposites. I develop two of his arguments against this thesis. The first is existential. This argument comes from the dramatic interplay between A, the often disagreeable aesthete of Either/Or I, and Judge William, the dutiful ethicist of Either/Or II. Judge William convincingly argues that the possibility of (...) future aiming human projects is rendered obsolete if aesthetic and ethical forms of existence are mediated opposites. The second is philosophical. This second argument is offered by Johannes Climacus in Concluding Unscientific Postscript. I show that Climacus issues a reductio argument that I call "the argument from insufficient difference.". (shrink)

O estudo teve por objetivo identificar e analisar os processos de aprendizagem que contribuem para o desenvolvimento de competências requeridas ao administrador no atual ambiente de negócios a partir da percepção de estudantes universitários que estavam trabalhando e cursando a etapa final do curso ..

The aim of this special collection of essays, titled Intersubjectivity, Desire, and Mimetic Theory: René Girard and Psychoanalysis, is to reappraise the relationship between René Girard's thought and the psychoanalytic tradition. The tripartite structure of the title clearly echoes the English title of Girard's first book, Deceit, Desire and the Novel, with which he introduced the psychological dynamics of mimetic desire as represented in modern European novels.1 Through the reference to the intentionally broad notions of "intersubjectivity," "desire," and "mimetic theory," (...) our title also signals the intention to cover the multifarious aspects and issues that inform Girard's thinking in relation to core issues of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Reception of René Girard's Thought in Italy:1965-Present1Federica Casini (bio) and Pierpaolo Antonello (bio)Italy provides an important national cultural context for the global mapping of constantly growing interest in René Girard's thought and in mimetic theory. Girard is widely and unquestionably recognized as one of the most influential thinkers of our times. Interviews, public interventions, and excerpts of his books are featured quite regularly in Italian national newspapers (...) and magazines, and, as a result, Girard's name is known outside narrow academic circles.2 All his books have been translated into Italian, including several unique titles, which are available neither in French nor in English, and which are collections of previously unpublished occasional papers or essays.3 The reception of his thought has not been confined to any specific disciplinary ambit; it has been discussed, among others, by philosophers, literary critics, social scientists, cognitive scientists, theologians, and psychoanalysts.4 This article aims at providing a chronology of Girard's reception in Italy, while surveying the critical literature and the intellectual response to his theory, from the publication of his first book to the present. [End Page 139]From the 1960s to the 1980s: Lies and Truth (About Girard) and the Early Reception of His BooksThe first Italian translation of Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque5 was released by Bompiani in 1965, with a title that was both misleading and symptomatic: Struttura e personaggi del romanzo moderno (Structures and Characters in the Modern Novel). The reference to structuralism, which was the theoretical fashion of the day in Italian literary circles in the mid-1960s, and the pigeonholing of Girard's exegetical scrutiny as novelistic criticism testify emblematically to the difficulty of classification, plus the substantial misunderstanding that the book withstood both in Italy and in other parts of Europe at that time. To omit mensonge and vérité from the title of the Italian edition is to ignore the "truth" of the matter, that the book was also a mediation on the structure of human desire, extending outside the limits of representation and literature, branching out into a theory of human behavior and the social dynamic that had a profound psychological, anthropological, and sociological reach. Moreover, Mensonge romantique is a meditation on modernity (the novel being its most emblematic form of representation) and the consequences of the unleashing of increasing levels of "internal mediation" within bourgeois society. The reception of this volume was quite cold, and it was reprinted only in 1981, after the wave of discussion stirred by the publication of the Italian translation of Violence and the Sacred. The only review published between 1965 and 1979, by the literary critic Enzo Golino, appeared in 1966 in L'Espresso,6 a weekly magazine that has played, and still plays today, a determinant role in the presentation of Girardian texts to the general public in Italy.Given this minimal reception, it is not surprising that the publication of Girard's groundbreaking work, La Violence et le sacré, in 1972,7 was largely ignored in Italy, in spite of the discussion it stirred in French intellectual quarters and the cultural exchange that Italian intellectuals have always maintained with Parisian cultural circles. The only review that appeared in Italy was by Paola Daniela Giovannelli, a literary critic and an expert on Italian theater, showing that the new work clearly still suffered from the same kind of disciplinary classification and reception as Mensonge romantique. In fact, it appeared in the literary journal Lingua e stile, and it discusses the anthropology of sacrifice and the interdisciplinary perspective, ranging from ethnology to psychoanalysis to myth, that feature in La Violence et le sacré in terms of a "theatricalization" of anthropology, mainly due to Giovannelli's disciplinary interests and the book's focus on Greek tragedies.8 [End Page 140]However, Girard's name finally burst onto the intellectual scene in Italy in 1980, when the Italian translation of Violence and the Sacred was released by Adelphi, with the title La violenza e il sacro.9 This marks the "official" entrance of Girardian thought into the Italian cultural debate, as the volume was hailed by a series of... (shrink)