The phenomenon of transnational families is a topical issue on the European Union's family policy agenda, especially in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals and the Europe 2020 Strategy. Romania, not only as a member state of the European Union, but also as a country directly affected by the scale of this phenomenon, must include in the public family policy the issue of transnational families and provide solutions for these families. Starting from the identification of the risk factors faced (...) by children whose parents are working abroad, the article proposes a critical analysis of existing programs and measures in national legislation aimed at preventing and combating the social exclusion of Romanian children from transnational families. The results of the SWOT analysis carried out indicate a number of shortcomings in covering the risk situations of these vulnerable children, the access to education and a good start in the life of these children being quite affected. The obtained results have implications at the level of decision-makers, helping to improve the efficiency of measures and programs for the left behind children and transnational Romanian families. (shrink)

Social exclusion, especially social exclusion in old age, represents an area of interest at European level, in the context of demographic transformations. At national level, studies and research on social exclusion in old age are scarce, although the older population is more likely to be at risk of social exclusion. The article presents the results of a quantitative research methodology based on a questionnaire applied to older people of age 65 years and over. The research was conducted during November - (...) December 2021 and the survey was representative at national level with a margin of error of ±3.5%. The aim of this article is to analyse the perceptions of older persons regarding the access and quality of social and healthcare services accessed, and thus, to gain a better understanding on how these types of services could contribute to social inclusion. Data interpretation was made using techniques of descriptive statistical analysis. Results emphasize that access to social and healthcare services are essential in old age. Perceptions of older persons highlight the need for structural changes at national level, so that social and healthcare services could make a real contribution to reducing social exclusion. (shrink)

Resumen El 16 de noviembre de 2015, se enfrentaron en el programa televisivo Argentina Debate los dos candidatos a presidente argentinos que una semana después competirían en ballotage: Mauricio Macri y Daniel Scioli. Durante el debate, sus cuentas oficiales de Twitter fueron constantemente actualizadas mediante la reproducción de fragmentos de sus participaciones en el programa. Consideramos que el análisis de los mismos, desde la perspectiva de la pragmática sociocultural. Pragmática, sociopragmática y pragmática sociocultural del discurso de cortesía: una introducción. En (...) D. Bravo, N. Hernández Flores, y A. Cordisco, Aportes pragmáticos, socio pragmáticos y socioculturales a los estudios de la cortesía. Estocolmo – Buenos Aires: Dunken), nos permitirá comprender las actividades de imagen mediante las cuales se construyó y negoció, en Twitter, la imagen de estos candidatos. Se presenta aquí el análisis de 12 mensajes publicados, durante el debate, en la cuenta oficial de ambos candidatos. Se concluye que Mauricio Macri realiza actividades en torno a su imagen de afiliación. ¿Imagen positiva vs. imagen negativa? Pragmática socio-cultural y componentes de face. Oralia 2. Análisis del discurso oral, 155–184) como miembro del partido político Cambiemos y como un ciudadano que sufre las consecuencias de la mala gestión del gobierno. Simultáneamente, desarrolla su imagen de autonomía. ¿Imagen positiva vs. imagen negativa? Pragmática socio-cultural y componentes de face. Oralia 2. Análisis del discurso oral, 155–184) como un candidato distinto que puede generar cambios en la política nacional. A su vez, realiza actos de amenazas a la imagen de afiliación de Daniel Scioli. Este, en respuesta, despliega actividades tendientes a reforzar su imagen de autonomía y a construir una imagen de afiliación amplia con la oposición a Mauricio Macri. Asimismo, realiza amenazas a la imagen de su adversario. (shrink)

Vier Essays bilden den Inhalt dieses Buches: - Einige Denkgrundlagen im Werk von C.G. Jung - C.G. Jung - ein Mystiker? - Die Faszination durch Aberglauben und Parapsychologie - Hermann Brochs «Der Tod des Vergil» - ein Beitrag zum Problem der Individuation In allen vier Beiträgen geht es um die erkenntnistheoretischen Grenzen, die unserem Bewußtsein gestellt sind und um die Erfahrung eines transzendenten Bereichs, den die Mystiker immer wieder zu fassen suchten.

