Objective: To assess the psychological distress of healthcare providers working in the field of obstetrics during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic and to identify factors associated with psychological distress at the individual, interpersonal, and organizational level.Design: Cross-sectional survey study.Setting: Four University hospitals in Italy.Participants: HCPs working in obstetrics, including gynecologists, residents in gynecology and obstetrics, and midwives.Methods: The 104-item survey Impatto PSIcologico COVID-19 in Ostetricia was created by a multidisciplinary expert panel and administered to HCPs in obstetrics in May 2020 (...) via a web-based platform.Main Outcome Measures: Psychological distress assessed by the General Health Questionnaire-12 included in the IPSICO survey.Results: The response rate to the IPSICO survey was 88.2%, and that for GHQ-12 was 84.4%. Just over half of the GHQ-12 respondents reported a clinically significant level of psychological distress. Psychological distress was associated with either individual, interpersonal, and organizational factors in dealing with the pandemic.Conclusions: Results confirm the need for monitoring and assessing the psychological distress for HCPs in obstetrics. Interventions at the individual, interpersonal, and organizational level may relieve the psychological distress during the COVID-19 pandemic and foster resilience skills in facing emotional distress. (shrink)

Contemporary Darwinian medicine is a still-expanding new discipline whose principal aim is to arrive at an evolutionary understanding of aspects of the body that leave it vulnerable to disease. Historically, there was a precedent; between 1880 and 1940 several scientists tried to develop a general evolutionary theory of disease as arising from deleterious traits that escape elimination by natural selection. In contrast, contemporary Darwinian medicine uses evolutionary theory to consider all the possible reasons why selection has left human vulnerable to (...) a disease. (shrink)

Internal misconduct is a universal problem in prisons and affects the maintenance of social order. Consequently, correctional institutions often develop rehabilitation programs to reduce the likelihood of inmates committing internal offenses and criminal recidivism after release. Therefore, it is necessary to identify the profile of each offender, both for the appropriate indication of a rehabilitation program and the level of internal security to which he must be submitted. In this context, this work aims to discover the most significant characteristics in (...) predicting inmate misconduct from ML methods and the SHAP approach. A database produced in 2004 through the Survey of Inmates in State and Federal Correctional Facilities in the United States of America was used, which provides nationally representative data on prisoners from state and federal facilities. The predictive model based on Random Forest performed the best, thus, we applied the SHAP to it. Overall, the results showed that features related to victimization, type of crime committed, age and age at first arrest, history of association with criminal groups, education, and drug and alcohol use are most relevant in predicting internal misconduct. Thus, it is expected to contribute to the prior classification of an inmate on time, to use programs and practices that aim to improve the lives of offenders, their reintegration into society, and consequently, the reduction of criminal recidivism. (shrink)

Das Buch untersucht die Bedeutung des Begriffs rationalitas bei Hildegard von Bingen. Zunachst wird die Herkunft des Begriffs von der griechischen Logoslehre uber die fruhchristliche Trinitatsspekulation bis hin zur ratio-Rezeption des Fruhmittelalters beleuchtet. Auf diesem Hintergrund entfaltet der zweite Teil die anthropologisch-theologische Bedeutung von rationalitas fur das Weltbild Hildegards.

Jerry Fodor and Ernest Lepore [(1992) Holism: a shopper's guide, Oxford: Blackwell; (1996) in R. McCauley (Ed.) The Churchlands and their critics , Cambridge: Blackwell] have launched a powerful attack against Paul Churchland's connectionist theory of semantics--also known as state space semantics. In one part of their attack, Fodor and Lepore argue that the architectural and functional idiosyncrasies of connectionist networks preclude us from articulating a notion of conceptual similarity applicable to state space semantics. Aarre Laakso and Gary Cottrell [(1998) (...) in M. A. Gernsbacher & S. Derry (Eds) Proceedings of the 20th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Mahway, NJ: Erlbaum; Philosophical Psychology ] 13, 47-76 have recently run a number of simulations on simple feedforward networks and applied a mathematical technique for measuring conceptual similarity in the representational spaces of those networks. Laakso and Cottrell contend that their results decisively refute Fodor and Lepore's criticisms. Paul Churchland [(1998) Journal of Philosophy, 95, 5-32 ] goes further. He uses Laakso and Cottrell's neurosimulations to argue that connectionism does furnish us with all we need to construct a robust theory of semantics and a robust theory of translation. In this paper I shall argue that whereas Laakso and Cottrell's neurocomputational results may provide us with a rebuttal of Fodor and Lepore's argument, Churchland's conclusion is far too optimistic. In particular, I shall try to show that connectionist modelling does not provide any objective criterion for achieving a one-to-one accurate translational mapping across networks. (shrink)

