The justification of democracy, while widely debated, is hindered by a sub-optimal conceptual framework. For a start, there is confusion about the basic terms in the discussion. Many theorists claim to support either the ‘intrinsic’ or the ‘instrumental’ value of democracy, but it is unclear what this exactly means. Can democracy have other kinds of values? What does it mean to value democracy intrinsically? As a result, at certain points, scholars are talking past one another and their assessments of their (...) respective approaches to democracy are less clear than what they intended. This paper develops a conceptual framework of the values of democracy. I use this framework to classify theories of democracy under three main groups: theories that value democracy intrinsically, instrumentally, or contributorily (necessarily and non-necessarily). Through this analysis, the points of engagement among the different approaches will emerge and flawed arguments about democracy will be revealed. (shrink)

The rise of East Asian Confucian heritage societies (China, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam and Singapore) has inspired an enormous amount of new empirical research. At the political level, one...

Confucian meritocratic rule has been recently advocated on the basis of the economic performance of Western democracies and the political ignorance of their average voters. These arguments are grou...

The question of how democracy can deal with cultural diversity has become more central than ever. The increasing flow of people to many Western democratic countries indicates that our societies will become more and more multicultural. But what is the best way for democracy to deal with cultural diversity? It has been argued that, given its communicative core, the Habermasian model of deliberative democracy provides a platform where cultural groups can concur on peaceful agreements. In this paper, I show the (...) limits of this model of democracy in relation to diverse cultural traditions to public interactions. I will discuss the case of societies and ethnic groups of a Confucian heritage and show that Habermas’ account of public deliberation is not a neutral method for facilitating political decision making, but is culturally biased. (shrink)

The impact of social media technologies (SMTs) on digital wellbeing has become an increasingly important puzzle for ethicists of technology. In this article, we explain why individualised theories of digital wellbeing (DWB) can only solve part of this puzzle. While an individualised conception of DWB is useful for understanding online self-regulation, we contend that we must seek greater understanding of how SMTs connect us. To build an account of this, we locate the conceptual resources for our account in Confucian ethics. (...) In contrast to individualised conceptions of human flourishing that are found in the Western tradition, Confucian thinkers strongly emphasise that individuals cannot flourish alone, but need wider social structures (partner, family, society, nation). Not only do strands of Confucian ethics explain how individuals are defined by the roles they take up in relationships, but this perspective also makes practical suggestions for how these roles can be cultivated. We conclude our article by identifying the Confucian notions that seem to have most promise for the future design of SMTs. (shrink)

In cammino con l'ermeneutica -- Il tempo e la poetica della narratività -- Ermeneutica della temporalità e narrazione -- Ermeneutica della storicità e etica della narratività.

The current study investigates the influence of variety among online providers and customers' access to knowledge on consumer networks, consumer engagement, and sustainable purchasing. Emphasis is on the underlying relationships among these constructs in the digital economy, which has evolved into a complex structure of multifarious nodes and linkages unfolding in the online environment. The underlying theoretical approaches are knowledge-attitude-behavior (KAB) and customer sovereignty. Against this backdrop, a questionnaire-based survey was given to 200 Millennials (i.e., generation Y) and gen Z (...) Italians—approached as empowered stakeholders requiring accurate information and sustainable solutions from online providers—in January 2023. The data was processed via the structural equation modeling technique PLS-SEM, based on SmartPLS 4. The findings indicated that sustainable purchasing is influenced to some extent by access to knowledge, consumer engagement, and consumer networks. The study endeavors to fill a research gap, as the relationships between variety among online providers and sustainable purchasing, as well as consumer engagement from the empowerment perspective are underexplored. The study provides new evidence of the relationships between consumer networks, consumers' access to knowledge, sustainable purchasing, and consumer engagement in the framework of online retail by inquiring respondents. (shrink)