Is the concept of open society still relevant in the 21st century? Do the current social, moral, and political realities call for a drastic revision of this concept? Here fifteen essays address real-world contemporary challenges to open society from a variety of perspectives. What unites the individual authors and chapters is an interest in open society's continuing usefulness and relevance to address current problems. And what distinguishes them is a rich variety of geographical and cultural backgrounds, and a wide range (...) of academic disciplines and traditions.While focusing on probing the contemporary relevance of the concept, several chapters approach it historically. The book features a comprehensive introduction to the history and current 'uses' of the theory of open society. The authors link the concept to contemporary themes including education, Artificial Intelligence, cognitive science, African cosmology, colonialism, and feminism. The diversity of viewpoints in the analysis reflects a commitment to plurality that is at the heart of this book and of the idea of open society itself. (shrink)

This article examines influential recent arguments in science studies which stress the interactive and mutually transformative nature of human-animal relations in scientific research, as part of a broader ontological proposal for science as material engagement with the world, rather than epistemic detachment from it. Such arguments are examined in the light of ethnography and interviews with field biologists who work with meerkats under conditions of habituation. Where philosophers of science stress the mutually modifying aspect of scientific interspecies relationality, these researchers (...) present habituation as a way to study meerkats ‘in the wild’, and to access their putatively natural, undisturbed, behaviour. Building on this contrast, I will argue that the logic of scientific habituation remains difficult to grasp as long as we think of it exclusively in terms of human-animal relations. The seeming ‘paradox’ of habituation – the idea that it transforms precisely that which it aims to hold stable, namely the ‘wildness’ of animals – is an artefact of a frame of analysis which takes animals to be the object of the science of animal behaviour. Habituation ceases to look paradoxical, however, if we remain faithful to these researchers’ own interests, for whom the scientific object does not coincide with the animal as a whole, but is rather only a selected subset of its behaviour. In conclusion I suggest that this account of habituation sheds a new light on the articulations and disjunctions between diverse practices and commitments in social anthropology, philosophy and biological science. (shrink)

This comment on Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's article, “Zeno and the Art of Anthropology,” considers his definition of what it means to “take seriously” the world of the other, which he regards as the quintessential anthropological move. It means leaving the other's world in a state of suspended possibility, avoiding either belief or disbelief, assent or dissent. Candea's piece draws out the logic of the complementary and inverse move that grounds Viveiros de Castro's stance: “not taking seriously” the world of (...) the “same,” in this case, that of Western intellectuals such as Richard Rorty or Gilles Deleuze. Here “not taking seriously” involves (somewhat counterintuitively) argument, agreement and disagreement, rejection or adoption, of different visions. Candea identifies this controlled asymmetry between treatments of “us” and “them” as the major distinction between Viveiros de Castro's position and an older relativism, a difference that shields the former from the classic “self-refutation charge.” But this controlled asymmetry in turn raises the question of how we are to identify which visions we as anthropologists ought to take seriously and which we ought not to: where, in other words, do we draw the line, procedurally, between “us” and “them”? Candea argues that keeping this problematic and perhaps irresolvable question in view is the specific role of an “endo-anthropology” (the impossible figure of an “anthropology at home”), which is the necessary counterpart of Viveiros de Castro's “exo-anthropology.”. (shrink)

Romania was the first country in the Eastern bloc to initiate diplo­matic relations with the Federal Republic of Germany. On January 31, 1967, the Embassy of the FRG was opened in Bucharest, Romania. In this context, which marked the intensification of the cultural exchange between the two countries, with special attention paid to the exchange of students and researchers, in this article I aim to tackle the situation of the Humboldt fellows from Romania during 1965-1989, as agents of knowledge transfer (...) and actors of soft-power strategies between the two blocks. (shrink)

