The way people make career choices is often influenced by their idea of work. Alongside this concept, there is the idea of decent work, which takes the form of the opportunity, for men and women, to have productive, equal, safe, and rights-based work. We have conducted a study on these two concepts with a group of Italian adolescents, using both quantitative and qualitative methods. We found that most of the participants consider work as a means to obtain economic benefits and (...) satisfy certain values, and decent work as characterized by the respect for rights and duties and economic benefits; a part of the participants fails in giving a definition of decent work or gives a negative definition of it. We deepened the study through quantitative analyses that revealed that those who have a more complex view of work and decent work also have higher levels of self-efficacy and career adaptability. These findings are discussed in the light of previous research and from a perspective that intends to give a contribution to career counseling practices. (shrink)

The debate concerning the secularism of the state always returns to the regulation of certain issues, such as same-sex marriage or embryonic stem cell research. In this study, we analysed the effects of political orientation, Catholic identity, and religious orientations on the desire to have a secular state. Participants were 209 Italians who completed a questionnaire containing measures of the investigated constructs. The results showed that secularism of the state is negatively correlated with Catholic identity, extrinsic and intrinsic orientation, and (...) right-wing political orientation, and is positively correlated with quest orientation. Moreover, the application of dominance analysis showed that intrinsic orientation dominates all other variables. (shrink)

CHAPTER Structure and function In physical systems made by a large number of basic constituents one can observe collective properties which find their ...

This book is a systematic analysis of John R. Searle’s philosophy of mind. Searle’s view of mind, as a set of subjective _and_ biologically embodied processes, can account for our being part of nature _qua_ mindful beings. This model finds support in neuroscience and offers reliable solutions to the problems of consciousness, mental causation, and the self.

We here report the findings of our investigation into the validity of the conjunction fallacy (Tversky & Kahneman, 1983), bearing in mind the role of conversational rules. Our first experiment showed that subjects found a logically correct answer unacceptable when it implied a violation of the conversational rules. We argue that tautological questions, such as those which concern the relationship of inclusion between a class and its sub-class, violate conversational rules because they are not informative. In this sense, it is (...) not understood that the question in a Linda-type problem involves a comparison between an inclusive and included class, but presumed that a different type of comparison is intended. Tautological questions (and, consequently, also their answers) do not become a matter of discussion except under certain specific conditions. Our second experiment showed that, providing the context was adequately marked (such as in the case of a rhetorical question), the conjunction fallacy disappears. In two further experiments, the implications of our view were compared with those of the other critical approaches to the heuristic programme: the classical pragmatic view (which we call logical complementarity) and the frequentist view. (shrink)

Das Buch enthält die Einführung in die Lektüre sowie den Textkommentar zu den der Analyse der Grundsätze der Modalität gewidmeten "Postulaten des empirischen Denkens überhaupt". Untersucht wird Kants gesamte Theorie der Modalbegriffe (Möglichkeit - Unmöglichkeit, Dasein - Nichtsein, Notwendigkeit - Zufälligkeit) seit Mitte der 1750er Jahre bis zur Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Die Postulate sind nach Kant nicht objektiv, sondern subjektiv-synthetisch: Der Gegenstand der Erfahrung, welcher zunächst anhand der objektiv-synthetischen Funktionen der Quantität, Qualität und Relation bestimmt wird, lässt sich nun (...) in seinem Verhältnis zum setzenden Subjekt betrachten. Die Postulate thematisieren jedoch nicht - hier liegt die konstitutive Charakteristik dieser synthetischen Urteile a priori - das Subjekt selbst, sondern das Objekt als solches und die Objektivität überhaupt. Wie diese Untersuchung zeigt, antwortet Kant erst hier - nicht in den viel diskutierten Deduktionskapiteln oder in den anderen Grundsatzkapiteln - auf die Frage "Was ist ein Objekt?" und bezieht zugleich Stellung gegenüber anderen philosophischen Theorien der Objektivität des 18. Jahrhunderts: Rationalismus, Empirismus, Idealismus, Skeptizismus. (shrink)

Nijhawan argues convincingly that predictive mechanisms are pervasive in the central nervous system (CNS). However, scientific understanding of visual prediction requires one to formulate empirically testable neurophysiological models. The author's suggestions in this direction are to be evaluated on the basis of more realistic experimental methodologies and more plausible assumptions on the hierarchical character of the human visual cortex.

