Review of Mădălina Moraru, Mit și publicitate (Myth and advertising) (Bucharest: Nemira, 2009).

In the context in which the majority of Romanians are orthodox and the level of trust in Church is very high, this paper aims to analyze the level of political interference into religious life. The article focuses on particular aspects of political communication, namely the use of religious symbols and religious events in electoral campaigns. The main hypothesis of the research refers to the supposition that during the electoral years, the visibility of politicians presented by newspapers as attending religious events (...) is higher than in the rest of the time. Moreover, the paper aims to analyze if there is an overlapping between the years in which politicians are presented to attend more religious services and the years in which people have higher trust in Church. (shrink)

Inaugural speeches of U.S. Presidents are part of symbolic politics. They are part of the political traditions, and represent an important moment in presenting political visions for the future. The infusion of religious elements into politicians’ speeches becomes a tool in increasing the number of cast votes and the notoriety. This paper analyzes the inaugural speeches of both Republican and Democrat U.S. Presidents in the past twenty years, starting at the end of the Cold War until nowadays. By means of (...) content analysis we looked for religious elements while comparing the speeches of Democrat and Republican Presidents. (shrink)

In the last decades, scientific developments are largely discussed and debated mainly at the media level. Based on the agenda setting model, the importance of a certain theme is given by the frequency of its appearances in mass-media. Within this context, this paper focuses on the issue of stem cells and its media coverage in Romania. Using content analysis of the most read national newspapers, the research aims to emphasize two relevant aspects: the stem cells issue is only partly visible (...) in the written media and the debate between ethics and science is rather non-existent. (shrink)

Delia Cristina Balaban, Informationsvermittlung und öffentliche Meinungsbildung im rumänischen Fernsehen Editura Presa Universitarã, Cluj- Napoca, 2003.

Review of Delia Cristina Balaban, Advertising. From Strategic Planning to Media Implementation, (Iaşi: Polirom, 2009).

When social media influencers post sponsored content, it should be recognizable as such. However, there is no European Union-wide legislation governing sponsorship transparency, and monitoring practices differ significantly across member states. In Romania, where we conducted our study, such regulations are only just emerging, and there are weak monitoring policies regarding advertising disclosure on SMI branded posts. In this study, we examined how two different types of advertising disclosure commonly used on Instagram are likely to affect consumers’ behavioral outcomes, such (...) as purchase intention and intention toward the SMI, mediated by the activation of conceptual persuasion knowledge, via negative affect and the trustworthiness of the SMI. We conducted a three-level between-subjects online experiment, manipulating the absence versus the presence of advertising, which came in one of two types, brand-unspecific and brand-specific. Considering the mediation path via the trustworthiness of the SMI, findings suggest that the paid partnership disclosure had positive outcomes for purchase intention and intention toward the SMI. (shrink)

There are multiple and diverse voices of jurists who have expressed their fear of the unrestricted power of law enforcement and have announced the crisis of the formalist sense of Law. The widespread reaction against the abstract and formalist character of the positivist theory of law manifested itself as the Krausist philosophy of law and was backed by the philosophy of Krause, Schelling, Hegel and the most recent Natural Law theories that seek to establish substantial criteria for moral action. This (...) distrust was caused by the heteronomy of modest and obedient civil servants of the judicial order that rely on political balance of power in which nothing depends on the human bottom of institutions. Let us consider briefly the impressive analyses performed by different thinkers on this issue, which they considered characteristic of their era, but that continues to constitute a difficulty that challenges contemporary society. (shrink)

There are multiple and diverse voices of jurists who have expressed their fear of the unrestricted power of law enforcement and have announced the crisis of the formalist sense of Law. The widespread reaction against the abstract and formalist character of the positivist theory of law manifested itself as the Krausist philosophy of law and was backed by the philosophy of Krause, Schelling, Hegel and the most recent Natural Law theories that seek to establish substantial criteria for moral action. This (...) distrust was caused by the heteronomy of modest and obedient civil servants of the judicial order that rely on political balance of power in which nothing depends on the human bottom of institutions. Let us consider briefly the impressive analyses performed by different thinkers on this issue, which they considered characteristic of their era, but that continues to constitute a difficulty that challenges contemporary society. (shrink)