This paper investigates Negative Concord, arguing that it results from a systematic lexical ambiguity: the items that participate in Negative Concord ("n-words" in Laka's 1990 terminology) are ambiguous between negative polarity items and their genuinely negative counterparts. I try to show that on empirical grounds the proposed account compares favorably with other analyses that shy away from ambiguity. I furthermore suggest that the ambiguity is not implausible conceptually because it can be viewed as reflecting an intermediate stage of the Jespersen (...) Cycle. Negative Concord can be observed in many languages. The data discussed here are taken from Romance, primarily Spanish. (shrink)

Bare conditionals, I argue, exhibit Conditional Duality in that when they appear in downward entailing environments they differ from bare conditionals elsewhere in having existential rather than universal force. Two recalcitrant phenomena are shown to find a new explanation under this thesis: bare conditionals under only, and bare conditionals in the scope of negative nominal quantifiers, or what has come to be known as Higginbotham’s puzzle. I also consider how bare conditionals behave when embedded under negation, arguing that such conditionals (...) often involve denial negation. One important conclusion that emerges from the discussion is that an account of bare conditionals that validates Conditional Excluded Middle is not warranted. By limiting the scope of the strict analysis Conditional Duality is also a way of maintaining such an account. (shrink)

The enactive approach to cognition distinctively emphasizes autonomy, adaptivity, agency, meaning, experience, and interaction. Taken together, these principles can provide the new sciences of language with a comprehensive philosophical framework: languaging as adaptive social sense-making. This is a refinement and advancement on Maturana’s idea of languaging as a manner of living. Overcoming limitations in Maturana’s initial formulation of languaging is one of three motivations for this paper. Another is to give a response to skeptics who challenge enactivism to connect “lower-level” (...) sense-making with “higher-order” sophisticated moves like those commonly ascribed to language. Our primary goal is to contribute a positive story developed from the enactive account of social cognition, participatory sense-making. This concept is put into play in two different philosophical models, which respectively chronicle the logical and ontogenetic development of languaging as a particular form of social agency. Languaging emerges from the interplay of coordination and exploration inherent in the primordial tensions of participatory sense-making between individual and interactive norms; it is a practice that transcends the self-other boundary and enables agents to regulate self and other as well as interaction couplings. Linguistic sense-makers are those who negotiate interactive and internalized ways of meta-regulating the moment-to-moment activities of living and cognizing. Sense-makers in enlanguaged environments incorporate sensitivities, roles, and powers into their unique yet intelligible linguistic bodies. We dissolve the problematic dichotomies of high/low, online/offline, and linguistic/nonlinguistic cognition, and we provide new boundary criteria for specifying languaging as a prevalent kind of human social sense-making. (shrink)

Since March 2020, many countries throughout the world have been in lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In Italy, the quarantine began on March 9, 2020, and containment measures were partially reduced only on May 4, 2020. The quarantine experience has a significant psychological impact at all ages but can have it above all on adolescents who cannot go to school, play sports, and meet friends. In this scenario, this study aimed to provide a general overview of the perceived (...) risk related to COVID-19 and the psychological experience of quarantine in a large sample of Italian adolescents. 978 adolescents (males = 339; females = 639) living in 13 Italian regions and attending upper secondary school (age range: 13–20, M = 16.57, SD = 1.20), responded to an internet-based questionnaire about perceived health risk related to COVID-19, knowledge and information on measures to control the pandemic, beliefs and opinions on stage two of the quarantine, and psychological experiences related to quarantine. 31.1% of the participants lived in "red zones," which are places where the government has imposed stricter measures of containment due to exponential and uncontrolled growth in contagion cases compared to other areas in Italy. According to our results, Italian adolescents had a low perception of risk of COVID-19. Perceived comparative susceptibility and perceived seriousness were also very low. However, they were aware of the restriction measures necessary to contain the spread of the virus, and they agreed with the limitations imposed by the government. Females and adolescents living in a “red zone” showed more significant psychological negative feelings about the quarantine experience. However, no significant differences were found about the regions where the teenagers of our sample live and the other variables related to the COVID-19 experience. This is very interesting data, leading us to hypothesize that the participants' negative feelings may be more related to the adolescent period than to the pandemic itself. (shrink)