One of the two central suggestions put forth in Longobardi (1991, 1994) was that Romance/English differences in the syntax of proper names were parametrically connected to supposed differences in the semantics of bare (plural and mass) common nouns (BNs). The present article will pursue this line of investigation, trying to make precise such meaning differences and to understand the reason for their apparently surprising parametric association with the syntax of proper names.It will be shown that in most Romance varieties BNs, (...) unlike their English counterparts, distribute their existential and generic readings across all different contexts exactly like (Romance and English) overt indefinites. All the differences will be unified under the proposal that Romance BNs are nothing but a type of indefinites (variables, existentially or generically bound) in Kamp-Heim’s DRT sense, while English BNs are rather systematically ambiguous between this quantificational interpretation and a referential (i.e. directly kind-denoting, much in the spirit of Carlson 1977a, b) one, providing for another type of generic reading.The analysis will therefore crucially exploit and empirically support Gerstner and Krifka’s (1987) distinction between referential and quantificational genericity. On such grounds we will finally gain a conceptual understanding of the typological implication originally established in Longobardi (1991, 1994), thus confirming that the strategies of interpretation of nominals, whether proper or common nouns, are basically one and the same, though differently parametrized in different languages. This result, in turn, will shed some light on the question whether comparative semantics is possible and whether it can be singled out as a legitimate independent component of parametric theories of grammatical variation. (shrink)

En este artículo se propone una lectura de las obras de Giambattista Vico y Eric Voegelin, cuyo objetivo es evidenciar importantes puntos de contacto entre ellas, en particular en lo que se refiere a su acercamiento al tema del fundacionalismo. Para ambos autores la trascendencia del significado últ..

This article will attempt to show that from the beginning of the letter of Eusebius of Nicodemia to Paulinus of Tyre, the meaning of ὁμοούσιος should be sought in the opposition on the part of the Council of Nicea to the divisive doctrine of hypostases by Arius and his followers. The assertion of the similarity or identity of nature or ousia between the Father and the Son that ὁμοούσιος suggests is traceable to the teaching of Alexander of Alexandria, but also (...) of Eusthatius of Antioch, so that it could be thought that in Nicea a convergence between the two major opponents of Arius could have taken place, in the same way in which it had occurred over the Antiochene formula of 325. Analysis of the doctrine of ὁμοούσιος by Athanasius confirms that the term was opposed to the divisive interpretation of the hypostases within Arianism. The second part of the article, takes into consideration the study on the interpretation of the Nicene ὁμοούσιος proposed by P. F. Beatrice. The Author argues that Beatrice’s thesis, which attempts to trace the introduction of the term in the Nicene Creed back exclusively to Constantine, with the agreement of Eusebius of Caesarea, is not backed by the documentation at our disposal. (shrink)

This study intends to show how the essential elements in the debate over the divinity of the Son provoked by Arianism are already present within the Alessandrian Church during the first decades of the 3rd century. From the works of Origen it becomes apparent that his teaching on the eternity of the Logos intends to oppose those who asserted a temporal beginning thus separating the Logos from the divinity of the Father, which allows us to define them as radical supporters (...) of the theology of the Logos. Against this doctrine, there is an identified opposition which probably utilized the term ὁμοούσιος to indicate to the contrary the divinity of the Son; nevertheless Origen, while proposing that the Son is generated from the ousia of the Father, does not share this teaching because in his theology the Son remains subordinate to the Father. (shrink)

The brain constructs within itself an understanding of its surround which constitutes its own world. This is described as its Double in the frame of the dissipative quantum model of brain, where the perception-action arc in the Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception finds its formal description. In the dialog with the Double, the continuous attempt to reach the equilibrium shows that the real goal pursued by the brain activity is the aesthetical experience, the most harmonious “to-be-in-the-world” reached through reciprocal actions, the (...) aesthetical dimension characterized by the “pleasure” of the perception. Aesthetical pleasure unavoidably implies disclosure, to manifest “signs”, artistic communication. An interpersonal, collective level of consciousness then arises, a larger stage where the actors are mutually dependent. The coherent structure of the brain background state manifests itself in the auto-similarity properties of fractal structures. These are observed to occur also in a large number of natural phenomena and systems. The conception of Nature divided in separated domains is replaced by the vision of Nature unified by laws of form implied by the underlying quantum dynamics of the coherent vacuum, an integrated ecological vision. (shrink)

The author proposes an analysis on a key issue in 20th-century thought: the struggle against disciplinary specialism. This problem is stressed by the reflections of philosophers and scientists such as Ortega y Gasset, Erwin Chargaff, Werner Heisenberg, Konrad Lorenz, Karl Popper, Paul Feyerabend, and Edgar Morin.