The Italian Twin Registry (ITR) has been carrying out several genetic-epidemiological studies. Collection and storage of biological material from study participants has recently increased in the light of biobanking development. Within this scenario, we aimed at investigating understanding, awareness and attitude towards blood/DNA donation of research participants. About these quite unknown dimensions more knowledge is needed from ethical and social perspectives.

The relationship between dream content and waking life experiences remains difficult to decipher. However, some neurobiological findings suggest that dreaming can, at least in part, be considered epiphenomenal to ongoing memory consolidation processes in sleep. Both abnormalities in sleep architecture and impairment in memory consolidation mechanisms are thought to be involved in the development of psychosis. The objective of this study was to assess the continuity between delusional contents and dreams in acutely psychotic patients. Ten patients with a single fixed (...) and recurring delusional content were asked to report their dreams during an acute psychotic break. Sixteen judges with four different levels of acquaintance to the specific content of the patients’ delusions were asked to group the dreams, expecting that fragments of the delusional thought would guide the task. A mathematical index was developed in order to compare correct groupings between the four groups of judges. Most judges grouped the dreams slightly above chance level and no relevant differences could be found between the four groups [F = 1.297; p = n.s.]. Scoring of dreams for specific delusional themes suggested a continuity in terms of dream and waking mentation for two contents . These findings seem to suggest that at least some delusional contents recur within patients’ dreams. Future studies will need to determine whether such continuity reflects ongoing consolidation processes that are relevant to current theories of delusion formation and stabilization. (shrink)

Several independent lines of research in neurobiology seem to support the phenomenologically-grounded view of the dreaming brain/mind as a useful model for psychosis. Hallucinatory phenomena and thought disorders found in psychosis share several peculiarities with dreaming, where internally generated, vivid sensorimotor imagery along with often heightened and incongruous emotion are paired with a decrease in ego functions which ultimately leads to a severe impairment in reality testing. Contemporary conceptualizations of severe mental disorders view psychosis as one psychopathological dimension that may (...) be found across several diagnostic categories. Some experimental data have shown cognitive bizarreness to be equally elevated in dreams and in the waking cognition of acutely psychotic subjects and in patients treated with pro-dopaminergic drugs, independent of the underlying disorder. Further studies into the neurofunctional underpinnings of both conditions will help to clarify the use and validity of this model. (shrink)

The overblown, somewhat dramatic media interpretation of microbiota-gut-brain literature is highly misleading. This phenomenon is not new to neuroscience, wherein rapidly evolving research fields struggle to translate findings into clinical practice. Advances in microbiology might integrate our understanding of complex biological pathways that should be interpreted within neuropsychiatric symptom dimensions rather than specific disorders.

Citation-based metrics are increasingly used as a proxy to define representative, considerable, or significant papers. We challenge this belief by taking into account factors that may play a role in providing citations to a manuscript and whether/how those highly cited studies could shape a scientific field. A different approach to summarisation of relevant core publications within a topic is proposed.

Ce texte se propose d'examiner en quoi le discours oral se différencie de la composition écrite. La logique orale a pour caractéristique principale de recourir à des prémisses ou à des conclusions qui ont déjà valeur de “maxime” pour l'auditeur. Il s'agit donc d'une véritable “mise à l'épreuve” de chaque position. La logique orale touche directement le contenu. Elle s'oppose à la dialectique — elle est liée à une logique formelle — tout en étant complémentaire.

Il volume edito da F. Calemi, noto studioso di D.M. Armstrong (1926‑2014), al quale ha dedicato un’ampia monografia (Le radici dell’essere. Metafisica e metaontologia in David Malet Armstrong, Armando, 2013), è il primo in memoria del filosofo australiano, le cui opere sono state da noi raccolte in traduzione italiana nel 2012 per la collana Bompiani “Il Pensiero Occidentale” diretta da G. Reale. Una prima raccolta di saggi in onore di Armstrong, Ontology, Causality and Mind, curata da J. Bac...

Ontologia dell’arte L’ontologia dell’arte è la disciplina filosofica che si occupa di stabilire a quali categorie ontologiche appartengono determinate famiglie di opere d’arte. Si consideri innanzitutto la distinzione fra individui e tipi, che ricalca la distinzione aristotelica fra particolari e universali. Un individuo è qualcosa che ha una sua precisa localizzazione nello spazio e nel tempo, qualcosa che potremmo indicare con un gesto o con un dimostrativo come “questo” o “quello”: questa...

