Online research in philosophy

The school moral atmosphere refers to informal norms and values that regulate the relationships in school and their degree of sharing among students. We tested whether the school moral atmosphere is a mediating variable between adolescents? normative orientation and their self-reported aggressive and transgressive behaviours. A total of 664 Italian students (age range 15?21, M = 17.06, SD = 1.15) filled out a questionnaire to measure their perception of: (1) school moral atmosphere, (2) normative orientation and (3) frequency of aggressive (...) and transgressive behaviours at school. Normative orientation and school moral atmosphere were good predictors of both aggressive and transgressive behaviours. Normative orientation was proved as a direct explicative variable with transgressive behaviours as dependent variable, but an indirect variable with aggressive behaviours as dependent. In this case the relation was mediated by the school moral atmosphere, confirming previous results. Educational implications are discussed. (shrink)

Three experiments were used to investigate individuals' hypothesis-testing process as a function of moral perceived utilities , which in turn depend on perceived responsibility and fear of guilt. Moral perceived utilities are related to individuals' moral standards and specifically to people's attempt to face up to their own responsibilities, and to avoid feeling guilty of irresponsibility. The results showed that responsibility and fear of guilt in testing hypotheses involved a process defined as prudential mode , which entails focusing on and (...) confirming the worst hypothesis , and then reiterating the testing process. In particular, the results showed that responsible and guilt-fearing individuals: (1) tended to search prudentially for examples confirming the worst hypothesis and to search for counter-examples falsifying the positive hypothesis; (2) focused on the worst alternative, and tended to confirm it; (3) prudentially kept up the testing process, even if faced with initial positive evidence. Our discussion of the results emphasises how people are largely pragmatic in their hypothesis testing, using efficient cognitive strategies that focus on error minimisation rather than on truth detection. In a context of responsibility and guilt, the errors are linked to people's failure to face up to their own responsibilities, and are thus moral errors. (shrink)

This paper presents in outline Luigi Ferrajoli’s axiomatic and general theory of law, as developed in his lifelong work Principia Iuris . The first section focuses on the three main aspects of the theory: the methodological, the theoretical and the pragmatic, which respectively represent the theory’s syntax, semantics and its pragmatics. Ferrajoli identifies three deontic gaps of norms: firstly, the one between their validity and efficacy ; secondly, the one between their justice and validity ; and finally, and most importantly, (...) the one between validity and existence (i.e. normative force). The presence of such gaps is, according to Ferrajoli, the extraordinary innovation that entrenched constitutions have brought into modern legal systems, by establishing norms that are superior to statutes and case law. In this sense, all normative phenomena (except for the constitution itself) can be conceived both as norms and as facts. In the second section the role of juridical science is briefly discussed. (shrink)

The author starts by noting a discourse that is widespread but more or less diffuse in the media and certain contemporary political and intellectual quarters, and which has to do with ‘the permanence of the religious’: according to an idea now current, the religious might be resistant to the process of secularization of civil society, because of its psychological and existential implications, or if seen as a universal, irreducible component of human culture. The author analyses the different aspects of this (...) discourse, puts them into perspective in order to draw out their intellectual and political elements and attempts to reconstruct their historical and cultural origins and show how the refusal to historicize ‘religion’ is expressed today through various types of scientific argument coming out of the human and social sciences (arguments which appeal, for example, to the Latin concept of ‘civilization’, or the Germanic one of ( ‘Kultur’ ). (shrink)

Not only the vertical direction of images – perceptually subject to the law of gravity and its consequences – plays an important role in their interpretation; the horizontal direction left-right too seems to foster different interpretations from its converse. For this reason there are subjects and genres of painting, such as the Annunciation or the portrait, revealing some constants from this point of view, in their representation conventions. And for this same reason there are languages​​, like comics, where the left-right (...) direction is critical not only for the succession of panels – clearly bound to the direction of verbal writing – but also for the panel’s internal organization. These reflections suggest a cultural explanation of the differences in horizontal organization in pictures, linking it to the habits of writing, while ruling out the explanations making reference to the physiology of brain. (shrink)