This essay argues that according to feminist existential phenomenology, feminist pragmatism, and feminist genealogy, our embodied condition is an important starting place for ethical living due to the inevitable role that habits play in our conduct. In bodies, the phenomenon of habit uniquely holds together the ambiguities of freedom and determinism, transcendence and immanence, and stability and plasticity. Seeing habit formation as a matter of self-growth and social justice gives fresh opportunity for thinking of “assuming ambiguity” as a lifelong endeavor (...) made up of many small projects and practices of situated resistance to stagnation. Transcendence, understood as ameliorative transformation, is found in cultivating habits of learning from our bodily living. I articulate this argument via a reading of Simone de Beauvoir's The Coming of Age, John Dewey's Human Nature and Conduct, and Ladelle McWhorter's Bodies and Pleasures. I discuss two domains wherein the ethical significance of habit formation appears: cognitive psychological research on neural plasticity, and certain projects of self-cultivation that risk turning into overdetermining “cult of the self ” practices that close off possibilities for personal and collective transformation. (shrink)

"Now in its third edition, this classic text remains the seminal resource for in-depth information about major concepts and principles of the cultural-historical theory developed by Lev Vygotsky, his students, and colleagues, as well as three generations of neo-Vygotskian scholars in Russia and the West. Featuring two new chapters on brain development and scaffolding in the zone of proximal development, as well as additional content on technology, dual language learners, and students with disabilities, this new edition provides the latest research (...) evidence supporting the basics of the cultural-historical approach alongside Vygotskian-based practical implications. With concrete explanations and strategies on how to scaffold young children's learning and development, this book is essential reading for students of early childhood theory and development"--. (shrink)

Over the years, researchers of numerous fields have suggested different criteria and conventions for the transcription of oral samples. Current practice by workers who carry out transcriptions in the Spanish legal system is not standardized and does not follow any general criteria. Indeed, the standards followed by professionals in this context are characterized by their heterogeneity. This contribution highlights the benefits of adhering to a particular set of criteria and conventions agreed upon by 115 transcribers to make the transcription process (...) more efficient, improve its comprehension and add to the value of transcriptions as key documents within the legal system that may have a direct impact on the right of the parties involved. (shrink)

The question whether AI systems have agency is gaining increasing importance in discussions of responsibility for AI behavior. This paper argues that an approach to artificial agency needs to be teleological, and consider the role of human goals in particular if it is to adequately address the issue of responsibility. I will defend the view that while AI systems can be viewed as autonomous in the sense of identifying or pursuing goals, they rely on human goals and other values incorporated (...) into their design, and are, as such, dependent on human agents. As a consequence, AI systems cannot be held morally responsible, and responsibility attributions should take into account normative and social aspects involved in the design and deployment of the said AI. My argument falls in line with approaches critical of attributing moral agency to artificial agents, but draws from the philosophy of action, highlighting further philosophical underpinnings of current debates on artificial agency. (shrink)

Villeneuve d’Ascq, Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2018, 404 p. Cette collection d’essais commence avec une question provocatrice : d’autres cours d’Europe offrent-elles une place « aussi éminente » aux femmes que la cour de France à l’époque moderne? Les études réunies ici montrent de façon évidente l’importance et la centralité des femmes à la cour de France, des reines et princesses au sommet du pouvoir jusqu’aux demoiselles de musique, nourrices, femmes d’officiels et autres. Cet...

This article examines the ways in which villainous characters are portrayed in post-classical American films, and examines how these characters are viewed by the cinematic audience in order to ascertain the degree to which the socially and morally understood roles or heroism and villainy might be inverted through cinematic representation. The potential for the inversion of perceived good and evil in the characters that inhabit the films discussed is considered in relation to the aligning and allying capacity of cinema. This (...) work also considers the impact of stars in villainous roles and the significance of generic conventions in rendering the villain apparently inert to a viewing audience. Through considering the formal presentation of characters and scenarios, this work suggests that villainous deeds can be perceived as unthreatening, and even 'moral' to an extent. The purpose of this article is to form an understanding of how audiences engage with iniquitous characters, and to consider the potential spectatorial implications of such a bond. (shrink)