The New Evil Demon Problem presents a serious challenge to externalist theories of epistemic justification. In recent years, externalists have developed a number of strategies for responding to the problem. A popular line of response involves distinguishing between a belief’s being epistemically justified and a subject’s being epistemically blameless for holding it. The apparently problematic intuitions the New Evil Demon Problem elicits, proponents of this response claim, track the fact that the deceived subject is epistemically blameless for believing as she (...) does, not that she is justified for so believing. This general strategy—which I call the “unjustified-but-blameless maneuver”—is motivated, in part, by the assumption that the distinction between epistemic justification and blamelessness is merely an extension of the familiar distinction between moral justification and blamelessness. In this paper, I consider three ways of drawing the distinction between justification and blamelessness familiar from the moral domain: the first in terms of a connection with reactive attitudes, the second in terms of the distinction between wrongness and wronging, and the third in terms of reasons-responsiveness. All three ways of drawing the distinction, I argue, make it difficult to see how an analogous distinction in the epistemic domain could help externalists explain away the intuitions which underwrite the New Evil Demon Problem. Motivating the unjustified-but-blameless maneuver, I conclude, is a much less straightforward task than its proponents tend to assume. (shrink)

World-renowned specialists in contemporary critical theory address the recent crises and transformations of the global political and economic order.

In this article I analyze Rawls' and Habermas' accounts of the role of religion in political deliberations in the public sphere. After pointing at some difficulties involved in the unequal distribution of deliberative rights and duties among religious and secular citizens that follow from their proposals, I argue for a way to structure political deliberation in the public sphere that imposes the same deliberative obligations on all democratic citizens, whether religious or secular. These obligations derive from the ideal of mutual (...) accountability that is supposed to guide political deliberation in a deliberative democracy. The main advantage of this proposal is that it recognizes the right of all democratic citizens to adopt their own cognitive stance (whether religious or secular) in political deliberation in the public sphere without giving up on the democratic obligation to provide reasons acceptable to everyone to justify coercive policies with which all citizens must comply. (shrink)

In this paper I analyze the tension between realism and antirealism at the basis of Kantian constructivism. This tension generates a conflictive account of the source of the validity of social norms. On the one hand, the claim to moral objectivity characteristic of Kantian moral theories makes the validity of norms depend on realist assumptions concerning the existence of shared fundamental interests among all rational human beings. I illustrate this claim through a comparison of the approaches of Rawls, Habermas and (...) Scanlon. On the other hand, however, objections to moral realism motivate many Kantian constructivists to endorse the antirealist claim that reasonable agreement is the source of the validity of social norms. After analyzing the difficulties in the latter strategy, I try to show how a balance between the realist and antirealist elements of Kantian constructivism can be reached by drawing a sharper distinction between the justice and the legitimacy of social norms. (shrink)

Recent studies have proposed that the executive advantages associated with bilingualism may stem from language-switching frequency rather than from bilingualism per se (see for example, Prior & Gollan, 2011). Barbu, Gillet, Orban and Poncelet (2018) showed that high-frequency language switchers outperformed low-frequency switchers on a mental flexibility task but not on alertness or response inhibition tasks. The aim of the present study was to replicate these results as well as to compare proficient high and low-frequency bilingual language switchers to a (...) control group of monolingual participants. Two groups of proficient bilingual adults (30 high-frequency language switchers and 21 low-frequency language switchers) and a group of 28 monolinguals participated in the study. The results showed superior mental flexibility skills in high-frequency language switchers compared to low-frequency switchers and monolinguals; furthermore, the two latter groups showed no difference in mental flexibility skills. These results provide novel support for the hypothesis that the so-called bilingual advantage is, in fact, a result of language-switching habits. (shrink)

To address the question posed in the title, I focus on Heidegger's conception of linguistic communication developed in the sections on Rede and Gerede of Being and Time. On the basis of a detailed analysis of these sections I argue that Heidegger was a social externalist but semantic internalist. To make this claim, however, I first need to clarify some key points that have led critics to assume Heidegger's commitment to social externalism automatically commits him to semantic externalism regarding concept (...) use. I begin by explaining the independence of those positions, arguing that social externalism answers the question of whose concepts in a linguistic community are properly individuated, whereas semantic externalism makes a claim about what it takes for concepts to be properly individuated. Once these issues are distinguished, it is possible to see that Heidegger's intersubjectivist conception of language commits him to social externalism, while his conception of the ontological difference commits him to semantic internalism. (shrink)

This article aims to show the consistency of Simone Weil’s political thought. To this end, I will analyze some of her main writings in which a tension is displayed between an accentuated political realism and a critical longing for a politics free from the subjection to force and the legitimation of the status quo. From this point of view, Weil’s thought can be understood as a form of political mysticism in which the images, notions, and symbols of mysticism serve the (...) purpose to innervate a renewed political rationality. (shrink)

In this paper I focus on the discussion between Rawls and Habermas on procedural justice. I use Rawls’s distinction between pure, perfect, and imperfect procedural justice to distinguish three possible readings of discourse ethics. Then I argue, against Habermas’s own recent claims, that only an interpretation of discourse ethics as imperfect procedural justice can make compatible its professed cognitivism with its proceduralism. Thus discourse ethics cannot be understood as a purely procedural account of the notion of justice. Finally I draw (...) the different consequences that follow from this reading. (shrink)