Many important thinkers in the philosophical tradition, like Aristotle or Hume, have used an explicit theory of action as the basis of their respective normative theories of practical rationality and morality. The idea behind this architecture of theories is that action theory can inform us about the origin, bonds, reach and limits of practical reason. The aim of this book is to revive this direct connection between action theory and practical philosophy, in particular to provide systematic action-theoretical underpinnings for the (...) discussion about the normative structure of practical reason. This book brings together a collection of specially commissioned essays from internationally prestigious scholars in the field and represents the state of the art in contemporary philosophy of action. The book is divided into three parts: i. conceptual work about what actions, intentions and intentional actions are; ii. empirical theory of practical deliberation; and iii.theories about the action theoretic features of autonomy. The volume significantly advances these three lines of research and offers important new contributions to each of them. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: -- 1. Introduction -- Consciousness and Sensorimotor Dynamics: Methodological Issues -- 2. Computational consciousness, D. Ballard -- 3. Explaining what people say about sensory qualia, J. Kevin O'Regan -- 4. Perception, action, and experience: unraveling the golden braid, A. Clark -- The Two-Visual Systems Hypothesis -- 5. Cortical visual systems for perception and action, A.D. Milner and M.A. Goodale -- 6. Hermann Lotze's Theory of 'Local Sign': evidence from pointing responses in an illusory figure, (...) D.R. Melmoth -- Understanding Agency and Object Perception -- 7. Two visual systems and the feeling of presence, M. Matthen -- 8. Spatial coordinates and phenomenology in the two-visual systems model, P. Jacob and F. de Vignemont -- 9. Perceptual experience and the capacity to act, S. Schellenberg -- Perception and Action: Studies in Cognitive Neuroscience -- 10. Why does the perception-action functional dichotomy not match the ventral-dorsal streams in anatomical segregation: optic ataxia and the function of the dorsal stream, Y. Rossetti et al -- 11. Mapping the neglect syndrome onto neurofunctional streams, G. Vallar and F. Mancini -- 12. Motor representations and the perception of space: perceptual judgments of the boundary of action space, Y. Delevoye-Turrell -- The Role of Action and Sensorimotor Knowledge in Sensorimotor Theories of Perception -- 13. Vision without representation, A. Noe -- 14. Sensorimotor knowledge and the contents of experience, J. Kiverstein -- Boundaries of the Agent -- 15. Extended vision, R. A. Wilson. (shrink)

This paper investigates the link between the consumer perception that a company is socially oriented and the consumer intention to buy products marketed by that company. We suggest that this link exists when at least two conditions prevail: (1) the products sold by that company comply with ethical and social requirements; (2) the company has an acknowledged commitment to protect consumer rights and interests. To test these hypotheses, we conducted a survey among the clients of retail chains offering Fair Trade (...) products. The results show that socially oriented companies can successfully leverage their reputation to market products with high symbolic values. (shrink)

Scholarly research largely converges on the argument that trust is of paramount importance to drive economic agents toward mutually satisfactory, fair, and ethically compliant behaviors. There is, however, little agreement on the meaning of trust, whose conceptualizations differ with respect to actors, relationships, behaviors, and contexts. At present, we know much better what trust does than what trust is . In this article, we present an extensive review and analysis of the most prominent articles on trust in market relationships. Using (...) computer-aided content analysis and network analysis methods, we identify key, recurring dimensions that guided the conceptualization of trust in past research, and show how trust can be developed as a multifaceted and layered construct. Our results are an important contribution to a convergence of research toward a shared and common view of the meaning of trust. This process is important to ensure the body of trust research’s internal theoretical consistency, and to provide reliable and common principles for the management of business relationships – a context in which opportunism and imperfect information may induce economic actors to cheat and stray from fair and ethically compliant behaviors. (shrink)

We present a procedure which allows us to recover classical and nonclassical logical structures as concrete logics associated with physical theories expressed by means of classical languages. This procedure consists in choosing, for a given theory ${{\mathcal{T}}}$ and classical language ${{\fancyscript{L}}}$ expressing ${{\mathcal{T}}, }$ an observative sublanguage L of ${{\fancyscript{L}}}$ with a notion of truth as correspondence, introducing in L a derived and theory-dependent notion of C-truth (true with certainty), defining a physical preorder $\prec$ induced by C-truth, and finally selecting (...) a set of sentences ϕ V that are verifiable (or testable) according to ${{\mathcal{T}}, }$ on which a weak complementation ⊥ is induced by ${{\mathcal{T}}. }$ The triple $(\phi_{V},\prec,^{\perp})$ is then the desired concrete logic. By applying this procedure we recover a classical logic and a standard quantum logic as concrete logics associated with classical and quantum mechanics, respectively. The latter result is obtained in a purely formal way, but it can be provided with a physical meaning by adopting a recent interpretation of quantum mechanics that reinterprets quantum probabilities as conditional on detection rather than absolute. Hence quantum logic can be considered as a mathematical structure formalizing the properties of the notion of verification in quantum physics. This conclusion supports the general idea that some nonclassical logics can coexist without conflicting with classical logic (global pluralism) because they formalize metalinguistic notions that do not coincide with the notion of truth as correspondence but are not alternative to it either. (shrink)

