Stakeholder engagement and dialogue have a central role in defining the relations between organisations and their internal and external interlocutors. Drawing upon the analysis of dialogic motifs, power–conflict dynamics and sociopolitical perspectives, and based on a set of interviews with the stakeholders of a consumer-owned cooperative, the research explores the dialogic potential of stakeholder engagement. The analysis revealed a fragmented picture where the co-design and co-implementation aspects were mainly related to the non-business areas of cooperative life, while business logic dominated (...) the most central aspects. Stakeholder engagement was mainly related to consensus building, while dialogic engagement based on a pluralistic understanding was only partially considered and then neglected. The social capital in the local area, the growing size of the organisation and the related power structure embrace stakeholder engagement, influencing the orientation of the dialogic dynamic. The analysis indicates that a dialogic exchange is a relative concept which depends on the interests involved and the topics discussed. It also reveals that the key factors in the democratisation of stakeholder engagement are a mutual understanding and long-term opportunities. Common sociopolitical aspects are also important, but they do not necessarily guarantee the creation of dialogism paths. The research contributes to the critical dialogic literature in revealing whether and how stakeholder engagement has been implemented in a specific setting. It also shows the limitations of voluntarist stakeholder engagement initiatives. (shrink)

Cooperatives are facing the challenge to be competitive in the market, without losing their traditional values of mutuality and democracy. To do that, they need to re-construct open and participative dialogue with their employees and members based on more democratic forms of communication and engagement. From this point of view, the measurement and communication of sustainability aspects may allow a dialogue to be mobilized with shareholders and stakeholders without losing the attention on competitive factors. Based on these premises, the article (...) analyses the experience of a 5-year action research project , carried out within Unicoop Tirreno, an Italian consumers' cooperative, and aimed to implement different tools for sustainability accounting and to embrace a more open dialogue with stakeholders, in particular with employees and members. In this process of change, the tools implemented for sustainability accounting played a key role in supporting the cooperative to reinterpret its own values and in stimulating a new and participative management approach. The results indicate a virtuous circle between the management and measurement of cooperative principles and the management and measurement of sustainability issues. (shrink)

Il 2021 segna gli ottant’anni dalla nascita di Mario Perniola, uno dei massimi filosofi italiani del secondo dopoguerra. Questo volume raccoglie interventi che esplorano la sua opera mostrandone la fertilità e sottolineando al tempo stesso la prossimità delle sue idee con le principali sfide del nostro tempo. Dall’Italia al Brasile, passando per gli Stati Uniti, l’Irlanda, la Francia, il Belgio, il Messico e la Cina, gli autori si soffermano su temi che comprendono l’estetica, la politica, la teoria della comunicazione, i (...) queer studies, il pensiero rituale e religioso, la sessualità e la letteratura, restituendo la plurivocità e l’originalità di un filosofo di respiro internazionale e più che mai attuale. (shrink)

A collection of essays dedicated to Pier Luigi Lecis' retirement. Contributors include: Mariano Bianca, Silvana Borutti, Vinicio Busacchi, Massimo Dell'Utri, Rosaria Egidi, Roberta Lanfredini, Giuseppe Lorini, Diego Marconi, Francesco Orilia, Paolo Parrini, Alberto Peruzzi, Simonluca Pinna, Pietro Salis, Paolo Spinicci.

I describe two approaches to modelling the universe, the one having its origin in topos theory and differential geometry, the other in set theory. The first is synthetic differential geometry. Traditionally, there have been two methods of deriving the theorems of geometry: the analytic and the synthetic. While the analytical method is based on the introduction of numerical coordinates, and so on the theory of real numbers, the idea behind the synthetic approach is to furnish the subject of geometry with (...) a purely geometric foundation in which the theorems are then deduced by purely logical means from an initial body of postulates. The most familiar examples of the synthetic geometry are classical Euclidean geometry and the synthetic projective geometry introduced by Desargues in the 17th century and revived and developed by Carnot, Poncelet, Steiner and others during the 19th century. The power of analytic geometry derives very largely from the fact that it permits the methods of the calculus, and, more generally, of mathematical analysis, to be introduced into geometry, leading in particular to differential geometry (a term, by the way, introduced in 1894 by the Italian geometer Luigi Bianchi). That being the case, the idea of a “synthetic” differential geometry seems elusive: how can differential geometry be placed on a “purely geometric” or “axiomatic” foundation when the apparatus of the calculus seems inextricably involved? To my knowledge there have been two attempts to develop a synthetic differential geometry. The first was initiated by Herbert Busemann in the 1940s, building on earlier work of Paul Finsler. Here the idea was to build a differential geometry that, in its author’s words, “requires no derivatives”: the basic objects in Busemann’s approach are not differentiable manifolds, but metric spaces of a certain type in which the notion of a geodesic can be defined in an intrinsic manner. I shall not have anything more to say about this approach. The second approach, that with which I shall be concerned here, was originally proposed in the 1960s by F.. (shrink)