It has been a long-standing puzzle that Negative Polarity Items appear to split into two subvarieties when their effect on the interpretation of questions is taken into account: while questions with any and ever can be used as unbiased requests of information, questions with so-called `minimizers', i.e. idioms like lift a finger and the faintest idea, are always biased towards a negative answer (cf. Ladusaw 1979). Focusing on yes/no questions, this paper presents a solution to this puzzle. Specifically it is (...) shown that in virtue of containing even (cf. Heim 1984), minimizers, unlike any, trigger a presupposition, which reduces the set of the possible answers to a question to the singleton containing the negative answer. (shrink)

A macroscope is proposed and tested here for the discovery of the unique argumentative footprint that characterizes how a collective manages differences and pursues disagreement through argument in a polylogue. The macroscope addresses broader analytic problems posed by various conceptualizations of large-scale argument, such as fields, spheres, communities, and institutions. The design incorporates a two-tier methodology for detecting argument patterns of the arguments performed in arguing by an interactive collective that produces views, or topographies, of the ways that issues are (...) generated in the making and defending of standpoints. The design premises for the macroscope build on insights about argument patterns from pragma-dialectical theory by incorporating research and theory on disagreement management and the Argumentum Model of Topics. The design reconceptualizes prototypical and stereotypical argument patterns for characterizing large-scale argumentation. A prototype of the macroscope is tested on data drawn from six threads about oil-drilling and fracking from the subreddit Changemyview. The implementation suggests the efficacy of the macroscope’s design and potential for identifying what communities make controversial and how the disagreement space in a polylogue is managed through stereotypical argument patterns in terms of claims/premises, inferential relations, and presentational devices. (shrink)

This publication aims to analyze the economic, social, and cultural phenomena that first appeared in the "era of revolutions" that occurred in the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. The modern European trend toward tolerance, which is the basis of current social and cultural changes, including in our country, has specific intellectual grounds. The subject of the study was the ideosphere of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including philosophical, economic, and psychological concepts that gave rise to modern trends in these (...) areas. The result of this study was the determination of the reasons that caused the change of the ideological paradigm in Europe. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that, for the first time, the intellectual foundations of the formation of tolerance as an actual socio-cultural phenomenon are analyzed. This article consistently proves that among the first such grounds, it is possible to determine the emergence of machine production and, as a result, the appearance of a mass person with a culture corresponding to them, performing a compensatory and entertaining function. The most important cultural foundation is mainly the intellectual "background" created by the teachings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud. The ideas of Anglo-American pragmatism played a significant role in forming a new morality, which included the denial of religion and its values, giving it a utilitarian character. During the subsequent historical period and at present, these views have become the basis for the creation of the so-called "individual faith," in which religion ceases to be the guide of human life but only serves the needs of the individual. The desacralization of religion leads to the study of different aspects of sexuality, which opens up the possibility for modern thinking about gender. The concept of "natural law" should also be attributed to the intellectual factors of the formation of modern European tolerance. (shrink)

Coordination is a widely employed term across recent quantitative and qualitative approaches to intersubjectivity, particularly approaches that give embodiment and enaction central explanatory roles. With a focus on linguistic and bodily coordination in conversational contexts, I review the operational meaning of coordination in recent empirical research and related theorizing of embodied intersubjectivity. This discussion articulates what must be involved in treating linguistic meaning as dynamic processes of coordination. The coordination approach presents languaging as a set of dynamic self-organizing processes and (...) actions on multiple timescales and across multiple modalities that come about and work in certain domains (those jointly constructed in social, interactive, high-order sense-making). These processes go beyond meaning at the level that is available to first-person experience. I take one crucial consequence of this to be the ubiquitously moral nature of languaging with others. Languaging coordinates experience, among other levels of behavior and event. Ethical effort is called for by the automatic autonomy-influencing forces of languaging as coordination. (shrink)