Figurative experience, as a codified system of images, emerges in Europe about 40.000 years ago. Together with the development of a figurative system, Homo sapiens acquired his modern cognitive architecture: an entirely articulated language, as well-developed as our current phonological system is, and others cognitive capacities such as basic drawing skills, self-consciousness and group cohesiveness. “Making sign”, as a complex nonverbal symbolism, is a crucial stage in human evolution: a stage of complex symbolism by means of a non-verbal language. Its (...) value is both eidetic, when it aims at producing metaphoric and shared images, and individual, when it is involved in individual performances, that do not imply spectators. (shrink)

Focused on city-scale automation, and using self-driving cars (SDCs) as a case study, this article reflects on the role of AI—and in particular, computer vision systems used for mapping and navigation—as a catalyst for urban transformation. Urban research commonly presents AI and cities as having a one-way cause-and-effect relationship, giving undue weight to AI’s impact on cities and overlooking the role of cities in shaping AI. Working at the intersection of data science and social research, this paper aims to counter (...) this trend by exploring the reverse perspective: how do cities affect the development, and expose the present limits, of SDCs? The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, by comparing urban and nonurban environments and thoroughly examining the relationship between computer vision and city-specific sociality and form, it defines machine autonomy/automation as a function of the sociotechnical milieu in which an AI system operates. Second, and related, the paper problematizes the notion of SDCs as autonomous technologies and the role it plays in envisioning contending policy arrangements and technical solutions for achieving full driving automation. Finally, the article offers insight into a materialist and spatialized understanding of AI—namely, not as an abstract quality susceptible to replication within discrete machines, but rather as a distributed property emerging through embodied interactions among a multiplicity of agents (human, non-human, and technological) within/with their environments. (shrink)

Sacred Landscape and Visual Culture. The Paintings of the Lower Church of the Sacro Speco at Subiaco - The purpose of this article is to investigate the emergence of landscape in visual discourses. The subject of this research is the territory of Subiaco and - more specifically - the monastery of the Sacro Speco, built on the site of St Benedict’s hermitage. It is here, in the vast decorative cycle directed by Magister Conxolus at the end of the thirteenth century, (...) that the “sacred landscape” of Subiaco is bent by the monastic community to claim its possession. Benedict is always portrayed inside his Grotto - which becomes a veritable “attribute” of the saint - and the same discourse also includes the portrayal of Chelidonia, a Benedictine hermit nun who lived between the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Through the experiences of the two saints, the landscape becomes sacralised and acquires an identity value for the Benedictine community which lives there. In this context, the figures of Benedict and Chelidonia create a visual bridge to Francis and Clare, and the frescoes becomes a Benedictine response to the “Franciscan challenge”. (shrink)

In this commentary I explore nonclassical connectionism as a coherent framework for evaluation in the spirit of the Newell Test. Focusing on knowledge integration, development, real-time performance, and flexible behavior, I argue that NCC's “within-theory rank ordering” would place subsymbolic modeling in a better position. Failure to adopt a symbolic level of thought cannot be interpreted as a weakness.

Solidarity can be conceived in multiple ways. This article probes possible underlying ontological and normative assumptions of solidarity. In order to conceptually clarify the notion of solidarity, we distinguish between five types of solidarity. We suggest that solidarity is either grounded in the Enlightenment ideas of liberty, or a category of loyalty and allegiance. If the former is the case, solidarity can be justified on rational grounds. If the latter is the case, it is contingent on narratives of historical continuity (...) and a non-rational sense of belonging. Moreover, we show that different types of solidarity can be derived from Anglo-Saxon and continental thought, which hints at different conceptions of community. (shrink)

This paper consists of four parts. In section 1, I shall offer a strategy to bypass a counter‐example which Gareth Evans (1975) offers against Quine’s Thesis of the Inscrutability of Reference. In section 2, I shall introduce a criterion recently pro‐duced by Crispin Wright (1997) in terms of ‘psychological simplicity’ which threatens the perverse route offered in section 1. In section 3, I shall argue that a LOT model of human cognition could motivate Wright’s criterion. In section 4, I shall (...) argue that if we instead model human cognition by a recurrent neural network, then Wright’s criterion is unmotivated. Thus I shall produce a Connectionist Defence of the Inscrutability Thesis. (shrink)