This article offers a detailed review of Filosofi italiani contemporanei, a book that presents overviews of seven contemporary Italian philosophers and philosopher/theologians—Luigi Pareyson, Emanuele Severino, Italo Mancini, Gianni Vattimo, Vincenzo Vitiello, Massimo Cacciari, and theologian Bruno Forte. Not intended as a comprehensive survey of the contemporary Italian philosophical scene, the book presents thinkers influential during the last three decades who have focused on tradition, post-metaphysical conceptions of being, origin, and principle, and the openness of philosophy to religion. Although eccentric (...) by Anglo-American standards, the selection does not misrepresent recent Italian philosophizing, which has been more thoroughgoingly shaped by neo-scholasticism, idealism, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and nihilism than most English-language work. Open to international philosophy as well as to its own traditions, Italian thinkers work within a complex ethos that has produced significant recent philosophizing and holds great promise for the future. (shrink)

The ESR model proposes a new theoretical perspective which incorporates the mathematical formalism of standard (Hilbert space) quantum mechanics (QM) in a noncontextual framework, reinterpreting quantum probabilities as conditional on detection instead of absolute. We have provided in some previous papers mathematical representations of the physical entities introduced by the ESR model, namely observables, properties, pure states, proper and improper mixtures, together with rules for calculating conditional and overall probabilities, and for describing transformations of states induced by measurements. We study (...) in this paper the relevant physical case of the quantum harmonic oscillator in our mathematical formalism. We reinterpret the standard quantum rules for probabilities, provide new expressions for absolute probabilities, and show how the standard state transformations must be modified according to the ESR model. (shrink)

Background: The rapid pace of progress in medical research, the consequent need for the timely transfer of new knowledge into practice, and the increasing need for ethics support, is making the work of Ethics Committees (ECs) ever more complex and demanding. As a response, ECs in many countries exhibit large variation in number, mandate, organization and member competences. This cross-sectional study aims to give an overview of the different types of activities of Italian ECs and favour discussion at a European (...) level.Methods: A questionnaire was emailed to all Italian Ethics Committees contained in the national Registry of the Ministry of Health, enquiring whether the EC was conducting, or planning to conduct, 4 specific activities. A telephone interview was conducted to determine reasons for failure to respond.Results: Response rate was 53% (101 respondents out of 191). 20% of ECs restrict their responsibilities to research protocol review, 25% also offer ethical consultation to institutions, support on individual health care decisions and promotes educational initiatives, while the remaining 50% conduct a few of the examined activities to varying degrees. Large variation was observed across different types of hosting institutions and geographical locations.Conclusions: A common European model should be developed, defining EC functions, member selection modalities, necessary member competences, decision-making criteria and measures for work verification. In the absence of sound empirical evidence, it would be interesting to study the effectiveness and efficiency of the different existing models. (shrink)

This article provides an overview on works that have come out in Italy in the field of ethnomethodology. General introductory works are considered first, with reference to their similarities and differences. Subsequently, the interpretations and discussions concerning the ethnomethodological perspective are briefly presented, and the limited amount of empirical investigations on ethnomethodological questions is mentioned. Garfinkel's ethnomethodology has been the object of a few specific introductory and interpretative contributions. The relationship between ethnomethodology and sociolinguistics has been a further and distinct (...) research theme. Discourse and conversational analysis as a research field of its own has elicited a remarkable flow of research, which is-in contrast to ethnomethodology-not only methodological and epistemological but empirical as well. In particular, a number of authors have studied asymmetrical conversational exchanges in the institutional context provided by an Italian Court of Justice. Conversational analysis also has been instrumental in studying the production of social identity. In the final discussion, some theoretical points Italian students of ethnomethodology and the related disciplines have raised and discussed are presented in a condensed form. (shrink)

Collapse models predict the spontaneous collapse of the wave function, in order to avoid the emergence of macroscopic superpositions. In their mass-dependent formulation, they claim that the collapse of any system’s wave function depends on its mass. Neutral K, D, B mesons are oscillating systems that are given by Nature as superposition of two distinct mass eigenstates. Thus they are unique laboratory for testing collapse models that are sensitive to the mass. In this paper we derive—for the single mesons and (...) bipartite entangled mesons—the effect of the mass-proportional CSL (Continuous Spontaneous Localization) collapse model on the dynamics on neutral mesons. We compare the theoretical prediction with experimental data from different accelerator facilities. (shrink)

This volume provides a unique overview of recent Italian studies on the foundations of quantum mechanics and related historical, philosophical and epistemological topics.

This book reexamines the birth of quantum mechanics, in particular examining the development of crucial and original insights of Bohr. In particular, it gives a detailed study of the development and the interpretation given to Bohr's Principle of Correspondence. It also describes the role that this principle played in guiding Bohr's research over the critical period from 1920 to 1927.

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