How many scientific demonstrations can a single phenomenon have? This paper argues that, according to Aristotle's theory of scientific knowledge as laid out in the Posterior Analytics, a single conclusion may be demonstrated via more than one explanatory middle term. I also argue that this model of multiple demonstration is put into practice in the biological writings. This paper thereby accomplishes two related goals: it clarifies certain relatively obscure passages of the Posterior Analytics and uses them to show how Aristotle (...) explains biological phenomena by reference to both final and material causes in the Parts of Animals. The first part of the paper explains the account of multiple demonstration present in the Posterior Analytics and distinguishes it from another kind of plural explanation rejected by Aristotle. The second part of the paper turns to the biological explanation in the Parts of Animals and shows how Aristotle's account of multiple demonstrations works in practice. The paper thus provides evidence for the claim that the ‘applied’ reasoning on display in the biological works is in harmony with the framework of the logical treatises, and thus may also shed light on questions of the unity of the Aristotelian corpus. (shrink)

A common approach for measuring the effectiveness of an education system or a school is the estimation of the impact that school interventions have on students’ academic performance. However, the latest trends aim to extend the focus beyond students’ acquisition of knowledge and skills, and to consider aspects such as well-being in the academic context. For this reason, the 2015 edition of the international assessment system PISA incorporated a new tool aimed at evaluating the socio-affective variables related to the well-being (...) of students. It is based on a definition focused on the five dimensions proposed in PISA theoretical framework: cognitive, psychological, social, physical and material. The main purpose of this study is to identify the well-being components that significantly affect student academic performance and to estimate the magnitude of school effects on the well-being of students in OECD countries, the school effect being understood as the ability of schools to increase subjective student well-being. To achieve this goal, we analyzed the responses of 234,000 students from thirty-five OECD countries to PISA 2015 questionnaires. Specifically, we considered non-cognitive variables in the questionnaires and student performance in science. The results indicated that the cognitive well-being dimension, composed of enjoyment of science, self-efficacy and instrumental motivation, as well as the test anxiety all had a consistent relationship with student performance across countries. In addition, the school effect, estimated through a two-level hierarchical linear model, in terms of student well-being was systematically low. While the school effect accounted for approximately 25% of the variance in the results for the cognitive dimension, only 5-9% of variance in well-being indicators was attributable to it. This suggests that the influence of school on student welfare is weak, and the effect is similar across countries. The present study contributes to the general discussion currently underway about the definition of well-being and the connection between well-being and achievement. The results highlighted two complementary concerns: there is a clear need to promote socio-emotional education in schools, and it is important to develop a rigorous framework for well-being assessment. The implications of the results and proposals for future studies are discussed. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 45, Issue 11, November 2021.

In this paper, we discuss a proposal for reform in the teaching of Euclidean geometry that reveals the symbiotic relationship between axiomatics and pedagogy. We examine the role of intuition in this kind of reform, as expressed by Mario Pieri, a prominent member of the Schools of Peano and Segre at the University of Turin. We are well aware of the centuries of attention paid to the notion of intuition by mathematicians, mathematics educators, philosophers, psychologists, historians, and others. To set (...) a context for Pieri’s proposal, we only seek to open a small window on views of the pedagogical role of intuition, from primary education to university study that may have informed early 20th century efforts to improve the teaching of geometry at the secondary school level. Pieri addressed the topic of intuition in many of his axiomatizations, including those in projective geometry which was his main area of concentration in foundations. We focus here primarily on his axiom systems for elementary geometry, which embraced the transformational approach of Felix Klein’s vision for the subject. Our goal is to convey Pieri’s thoughts on how to integrate two types of intuition, denoted as sensible and rational, in his endeavors to improve the teaching of the geometry of Euclid. We show how Pieri’s views on geometric intuition and pedagogical reform were either ignored or misrepresented in several notable publications at the turn of the 20th century. In particular, we give Pieri a voice in response to specific comments made in the early 1900s by Federigo Enriques, Ugo Amaldi, and Florian Cajori in widely circulated publications inspired by Klein. (shrink)