Traditionally, there have been two methods of deriving the theorems of geometry: the analytic and the synthetic. While the analytical method is based on the introduction of numerical coordinates, and so on the theory of real numbers, the idea behind the synthetic approach is to furnish the subject of geometry with a purely geometric foundation in which the theorems are then deduced by purely logical means from an initial body of postulates. The most familiar examples of the synthetic geometry are (...) classical Euclidean geometry and the synthetic projective geometry introduced by Desargues in the 17th century and revived and developed by Carnot, Poncelet, Steiner and others during the 19th century. The power of analytic geometry derives very largely from the fact that it permits the methods of the calculus, and, more generally, of mathematical analysis, to be introduced into geometry, leading in particular to differential geometry (a term, by the way, introduced in 1894 by the Italian geometer Luigi Bianchi). That being the case, the idea of a “synthetic” differential geometry seems elusive: how can differential geometry be placed on a “purely geometric” or “axiomatic” foundation when the apparatus of the calculus seems inextricably involved? To my knowledge there have been two attempts to develop a synthetic differential geometry. The first was initiated by Herbert Busemann in the 1940s, building on earlier work of Paul Finsler. Here the idea was to build a differential geometry that, in its author’s words, “requires no derivatives”: the basic objects in Busemann’s approach are not differentiable manifolds, but metric spaces of a certain type in which the notion of a geodesic can be defined in an intrinsic manner. I shall not have anything more to say about this approach. The second approach, that with which I shall be concerned here, was originally proposed in the 1960s by F. W. Lawvere, who was in fact striving to fashion a decisive axiomatic framework for continuum mechanics.. (shrink)

In this commentary, we discuss the nature of reversible and irreversible questions, that is, questions that may enable one to identify the nature of the source of their answers. We then introduce GPT-3, a third-generation, autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like texts, and use the previous distinction to analyse it. We expand the analysis to present three tests based on mathematical, semantic, and ethical questions and show that GPT-3 is not designed to pass any of them. (...) This is a reminder that GPT-3 does not do what it is not supposed to do, and that any interpretation of GPT-3 as the beginning of the emergence of a general form of artificial intelligence is merely uninformed science fiction. We conclude by outlining some of the significant consequences of the industrialisation of automatic and cheap production of good, semantic artefacts. (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)

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)

According to Mitchell Green, speech act theory traditionally idealizes away from crucial aspects of conversational contexts, including those in which the speaker’s social position affects the possibility of her performing certain speech acts. In recent times, asymmetries in communicative situations have become a lively object of study for linguists, philosophers of language and moral philosophers: several scholars view hate speech itself in terms of speech acts, namely acts of subordination. The aim of this paper is to address one of the (...) main objections to accounts of hate speech in terms of illocutionary speech acts, that is the Authority Problem. While the social role of the speaker is the focus of several approaches, the social role of the audience has too often been neglected. The author will show that not only must the speaker have a certain kind of standing or social position in order to perform speech acts of subordination, but also the audience must typically have a certain kind of standing or social position in order to either license or object to the speaker’s authority, and her acts of subordination. (shrink)

The paper uses the Neo-Kantian distinction between Natural and Human sciences and its methodological implications to navigate W. E. B. Du Bois’s and Alain L. Locke’s theories of race. In tracing a continuity between these two figures, the paper also shows how their respective reliance on Neo-Kantian categories leads them to different results. The goal is to show how, while Du Bois’s Neo-Kantianism is best understood as a Diltheyan Neo-Kantianism of the psycho-physical unity of human nature influenced by an anti-metaphysical (...) orientation, Locke’s Neo-Kantianism can be seen as a Neo-Kantianism whose focus is the rejection of causality and of the causal nexus between biological and non-biological traits. (shrink)

La caída del Muro de Berlín fue saludado por muchos analistas y académicos como el inicio de una nueva era. Con el fin de la Guerra Fría se vislumbraba una nueva etapa de paz y prosperidad. Tras la “revolución liberal” algunos avistaban el “fin de la historia”. Pero tal esperanza se disipó rápidamente: la desaparición del “socialismo real” relanzó un capitalismo desenfrenado y no sólo en los países ayer bajo la órbita soviética. El ordoliberalismo entendido como el establecimiento de un (...) modelo económico altamente competitivo y garantizado jurisdiccionalmente, se infiltró también en las instituciones europeas. La crisis del año 2010 vino a confirmar para Europa su deriva neoliberal, tecnocrática. La onda expansiva del 9 de noviembre de 1989 aún no ha concluido. Nuevas turbulencias aguardan. El Brexit también puede interpretarse en esta clave, como una empresa más de demolición, “liquidación”, “liberalización”. (shrink)

L’argumentation morale implique de donner des raisons de soutenir des conclusions normatives, et quand le fondement de ces raisons est mis en question, un effort de justification systématique est alors exigé. L’article discute trois modèles de justification philosophique : le modèle des « décisions de principe » proposé par Richard Hare ; deux versions de l’intuitionnisme philosophique ; le modèle de l’équilibre réflexif de John Rawls. Il défend la thèse qu’une version modifiée de « l’équilibre réflexif large », en dépit (...) des critiques qui lui ont été adressées sur la base d’études empiriques portant sur les jugements moraux, reste la stratégie la plus sûre pour fournir des justifications aux propositions morales. (shrink)

The point of view advocated, in the last ten years, by quantum probability about the foundations of quantum mechanics, is based on the investigation of the mathematical consequences of a deep and elementary idea developed by the founding fathers of quantum mechanics and accepted nowadays as a truism by most physicists, namely: one should be careful when applying the rules derived from the experience of macroscopic physics to experiments which are mutually incompatible in the sense of quantum mechanics.