This paper investigates the semantics of the focus particle only and is primarily concerned with the relation between the exclusive proposition and the proposition expressed by the prejacent. We argue that, in a sentence of the form only A is B, only triggers the conditional presupposition that if something is B, A is B. We show that in a positive- only sentence, the prejacent is a conversational implicature and therefore it is cancellable. Instead, in a negative- only sentence the prejacent (...) is shown to be entailed by any context that satisfies the conditional presupposition and to which the assertion is added. Hence, the prejacent of a negative- only sentence is not cancellable. The entailment analyses, the strong presupposition analyses and the weak presupposition analyses of only are discussed, together with the problems that each type of theories faces. (shrink)

This article undertakes a deconstructive reading of astrobiology’s search for extraterrestrial life. Taking its lead from Derrida’s ‘White Mythology’, it explores ‘metaphor in the text of astrobiology’—and includes within the astrobiological ‘text’ not only scientific publications and work on astrobiology in the philosophy of science, but also ‘life detection technologies’. I situate astrobiology in the tradition of a metaphysical analogy that goes back through the enlightenment and early modern astronomy to the ancient Atomists’ notion of the ‘plurality of worlds’. This (...) analogy, which constitutes an identification of life with being and therefore serves as the conceptual basis for the notion that life must exist on other worlds, experiences a mutation in the middle of the twentieth century when molecular biology refigures life in terms of a scriptural metaphor as text. The result is an aporia whose logic Derrida formalised in ‘White Mythology’. (shrink)

Los orígenes de la APS y de la Política de SALUD PARA TODOS se remontan al siglo XVIII y al movimiento de Medicina Social de 1848. Del siglo XX se destacan las experiencias pioneras de los años 30-50s. Entre ellas, Chile, Saskachewa (Canadá), EUA, Suráfrica, con Henry Sigerist, Sidney Kark, Salvador Allende, Gustavo Molina, trabajos pioneros de la medicina y la epidemiologia social vinculados a los del antropólogo Benjamin Paul. Así como personajes menos reconocidos en APS especialmente el italiano Franco (...) Basaglia transformador de la atención psiquiátrica y sanitaria con los principios de libertad terapéutica. A éstas están articuladas numerosas y desconocidas experiencias en América Latina y Colombia con Héctor Abad Gómez, Santiago Rengifo y César Uribe Piedrahita por el proceso de “Renovación de APS” de la OPS. En Latinoamérica, las luchas por la salud estaban articuladas a la luchas por una sociedad justa, con personajes como Ernesto Guevara desde la medicina, Paulo Freire en pedagogía, teología y filosofía de la liberación, y el sociólogo colombiano Camilo Torres, que aportaron metodologías cualitativas en la investigación en salud, los que junto aportes de integración como el Desarrollo a Escala Humana, consideran a los servicios sanitarios como elementos principales en la vida de las personas, y aportan a la construcción transdisciplinar e intersectorial de la salud para nuestro hoy. (shrink)

In this article, I propose a semantic account of temporally mismatched past subjunctive counterfactuals. The proposal consists of the following parts. First, I show that in cases of temporal mismatch, [past] cannot be interpreted inside the proposition where it occurs at surface structure. Instead, it must be interpreted as constraining the time argument of the accessibility relation. This has the effect of shifting the time of the evaluation of the conditional to some contextually salient past time. Second, I will propose (...) specific felicity conditions (presuppositions) for subjunctive conditionals and I will argue that there is a strict correspondence between the time of evaluation in the truth conditions of a conditional and the time relevant for the felicity conditions. In other words, if the time relevant for the accessibility relation has been shifted to the past, then the conditional's presupposition will make reference to a past context. On the other hand, if no past is constraining the time argument of the accessibility relation, the conditional's felicity will make reference to the current (main) context. Third, I will argue that the intuition that the antecedent of mismatched counterfactuals is not true is a scalar implicature arising from a competition not between assertions but between presuppositions. Finally, I will investigate the repercussions of my proposal for the general theory of modality. (shrink)

In this paper, we study the distribution and interpretation of a non-temporal use of the future tense in Italian, called ‘presumptive’ or ‘epistemic’, which we label here PF. We first distinguish PF from its closest modal relatives, namely epistemic necessity/possibility/likelihood modals, as well as weak necessity modals. We then propose an account of PF in declaratives and interrogatives that treats it as a special comparative subjective likelihood modal, and test its empirical predictions. A theoretical lesson drawn from this detailed study (...) of the semantics of PF is that semantics needs sharpened theoretical tools to be able to capture the fine-grained distinctions languages make when it comes to signaling modulated epistemic commitment to a proposition. (shrink)

In this essay, a brief analysis of the diplomatic efforts to achieve an accord in re- lation to the climatic change process is made. Particularly, it will analyze the two past Climate Summits (Copenhagen and Cancun). It emphasizes the growing social articulation of climatic politics. Finally, it aims to the birth of a new global responsibility of societies in relation to the human relation towards the planet. Also, it explores the impact of this responsibility on the environment global changes.