In this essay, I address some questions and challenges brought about by Thomas Christiano in his inspiring review of my book Democracy without Shortcuts. First, I defend the democratic credentials of the conception of self-government that I articulate in the book against conceptions of self-determination that are allegedly compatible with non-democratic government. To do so, I clarify some aspects of the notion of “blind deference” that I use in the book as a contrast concept to identify a minimal, necessary condition (...) for democratic self-government. In a second step, I clarify my criticism of deep pluralist conceptions of democracy and argue that Christiano’s own criticism does not seem to address the main challenge to which pure proceduralism is supposed to provide an answer. Lastly, I address Christiano’s contention that my criticism of lottocracy does not address the worries that lottocrats are responding to. I distinguish between populist and epistocratic worries and argue that both of them have anti-democratic roots and thus should be criticized rather than “responded to” in their own terms. (shrink)

In his book Tales of the Mighty Dead Brandom engages Gadamer’s hermeneutic conception of interpretation in order to show that his inferentialist approach to understanding conceptual content can explain and underwrite the main theses of Gadamer’s hermeneutics which he calls “the gadamerian hermeneutic platitudes”. In order to assess whether this claim is sound, I analyze the three types of philosophical interpretations that Brandom discusses: de re, de dicto and de traditione, and argue that they commit him to an “ecumenical historicism” (...) that is directly at odds with the hermeneutic approach. Although the variety of de re interpretation that Brandom denominates de traditione comes indeed very close to the Gadamerian approach, I conclude that if Brandomian scorekeepers were to adopt it, they could become Gadamerian hermeneuts, but once they did, they would not be able to go back to their scorekeeping practices as described by Brandom. (shrink)

La instauración de un vínculo entre historia y poder es uno de los aspectos más interesantes del pensamiento político de la filósofa francesa Simone Weil. Durante la primera mitad del siglo XX, Weil desarrolla unas reflexiones en torno al concepto de historia, desde la perspectiva de los vencidos, que aproximan su especulación a la de su contemporáneo Walter Benjamin. La comparación con Benjamin permite acercar el pensamiento weiliano a las recientes teorías de la justicia anamnética y, más en general, a (...) la exigencia actual de incorporar en el discurso político el punto de vista de las víctimas. (shrink)

Throughout the philosophical tradition that stems from Plato, Socratic irony has represented an enigma that all interpreters of the Platonic dialogues have had to face from different points of view. In this article I aim to present the peculiar Straussian reading of Socratic irony. According to Leo Strauss, Socratic irony is a key element of Plato’s political philosophy, linked to the «logographic necessity» that rules his texts. I will therefore examine the genesis and the main features of Straussian hermeneutics. I (...) will end the article by highlighting the relevance of the esoteric interpretation of Platonic thought as a conceptual tool that responds to the crisis of modern political philosophy. (shrink)

In his book The Future of Human Nature, Habermas argues against the moral and legal permissibility of any future practices of genetic human enhancement as well as against current practices such as embryonic research or preimplantation genetic diagnosis. After analyzing the core of Habermas’s argument against positive eugenics, I argue that his attempt to derive a principle of abstention under uncertainty from the principle of counterfactual consent assumes that non-interference is the proper default norm in the absence of consent. Yet, (...) this cannot be a plausible default norm for parental relationships. Moreover, since Habermas agrees that the no-harm principle justifies negative eugenics, once technical possibilities of genetic manipulation become available, non-interference becomes as much in need of normative justification as interference. I conclude that if our normative innocence regarding positive eugenics must be lost for the sake of negative eugenics, then it is an innocence well lost. (shrink)

Psychopathy is among the more widely discussed personality disorders. Psychopathy is intriguing for many reasons, one of which is that many of the most famous and heinous villains, real or imagined, are psychopathic. Understanding how a person could be so evil is clearly a very important, fundamental social concern. Yet, there remains no consensus as to even an authoritative description of the disorder. It is our impression, perhaps incorrectly, that Justman is arguing for a central importance of lack of guilt.We (...) begin by noting that it is only the rare person who has all of the features of a respective personality disorder (Widiger &... (shrink)