This paper investigates the emergence, in the second part of the 17th century, of a new body of experimental knowledge dealing with the chemical transformations of water taking place in plants. We call this body of experimental knowledge a “chemical history of vegetation.” We show that this chemical natural history originated, in terms of recipes and methods of investigation, in the works of Francis Bacon and that it was constructed in accordance with Bacon's precepts for putting together natural and experimental (...) histories. Our paper covers a wide array of experimental investigations, carried out by people with different backgrounds, theoretical assumptions, and metaphysical allegiances (Thomas Browne, Robert Sharrock, Robert Boyle, Nehemiah Grew, John Beale, and John Evelyn). We claim that, despite their differences, these naturalists had a lot in common. First, they treated plants as laboratories of chemical investigation. Second, they used the experiments with plants to develop tools, hypotheses, and operational concepts, which travelled from one naturalist to the other, even when their respective explanatory vocabularies were widely different. Third, we show that some of them also manifested an interest in defining and clarifying the limits and structure of this new body of experimental knowledge, displaying, thus, a certain disciplinary unity. (shrink)

_Five Faces of Modernity_ is a series of semantic and cultural biographies of words that have taken on special significance in the last century and a half or so: _modernity_, _avant-garde_, _decadence_, _kitsch_, and _postmodernism_. The concept of modernity—the notion that we, the living, are different and somehow superior to our predecessors and that our civilization is likely to be succeeded by one even superior to ours—is a relatively recent Western invention and one whose time may already have passed, if (...) we believe its postmodern challengers. Calinescu documents the rise of cultural modernity and, in tracing the shifting senses of the five terms under scrutiny, illustrates the intricate value judgments, conflicting orientations, and intellectual paradoxes to which it has given rise. _Five Faces of Modernity_ attempts to do for the foundations of the modernist critical lexicon what earlier terminological studies have done for such complex categories as _classicism_, _baroque_, _romanticism_, _realism_, or _symbolism_ and thereby fill a gap in literary scholarship. On another, more ambitious level, Calinescu deals at length with the larger issues, dilemmas, ideological tensions, and perplexities brought about by the assertion of modernity. (shrink)

Bacon’s projects of natural history were extremely popular in the mid-seventeenth century, especially for a group of people devoted to experimental activities, namely the Hartlib Circle. Ralph Austen, one member of the Hartlib Circle, tried to construct his own project of natural history using Bacon’s Sylva sylvarum as a pattern and following the Baconian scheme with particular interest for the methodological aspects entailed by such an endeavor. This paper provides an account of Austen’s at­tempts at writing a natural history as (...) found in his Observations upon some part of Sr Francis Bacon’s Naturall History. It discusses the methodology and aims served by such an enterprise, both practical and theoretical: the role of experimentation in the process of compiling a natural history as the most reliable activity able to provide accurate knowledge of the natural world and the determination to provide general rules and axioms about nature. (shrink)

This paper investigates the relation between Gabriel Plattes’ cosmology and theory of matter, on the one hand, and his method of experimentation, on the other. In my view Plattes based his cosmology and theory of matter on specific “principles of nature” expressed as alchemical qualitative relations between bodies, and these principles formed the theoretical framework for his experimental method and technologies. I also claim that Plattes’ method of experimentation has heuristic purposes, acting as a tool to instantiate and illustrate these (...) natural principles. By quantifiable manipulations of matter, Plattes made use of experimentation to provide technologies whose immediate purpose was to ameliorate or improve the material world. (shrink)

This interdisciplinary volume questions one of the most fundamental tenets of social theory by focusing on detachment, an important but neglected aspect of social life. Going against the grain of recent theoretical celebrations of engagement, this book challenges us to re-think the relational basis of social theory. In so, doing it brings to light the productive aspects of disconnection, distance and detachment. Rather than treating detachment simply as the moral inversion of compassion and engagement, the volume brings together empirical studies (...) and theoretical comments by leading anthropologists, sociologists and science studies scholars. Taken together, these illustrate the range of contexts within which distance and disconnection can offer meaningful frameworks for action. Positioned at the cutting edge of social theory, this landmark volume will be of great interest to students and academics across the social sciences and humanities. (shrink)