Populism is widely thought to be in tension with liberal democracy. This article clarifies what exactly is problematic about populism from a liberal–democratic point of view and goes on to develop normative standards that allow us to distinguish between more and less legitimate forms of populism. The point of this exercise is not to dismiss populism in toto; the article strives for a more subtle result, namely, to show that liberal democracy can accommodate populism provided that the latter conforms to (...) particular discursive norms. What the article calls a ‘liberal ethics of populism’ turns out to be closely bound up with a broader ethics of peoplehood, understood as a way of articulating who ‘the people’ are in a way that is compatible with liberal–democratic principles of political justification. Such an ethics, concludes the article, inevitably has a much wider audience than populist political actors: its addressees are all those who seek legitimately to exercise power in the name of the people. (shrink)

According to Carruthers ants and bees have minds. This claim is to be understood realistically. We do not interpret the overt behaviour of ants and bees by ascribing to them beliefs and desires in an instrumental manner. They rather possess minds in the relevant cognitive sense. In this paper, I propose to pave the way for a reductio against such a polemic view. In particular, I shall argue that if ants and bees have minds, by the same token, plants do (...) have minds too. In my view, the problem has to do with Carruthers' underlying technical concept of cognitive architecture; a concept which, as I shall argue, can be called into question both on empirical and conceptual grounds. Según Carruthers, las hormigas y las abejas tienen mente. Esta afirmación debe entenderse de modo realista. No es que interpretemos la conducta abierta de hormigas y abejas en términos de creencias y deseos atribuidos instrumentalmente. Se trata más bien de que tienen tales estados mentales en el sentido cognitivo relevante. En este trabajo, me propongo llevar esta polémica concepción a una reductio. En particular, argumentaré que si las hormigas y las abejas tienen mente, por la misma razón las plantas también la tendrían. A mi modo de ver, el problema tiene que ver con el concepto técnico de arquitectura cognitiva de Carruthers ; un concepto que puede ser cuestionado sobre bases empíricas y conceptuales, según argüiré. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Pruss proves the validity of the rule beta-2 relative to Lewis’s semantics for counterfactuals, which is a significant step forward in the debate about the consequence argument. Yet, we believe there remain intuitive counter-examples to beta-2 formulated with the actuality operator and rigidified descriptions. We offer a novel and two-dimensional formulation of the Lewisian semantics for counterfactuals and prove the validity of a new transfer rule according to which a new version of the consequence argument can (...) be formulated. This new transfer rule is immune to the counter-examples involving the actuality operator and rigidified descriptions. However, we show that counter-examples to this new rule can also be generated, demanding that the Lewisian semantics be generalized for higher dimensions where counter-examples can always be generated. (shrink)

This short piece discusses Hélène Landemore’s proposal of an ‘open democracy’, as outlined in her recent book _Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century_. Acknowledging the value of Landemore’s radical and ambitious proposals, I draw attention to a number of shortcomings and blind spots that have to do with how the case for an ‘open democracy’ is made: through an unduly brief and dismissive treatment of political parties; a methodological insensitivity to empirical variations of democratic performance and citizens’ (...) evaluations of the latter; a failure to distinguish between higher and ordinary law-making in the discussion of the central Icelandic case; and, finally, a surprising concession that realising an open democracy is all but infeasible in established constitutional democracies. If open democracy is to be an attractive ideal, these issues must arguably be addressed. (shrink)

that wilfrid sellars was a more subtle and sophisticated philosopher than his father, Roy Wood Sellars, is, I believe, a rather uncontroversial assessment, one which, with fatherly pride, Roy1 would most probably have endorsed. Even considering the radical shift in philosophical methods and attitude which took place in the United States in the decades of Wilfrid's philosophically formative years, Wilfrid's unrelenting philosophical acumen and imagination, his unflinching resolve to doggedly pursue a problem on a variety of fronts at once (arguably (...) the cause of his... (shrink)

Populist movements have become key players in European politics. These movements are readily criticized by journalists or political rivals, yet none of the common objections to populism seems to arrest their success. This article turns to normative political theory to cultivate sensitivity to problems arising from some existing arguments against populism, and to explore possible alternatives. It offers a critical reading of prototypical liberal and conservative arguments against populism, and proposes that the principles of solidarity and procedure provide good grounds (...) for a sustainable critique of populism. (shrink)