Emotional facial expression are an important communication channel between artificial characters and their users. Humans are trained to perceive emotions. Robots and virtual agents can use them to make their inner states transparent. Literature reported that some emotional types, such as anger, are perceived as being more intense than others. Other studies indicated that gender influences the perception. Our study shows that once the individual differences amongst participants are included in the statistical analysis, then the emotion type has no further (...) explanatory power. Artificial characters therefore should adapt to their specific users. (shrink)

Prompted by our commentators, we take this response as an opportunity to clarify the premises, attitudes, and methods of our enactive approach to human languaging. We high-light the need to recognize that any investigation, particularly one into language, is always a concretely situated and self-grounding activity; our attitude as researchers is one of knowing as engagement with our subject matter. Our task, formulating the missing categories that can bridge embodied cognitive science with language research, requires avoiding premature abstractions and clarifying (...) the multiple circularities at play. Our chosen method is dialectical, which has prompted several interesting observations that we respond to, particularly with respect to what this method means for enactive epistemology and ontology. We also clarify the important question of how best to conceive of the variety of social skills we progressively identify with our method and are at play in human languaging. Are these skills socially constituted or just socially learned? The difference, again, leads to a clarification that acts, skills, actors, and interactions are to be conceived as co-emerging categories. We illustrate some of these points with a discussion of an example of aspects of the model at play in a study of gift giving in China.Keywords: Enactive epistemology, Enactive ontology, Dialectics, languaging, Shared know-how. (shrink)

The use of algorithmic prediction in insurance is regarded as the beginning of a new era, because it promises to personalise insurance policies and premiums on the basis of individual behaviour and level of risk. The core idea is that the price of the policy would no longer refer to the calculated uncertainty of a pool of policyholders, with the consequence that everyone would have to pay only for her real exposure to risk. For insurance, however, uncertainty is not only (...) a problem – shared uncertainty is a resource. The availability of individual risk information could undermine the principle of risk-pooling and risk-spreading on which insurance is based. The article examines this disruptive change first by exploring the possible consequences of the use of predictive algorithms to set insurance premiums. Will it endanger the principle of mutualisation of risks, producing new forms of discrimination and exclusion from coverage? In a second step, we analyse how the relationship between the insurer and the policyholder changes when the customer knows that the company has voluminous, and continuously updated, data about her real behaviour. (shrink)

The paper argues in favour of a direct realist reading of Aquinas’s theory of intelligible species, in opposition to the recent representationalist challenges. In order to secure the direct realist reading, the paper follows three steps: a short description of Aquinas’s process of cognition, a survey of the direct realist arguments and the analysis of the representationalist interpretation. The final step consists of investigating the representationalist reading as it is suggested by two scholars, Claude Panaccio in Aquinas on Intellectual Representation (...) and Robert Pasnau in Theories of Cognition in the Latter Middle Ages. Thus, the paper can be construed as a reply to these two authors, due to the thorough attention paid to their argumentative trails. With regard to Panaccio’s reading the paper focuses on the identity between the intelligible species and the essence of the extra-mental object and argues that Panaccio understands identity in a very narrow sense. Concerning Pasnau’s line of reasoning the focus is on the primum cognitum status of the intelligible species, and the main argument is that intelligible species is understood by Aquinas as the quo and not the quod of cognition. As the paper shows, neither one, nor the other interpretation poses a threat to the direct realist reading of Aquinas’s intelligible species. (shrink)

Fictions feature prominently in several of Hume’s important arguments about the external world. For example, Hume is clear that there would be no belief in the continued existence of objects, were it not for the fictions that are causally responsible for effecting this belief. Interpreters of Hume on the topic of fiction generally argue that the formation of fiction requires the possession of general ideas and the use of language. Drawing upon recent attempts in the literature to advance this claim, (...) I offer reasons for why this general approach is undesirable. By examining Hume’s comments on the capabilities of children, this paper advances a novel approach to the topic of fictions in Hume’s philosophy that separates the matter of fiction formation from the use of language, arguing instead that it is not the use of language that establishes fictions; fictions exert their influence upon the mind before the use of language becomes available to us. (shrink)