In this essay I defend an institutional approach to democratic legitimacy against proceduralist approaches that are commonly endorsed by deliberative democrats. Although deliberative democrats defend a complex view of democratic legitimacy that aims to account for both the procedural and substantive dimensions of legitimacy, most accounts of the relationship between these dimensions currently on offer are too proceduralist to be plausible (I). By contrast, I argue that adopting an institutional approach helps provide a more convincing account of the interplay between (...) procedural and substantive aspects of democratic legitimacy which in turn illuminates the intricate relationship between public deliberation and decision-making procedures such as voting (II). This account also enables us to see what is wrong with interpreting the legitimacy of majoritarian and non-majoritarian institutions in terms of an alleged conflict between popular sovereignty and rights protections. In opposition to this view, I argue that the proper standard for judging the democratic legitimacy of both majoritarian and non-majoritarian institutions is whether they enable an ongoing recursive process of deliberative contestation or whether they generate antidemocratic shortcuts instead (III). (shrink)

La denominada desigualdad vertical es uno de los temas centrales del debate internacional de los últimos años ya que su desmedido crecimiento ha alcanzado límites intolerables en términos éticos y económicos que no pueden ser ya ignorados por nadie. Al respecto se discute la manera de abordar el problema. En concreto el movimiento de los derechos considera que puede ofrecer herramientas útiles para enfrentar esta injusta situación, mientras otros dudan de la relación entre desigualdad económica y derechos humanos y de (...) la capacidad de los derechos humanos para luchar frente a este tipo de desigualdad. En esta tesitura se pueden distinguir posiciones “en contra”, “a favor” e “intermedias”. Analizar atentamente este debate y los conceptos que en él se manejan es de fundamental relevancia para valorar el problema de raíz que está detrás de los llamados derechos económicos, sociales y culturales, y que tiene que ver entre otras cosas con un problema de concepto y fundamentación de los derechos. Al respecto se destacan los argumentos esenciales y se muestran críticamente las definiciones y consideraciones más cuestionables con el objetivo de afianzar a continuación una noción de derechos sociales más resistente. Una solución razonable pasa por combinar el proyecto de suficiencia con el proyecto de igualdad volviendo a las bases del auténtico Estado social de Derecho que dio origen a estos derechos y que los configura como derechos de dignidad basados en la libertad real, la igualdad sustancial y también la solidaridad, ésta última prácticamente ausente en el debate. (shrink)

En este artículo se argumenta contra la interpretación metaética del kantianismo moral como una forma de constructivismo o antirealismo moral. Dado que los kantianos no comparten el expresivismo característico del antirealismo moral estándar, el constructivismo kantiano parece llevar a una posición inherentemente inestable que sólo puede desarrollarse o bien en un realismo consistente con el cognitivismo moral kantiano o en un decidido antirealismo moral. Tomando la ética del discurso de Habermas como ejemplo, aquí se contrasta una interpretación realista con una (...) interpretación antirealista del principio moral de universalización con la intención de mostrar que sólo la primera es compatible con el cognitivismo moral característico de las éticas kantianas, mientras que la segunda lleva inevitablemente a un planteamiento decisionista y, con ello, a un claro relativismo moral. (shrink)

En este ensayo analizo algunas dificultades conceptuales asociadas a la exigencia de que las instituciones globales adquieran un grado mayor de legitimidad democrática. En ausencia de un Estado mundial, puede parecer inconsistente exigir que las instituciones globales sean responsables ante todos los que han de acatar sus decisiones y al mismo tiempo insistir en que los miembros de dichas instituciones, en tanto que representantes de sus respectivos Estados, mantengan las responsabilidades especiales que tienen con los ciudadanos de sus propios países. (...) Esta dificultad parece insuperable a la luz de la extendida aceptación de la concepción de los derechos humanos centrada en el Estado, según la cual los Estados, y sólo ellos, son los responsables principales de proteger los derechos de sus ciudadanos. Contra esta concepción, defiendo la plausibilidad de una concepción alternativa, pluralista de las obligaciones derivadas de los derechos humanos. Para ello argumento que, si se tiene en cuenta la distinción tripartita entre la obligación de respetar, proteger y realizar los derechos humanos, no hay ninguna dificultad conceptual en exigir que tanto los Estados como los actores no estatales se responsabilicen por sus respectivas obligaciones en materia de derechos humanos. (shrink)

In this essay I address the difficult question of how citizens with conflicting religious and secular views can fulfill the democratic obligation of justifying the imposition of coercive policies to others with reasons that they can also accept. After discussing the difficulties of proposals that either exclude religious beliefs from public deliberation or include them without any restrictions, I argue instead for a policy of mutual accountability that imposes the same deliberative rights and obligations on all democratic citizens. The main (...) advantage of this proposal is that it recognizes the right of all democratic citizens to adopt their own cognitive stance in political deliberation in the public sphere without giving up on the democratic obligation to provide reasons acceptable to everyone to justify coercive policies with which all citizens must comply. (shrink)