Popular sovereignty requires that citizens perceive themselves as being able to act and implement decisions, and that they are de facto causally connected to mechanisms of decision making. I argue that the two most common understandings of the exercise of popular sovereignty—which center on direct decision making by the people as a whole and the indirect exercise of democratic agency by elected representatives, respectively—are inadequate in this respect, and go on to suggest a complementary account that stresses the central role (...) of internally democratic and participatory political parties in actualising popular sovereignty, drawing on the democratic theory of Hans Kelsen. (shrink)

Populism is widely thought to be in tension with liberal democracy. This article clarifies what exactly is problematic about populism from a liberal–democratic point of view and goes on to develop...

We present a sound and complete Fitch-style natural deduction system for an S5 modal logic containing an actuality operator, a diagonal necessity operator, and a diagonal possibility operator. The logic is two-dimensional, where we evaluate sentences with respect to both an actual world (first dimension) and a world of evaluation (second dimension). The diagonal necessity operator behaves as a quantifier over every point on the diagonal between actual worlds and worlds of evaluation, while the diagonal possibility quantifies over some point (...) on the diagonal. Thus, they are just like the epistemic operators for apriority and its dual. We take this extension of Fitch’s familiar derivation system to be a very natural one, since the new rules and labeled lines hereby introduced preserve the structure of Fitch’s own rules for the modal case. (shrink)

In a recent article, P. Roger Turner and Justin Capes argue that no one is, or ever was, even partly morally responsible for certain world-indexed truths. Here we present our reasons for thinking that their argument is unsound: It depends on the premise that possible worlds are maximally consistent states of affairs, which is, under plausible assumptions concerning states of affairs, demonstrably false. Our argument to show this is based on Bertrand Russell’s original ‘paradox of propositions’. We should then opt (...) for a different approach to explain world-indexed truths whose upshot is that we may be morally responsible for some of them. The result to the effect that there are no maximally consistent states of affairs is independently interesting though, since this notion motivates an account of the nature of possible worlds in the metaphysics of modality. We also register in this article, independently of our response to Turner and Capes, and in the spirit of Russell’s aforementioned paradox and many other versions thereof, a proof of the claim that there is no set of all true propositions one can render false. (shrink)

In recent times, it has become increasingly common that elected parties and leaders systematically undermine democracy and the rule of law. This phenomenon is often framed with the term democratic backsliding or democratic regression. This article deals with the relatively little-studied topic of resistance to democratic regressions. Chief amongst the things it discusses is the rather central ethical issue of whether resisters may themselves, in their attempts to prevent a further erosion of democracy, transgress democratic norms. But the argument advanced (...) in the article is not merely about the ethics of resistance. It begins, perhaps unconventionally, by addressing the affective dimension of resistance to democratic regressions, looking in particular at the powerful feelings of anger and despair that pro-democratic citizens living under a regressive government are likely to experience. As the article argues, these feelings have not only motivational but also epistemic potential, which must be adequately theorized in order to understand how resisters can respond to the ethical challenges facing them. (shrink)

It is a widely held principle that no one is able to do something that would require the past to have been different from how it actually is. This principle of the fixity of the past has been presented in numerous ways, playing a crucial role in arguments for logical and theological fatalism, and for the incompatibility of causal determinism and the ability to do otherwise. I will argue that, assuming bivalence, this principle is in conflict with standard views about (...) knowledge and the semantics for ‘actually’. I also consider many possible responses to the argument. (shrink)

Hans Kelsen was one of the most important legal thinkers of the 20th century, and he is known for mounting an elaborate defense of liberal party democracy at a time when the latter was hardly the most popular form of regime. This article examines how Kelsen responded to two major political movements he experienced in his intellectual prime: political Catholicism, which he was confronted with in interwar Austria, and Christian Democracy, which became a hegemonic political force in Western Europe after (...) World War II, when Kelsen was already in exile. The article reconstructs Kelsen's complex critique of these two religious movements and ends by reflecting on what we can learn from his arguments about current attempts to revive Christian political thought. (shrink)