Context and AimsAlthough some exercise-based interventions have been associated with lower levels of pain and performance-related musculoskeletal disorders among musicians, the evidence is still mixed. Furthermore, little is known about musicians’ general engagement in physical activity, their knowledge of PA guidelines, or the relevant training they receive on pain prevention and the sources of such training. Similarly, little is known about the relationship between PA and PRMDs and other risk factors for PRMDs.MethodsFollowing a cross-sectional correlational study design, both standardized andad (...) hocmeasurements were used to investigate self-reported PA [International Physical Activity Questionnaire – Short Form ], knowledge of PA guidelines, and barriers to engaging in PA [Centers for Disease Control ; Determinants of Physical Activity Questionnaire ]; sedentary behavior [Sedentary Behavior Questionnaire ]; pain [36-Item Short Form Survey Instrument ] and PRMDs ; reported physical exertion ; anxiety [Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale ]; practice behaviors ; and relevant training among conservatoire students in the United Kingdom. The entire set of questionnaires was administered both online and via hard copies between June 2017 and April 2018.ResultsDemographic information was obtained from 111 respondents, mostly undergraduate students from seven conservatoires. They reported high levels of engagement in PA, despite poor knowledge of PA guidelines. Teachers were the most frequently mentioned source of pain prevention information, and 62% agreed that they had received advice on why they should engage in cardio PA. Sedentary behavior was comparable to normative data. Levels of bodily pain and PRMDs were low, but 43% showed “abnormal” clinical anxiety and found playing their instruments “somewhat hard” on average. Bodily pain interfering with practice and performance was positively correlated with frequency and severity of PRMDs, anxiety, and RPE. Frequency and severity of PRMDs were also associated with sedentary behavior at the weekend. Anxiety was associated with RPE. No association was found between PA and PRMDs.ConclusionThe relationship between PA and PRMDs and pain remains unclear and needs further investigation. While health education needs to be improved, other pathways may need to be taken. Given the high levels of anxiety, the ideology of Western classical music itself may need to be challenged. (shrink)

Roland Barthes: For an Ecology of WritingEven if the theoretical prestige of the notion of ecology is recent, an ecological writing has already been racticed, without receiving this name, by Roland Barthes. On several occasions, progressively after Writing Degree zero, Roland Barthes envisaged writing as a multifaceted practice, the most suitable for overturning the only order worth to be revolutionized, the symbolic order. We will take a fresh look at Barthes' writing as a theoretical concept in the early 1950s, along (...) a shift that takes the term first to the name of a technique. Finally, in the mid-1970s, writing comes to be defined by Barthes as a practice that ignores the dichotomy between matter or body and mind or idea, and which arrives, in a spiral return movement, at an inclusive conception that recovers both the concept and the practice. This is where writing meets, in Barthes' work, the act that Latour calls "greening" and which he defines above all as a new relationship between facts and values. In the light of the latest research in "Barthesian studies" we would like to show that the future of "theory", if it is ecology today, lies in the practice and ecological commitment of writing, as a mediator of meaning, a tool of "charitable fiction", at the confines of spirit and matter. (shrink)

Even if the theoretical prestige of the notion of ecology is recent, an ecological writing has already been racticed, without receiving this name, by Roland Barthes. On several occasions, progressively after Writing Degree zero, Roland Barthes envisaged writing as a multifaceted practice, the most suitable for overturning the only order worth to be revolutionized, the symbolic order. We will take a fresh look at Barthes' writing as a theoretical concept in the early 1950s, along a shift that takes the term (...) first to the name of a technique. Finally, in the mid-1970s, writing comes to be defined by Barthes as a practice that ignores the dichotomy between matter or body and mind or idea, and which arrives, in a spiral return movement, at an inclusive conception that recovers both the concept and the practice. This is where writing meets, in Barthes' work, the act that Latour calls "greening" and which he defines above all as a new relationship between facts and values. In the light of the latest research in "Barthesian studies" we would like to show that the future of "theory", if it is ecology today, lies in the practice and ecological commitment of writing, as a mediator of meaning, a tool of "charitable fiction", at the confines of spirit and matter. (shrink)