Following a usage-based approach to language acquisition, lexically specific patterns are considered to be important building blocks for language productivity and feature heavily both in child-directed speech and in the early speech of children (Arnon, Inbal & Morten H. Christiansen. 2017. The role of multiword building blocks in explaining L1-L2 differences. Topics in Cognitive Science 9(3). 621–636; Tomasello, Michael. 2003. Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press). In order to account for patterns, the traceback (...) method has been widely applied in research on first language acquisition to test the hypothesis that children’s utterances can be accounted for on the basis of a limited inventory of chunks and partially schematic units (Lieven, Elena, Dorothé Salomo & Michael Tomasello. 2009. Two-year-old children’s production of multiword utterances: A usage-based analysis. Cognitive Linguistics 20(3). 481–508). In the current study, we applied the method to code-mixed utterances (n = 1,506) of three German-English bilingual children between 2 and 4 years of age to investigate individual differences in each child’s own inventory of patterns in relation to their input settings. It was shown that units such as I see X as in I see a Kelle ‘I see a trowel’ could be traced back to the child’s own previous productions. More importantly, we see that each child’s inventory of constructions draws heavily on multiword chunks that are strongly dependent on the children’s language input situations. (shrink)

In our contemporary age, where a combination of individualism and mutual distrust is unhappily common among people and society is “liquid” and disoriented, so-called intermediate units are a precious resource that promotes positive coexistence within organizations and in local communities, too. The present contribution describes an example of such an intermediate unit, the Talent Club, located in a peripheral neighborhood of a metropolitan area in northern Italy. This case study shows the development of positive living and working together in organizations (...) and their transformation in the tool for community development and good coexistence. Qualitative and quantitative data show that the relational aspect is crucial because it promotes authentic exchange among people, supporting participation and social cohesion against self-referential habits and isolation. Although at present the Talent Club is mostly functioning in a affiliating coexistence among members, seeds of a more generativ... (shrink)

Language used to describe measles in the press has altered significantly over the last sixty years, a shift that reflects changing perceptions of the disease within the medical community as well as broader changes in public health discourse. California, one of the most populous U.S. states and seat of the 2015 measles outbreak originating at Disneyland, presents an opportunity for observing these changes. This article offers a longitudinal case study of five decades of measles news coverage by the Los Angeles (...) Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, which represented two of the largest news markets in California when the measles vaccine was released, in 1963, and during the 2015 outbreak. Measles reporting during this period displays patterns pointing to an active role for journalists in shaping public understanding of health and medical matters, especially as they recede from public memory, through the employment of available and circulating political and cultural frames. Moreover, journalistic frames in this period of reporting incorporated presentist descriptions of the disease, which imposed present values on the medical past, and which were constructed of decontextualized historical references that supported prevailing contemporary notions of the disease. Framing and the tendency toward presentism, in the context of shifting public health discourse, had the effect of communicating an increasingly severe sounding disease over time, and of shifting blame for that disease’s spread from nature to government to individuals. Journalistic framing and causal stories have much power to shape public understanding of medical matters as they recede from public memory. (shrink)

Despite the increasing concern for the issue of respect for persons displayed over the last decades by political philosophers, human-right thinkers, social and ethical theorists, a comprehensive treatment of the problem at stake from a historical-philosophical perspective is conspicuously absent. The present collection of essays aims to contribute to the fulfillment of this gap by offering a reconstruction of the seminal passages in the history of philosophy which testify to the evolution of the idea of respect for persons and the (...) rich array of conceptual specifications that such an idea acquires across the centuries. By analysis of pivotal texts of ancient and modern contemporary philosophy, the volume will try to offer an articulated account of respect which, starting from its primeval connection with the search for esteem and the pursuit of human excellence, gradually evolves towards the recognition of the political status of each citizen and culminates into a true politics of human rights. Bringing together the expertise of classicists and scholars specialized in modern and contemporary philosophy, the volume is especially intended for scholars working in the fields of the history of philosophy, ethical and political theory. (shrink)