In this paper I provide a unified analysis of a number of pragmatic anomalies that have been discussed in the literature. The paper’s main goal is to account for Sobel sequences of conditionals and sequences of disjunctive sentences, but I will also propose that this analysis can be extended to sequences of sentences with superlatives. The starting point is the observation that, while all these sequences are felicitous in one order, they are infelicitous when the order is reversed. Previous proposals (...) have focussed on particular types of infelicitous sequences Ken Hale: A life in language, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2001; Moss in Noûs 46:516–586, 2012; Lewis in Noûs 52:481–507, 2018; a.o.), or a subset of all the phenomena cited above Linguistic and psycholinguistic approaches on implicatures and presuppositions. Palgrave McMillan, Basingstoke, 2017; a.o.). I propose that sequences of sentences belonging to the same structured set of alternatives T are subject to a Specificity Constraint : sequences are acceptable if both alternatives are dominated by the same number of nodes in the structured set of alternatives T. Violations of SC can be avoided by strengthening the weaker alternative. However, covert strengthening violates an economy condition if the overtly stronger alternative is among those made salient by the preceding utterance in the sequence. I propose that the set of alternatives made salient by an utterance of a sentence s consists of s’s sisters and mother in T. I will show that the strengthening mechanism varies depending on the kind of sequence we have. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to offer a compositional semantics for subjunctive and indicative will conditionals, and to derive the projection properties of the types of conditionals we consider and in particular those of counterfactual conditionals. It is argued that subjunctive conditionals are "bare" conditional embedded under temporal and aspectural operators, which constrain the interpretation of the modal operators in the embedded conditional. Furthermore, it is argued that a theory of presupposition projection à la Heim together with the present (...) proposal about their logical form explains the projection facts. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the aspectual, marginality, and concessive uses of the grading particles still and already can be reduced to the fol lowing three classes of focus sensitive-grading particles: additive particles like too, scalar particles like even, and exclusive particles like only. The meaning differences among the occurrences of still (and already) are mostly reduced to the differences among these three classes of grading particles. In turn, these differences are shown to correlate with what type of object (...) is denoted by the phrase in the scope of the particle. The proposal has repercussions also for the focus-sensitive particle again. I investigate the latter too, and I propose a parallel between the temporal and nominal domains where the contrast between still and again is analyzed along the lines of the contrast between definite and indefinite noun phrases. (shrink)

In this paper I provide a unified analysis of a number of pragmatic anomalies that have been discussed in the literature. The paper’s main goal is to account for Sobel sequences of conditionals and sequences of disjunctive sentences, but I will also propose that this analysis can be extended to sequences of sentences with superlatives. The starting point is the observation that, while all these sequences are felicitous in one order, they are infelicitous when the order is reversed. Previous proposals (...) have focussed on particular types of infelicitous sequences Ken Hale: A life in language, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2001; Moss in Noûs 46:516–586, 2012; Lewis in Noûs 52:481–507, 2018; a.o.), or a subset of all the phenomena cited above Linguistic and psycholinguistic approaches on implicatures and presuppositions. Palgrave McMillan, Basingstoke, 2017; a.o.). I propose that sequences of sentences belonging to the same structured set of alternatives T are subject to a Specificity Constraint : sequences are acceptable if both alternatives are dominated by the same number of nodes in the structured set of alternatives T. Violations of SC can be avoided by strengthening the weaker alternative. However, covert strengthening violates an economy condition if the overtly stronger alternative is among those made salient by the preceding utterance in the sequence. I propose that the set of alternatives made salient by an utterance of a sentence s consists of s’s sisters and mother in T. I will show that the strengthening mechanism varies depending on the kind of sequence we have. (shrink)

In this paper I provide a unified analysis of a number of pragmatic anomalies that have been discussed in the literature. The paper’s main goal is to account for Sobel sequences of conditionals and sequences of disjunctive sentences, but I will also propose that this analysis can be extended to sequences of sentences with superlatives. The starting point is the observation that, while all these sequences are felicitous in one order, they are infelicitous when the order is reversed. Previous proposals (...) have focussed on particular types of infelicitous sequences Ken Hale: A life in language, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2001; Moss in Noûs 46:516–586, 2012; Lewis in Noûs 52:481–507, 2018; a.o.), or a subset of all the phenomena cited above Linguistic and psycholinguistic approaches on implicatures and presuppositions. Palgrave McMillan, Basingstoke, 2017; a.o.). I propose that sequences of sentences belonging to the same structured set of alternatives T are subject to a Specificity Constraint : sequences are acceptable if both alternatives are dominated by the same number of nodes in the structured set of alternatives T. Violations of SC can be avoided by strengthening the weaker alternative. However, covert strengthening violates an economy condition if the overtly stronger alternative is among those made salient by the preceding utterance in the sequence. I propose that the set of alternatives made salient by an utterance of a sentence s consists of s’s sisters and mother in T. I will show that the strengthening mechanism varies depending on the kind of sequence we have. (shrink)