This paper investigates the Baconian roots of Maupertuis’s Lettre XIX. Sur le Progrès des Sciences. The Letter was published almost a decade after Maupertuis had accepted Frederick II’s invitation to move from Paris to Berlin and become the new President of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Contrary to the secondary literature that identifies a distinction between Maupertuis’s Parisian and Berliner phases, this paper argues that there is in fact greater continuity between the two. Based on a reading that empha­sizes the (...) programmatic and methodological commonalities between Bacon’s project in De augmentis scientiarum and Maupertuis’s Lettre XIX, this paper argues that, in a Baconian fashion, Maupertuis combines the roles of the “scientist” and the “natural philosopher” into an integrated plan of action with both intellectual an institutional aims. One of Maupertuis’s aims was to highlight the importance of observation and experiment not only in the development of natural philosophy but also for some aspects of speculative philosophy, while another of his aims was to reinvigorate the structure of the Berlin Academy and to model it the fashion of other similar European intellectual projects of that time. (shrink)

We study smoking-cessation apps in order to formulate a framework for ethical evaluation, analyzing apps as ‘medium’, ‘market’, and ‘genre’. We center on the value of user autonomy through truthfulness and self-understanding. Smoking-cessation apps usually communicate in an anonymous ‘app voice’, with little presence of professional or other identified voices. Because of the fast-and-frugal communication, truthfulness is problematic. Messages in the ‘quantification’ modules may be read as deceitfully accurate. The app voice frames smoking as a useless, damaging habit indicative of (...) weakness of will, in a ‘cold-turkey’ frame of individual mind-over-body heroism. Thus apps contribute to a stigmatization of smokers and culpabilization of relapses. The potential to support user autonomy through diverse meaningful voices and personalized communication remains yet unused. (shrink)

In May 1956, in his eighty-second year, Jung first discussed with Gerhard Adler the question of the publication of his letters. Over many years, Jung had often used the medium of letters to communicate his ideas to others and to clarify the interpretation of his work, quite apart from answering people who approached him with genuine problems of their own and simply corresponding with friends and colleagues. Many of his letters thus contain new creative ideas and provide a running commentary (...) on his work. From some 1,600 letters written by Jung between the years 1906-1961, the editors have selected over 1,000. _Volume 1_, published in 1973, contains those letters written between 1906 and 1950. (shrink)

In this paper we present a set of good practices in the design of a security-centric architecture for a Communication Channel that can be used to secure a Loosely-Coupled distributed platform, over unreliable communication mediums. The proposed practices are derived from designing a complete architecture that is modular and designed to support principles of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and the common functional requirements of a wide range of applications, including cybersecurity, smart power grids and industrial Internet of Things (IoT). The (...) architecture was developed and implemented as part of the BIECO project, and is based around open standards such as Open Platform Communications United Architecture (OPC-UA). The key feature of the architecture is that it enables secure asynchronous near-real-time communication between a large number of nodes in a multimodal setup, without the need of any Service to know its place within the tool-chain. Based on our experience with building this system and based on the good results obtained, we are presenting a list of lessons learnt, recommendations for better communication channel modules within loosely coupled distributed systems. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to analyze the transformation of a tradition of husbandry from moral and political philosophy to natural magic and technology. In the early 1640s there was a shift of approach in the Hartlib circle from the ecclesiastical peace projects to the more experimental and practical projects of husbandry. The discipline of vegetable philosophy defined a new field of interest which could connect the Baconian tradition of experimentation, the desire to compile natural histories, and the dedication (...) to the open character of knowledge and human benefits. I will claim that vegetable philosophy, although operational and practical, and based on the production of transferable technologies, is still grounded on a set of metaphysical assumptions. (shrink)