In recent times, representation theory has become one of the most productive and interesting sub-fields in democratic theory. Arguably, the most important theoretical innovation are the so-called ‘constructivist’ approaches to political representation. These approaches play a central role in Creating Political Presence: The New Politics of Democratic Representation and The Constructivist Turn in Political Representation, two impressive volumes that take stock of the state of the art in representation theory. I discuss the two volumes by focusing on three broader and (...) interconnected themes: the problem that constructivism is meant to respond to, the tendency of representation theorists to expand the possibilities of representation as broadly as possible, and the normative aspects of political representation and how constructivists deal with them. (shrink)

In recent times, representation theory has become one of the most productive and interesting sub-fields in democratic theory. Arguably, the most important theoretical innovation are the so-called ‘constructivist’ approaches to political representation. These approaches play a central role in Creating Political Presence: The New Politics of Democratic Representation and The Constructivist Turn in Political Representation, two impressive volumes that take stock of the state of the art in representation theory. I discuss the two volumes by focusing on three broader and (...) interconnected themes: the problem that constructivism is meant to respond to, the tendency of representation theorists to expand the possibilities of representation as broadly as possible, and the normative aspects of political representation and how constructivists deal with them. (shrink)

O presente texto investiga recentes modificações na prática da crítica filosófica. Em sua parte inicial, delineia rapidamente as principais determinações do conceito de crítica, bem como estabelece a ligação entre crítica e crise. Isto é seguido por uma descrição da prática crítica de T.W. Adorno, na qual são apontadas: a) a valorização da leitura micrológica em um contexto de precarização do conceito de totalidade; b) a problematização de uma linearidade temporal por meio da imbricação entre história e natureza; c) a (...) crescente opacidade da linguagem filosófica diante da proximidade de seu objeto. A última parte do texto volta-se para desenvolvimentos recentes da crítica que acentuam as transformações introduzidas por Adorno. Em Derrida, há autonomização do detalhe; em Slavoj Zizek perde-se a diferenciação entre objeto e instrumento de análise; em Deleuze e Guattari, ocorre a dissipação da distância hermenêutica. (shrink)

Voting is often said to be irrational because of the incredibly small likelihood that an individual voter’s ballot will be pivotal in favour of her preferred candidate or party. A persuasive respon...

This work represents an attempt to stake out the landscape for dynamicism based on a radical dismissal of the information-processing paradigm that dominates the philosophy of cognitive science. In Section 2, after setting up the basic toolkit of a theory of minimal representationalism, I introduce the central tenets of dynamic systems theory (DST) by discussing recent research in the dynamics of embodiment (Thelen et al. [2001]) in the perseverative-reaching literature. A recent proposal on the dynamics of representation--the dynamic field approach (...) (Spencer and Schöner [2003])-- according to which the alleged representational gap between DST and representational theories of cognition needs to be bridged in order to explain higher-order cognitive activity will then be reviewed. In Section 3 I shall argue that Spencer and Schöner's attempt to bridge the representational gap may jeopardize the whole (antirepresentationalist) spirit of the DST project. In order to show why, I shall introduce the key concepts of "reliability of environment" and "primagenesis", and argue that DST can account for de-coupled, offline cognitive activity with no need of positing representational resources. Conclusions and directions for future research will follow. (shrink)

Book 1 of Euclid's Elements opens with a set of unproved assumptions: definitions, postulates, and ‘common notions’. The common notions are general rules validating deductions that involve the relations of equality and congruence. The attested postulates are five in number, even if a part of the manuscript tradition adds a sixth, almost surely spurious, that in some manuscripts features as the ninth, and last, common notion. The postulates are called αἰτήματα both in the manuscripts of the Elements and in the (...) ancient exegetic tradition. It is not said, however, that this denomination is original, as it coincides with the nomen rei actae associated with the verbal form introducing the postulates themselves. Since antiquity it has been recognized that the postulates naturally split into two groups of quite different character: the first three are rules licensing basic constructions, the fourth and the fifth are assertions stating properties of particular geometric objects. I transcribe postulates 1–3 in the text established by Heiberg : ᾐτήσθω ἀπὸ παντὸς σημείου ἐπὶ πᾶν σημεῖον εὐθεῖαν γραμμὴν ἀγαγεῖνκαὶ πεπερασμένην εὐθεῖαν κατὰ τὸ συνεχὲς ἐπ᾽ εὐθείας ἐκβαλεῖνκαὶ παντὶ κέντρῳ καὶ διαστήματι κύκλον γράϕεσθαι. (shrink)