AimThe Coronavirus 2019 pandemic represents one of the most catastrophic events of recent times. Due to the hospitals’ emergency situation, the population of healthcare workers was the most affected. Healthcare workers who were exposed to COVID-19 patients are most likely to develop psychological distress and post-traumatic stress disorder. The present study aimed at investigating PTSD in a sample of Italian healthcare workers during this outbreak and to evaluate the effectiveness of the Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy with this population.MethodsA (...) total of 744 healthcare workers were included. 587 healthcare workers were treated with EMDR, while the other 157 were not treated. Participants were asked to provide sociodemographic information; the post-traumatic symptomatology was evaluated through Impact of Event Scale-Revised and to investigate the level of intensity of emotional activation was used The Emotion Thermometer at two time points.ResultsThe results obtained between EMDR treatment and non-EMDR treatment were evaluated on only 2 hospitals. Treatment group n = 68 vs. waitlist non-treatment group n = 157. All scores pre- and post-EMDR decreased significantly showing an evident effect of EMDR. The differences between pre- and post-treatment of the IES-R scores of subjects in which EMDR was performed as compared to the scores pre- and post-12 weeks of waiting list subjects in which it was not performed were significantly different.LimitationThe emergency situation did not provide an opportunity to explore further aspects that would have been important for research. One limitation is the use and analysis of only two standardized tests. In addition, other psychopathologies were not investigated as outcome measures. A limitation is the comparison of subjects treated online and de visu. Although the protocol used was the same, the mode of intervention may have influenced the results. In addition, the effectiveness of EMDR treatment was only evaluated at two time points with no possibility of follow-up and the lack of a control group.Discussion/conclusionThe findings of the present study suggest that healthcare workers were at high risk of developing PTSD when confronted with COVID-19 outbreak and suggest the importance of psychological support during this humanitarian emergency. (shrink)

1. Le fe por la palabra -- 2. Topía y Utopía -- 3. Luz en la caverna.

The thin red line theory is a form of branching indeterminism. It entails that, among the many possible developments that reality might take, one is privileged: the actual history. The thin red line theory is naturally paired off with a semantic thesis that may be called ‘the actuality principle’: a statement is true as used at a moment if and only if it is true at that moment on the actual history. The actuality principle has been challenged, for it would (...) be wrong about several counterfactual reasonings. On the one hand, the actuality principle should entail that any statement uttered at a merely possible moment is untrue. On the other hand, the actuality principle should be at odds with the way we use subjunctive conditionals. This paper argues that both objections rely on an inadequate understanding of the notion of the history of use. As for the first objection, the paper argues that to assume the actuality principle amounts to taking the actual history as the history of use. As a consequence, one cannot consistently take the actual history as the history of use and, at the same time, a merely possible moment as the moment of use. As for the second objection, the paper shows that the actuality principle is consistent with any reasonable treatment of subjunctive conditionals. (shrink)

Em 1630 Descartes declarou que os seus estudos estavam voltados para o estabelecimento dos fundamentos do conhecimento. Várias questões discutidas nas cartas são significativas, mas uma em particular é de grande importância para a compreensão da sua filosofia, a saber, a afirmação do fundamento metafísico das verdades eternas.

Neste artigo pretendo apresentar uma interpretação do sentido que Espinosa atribuiu ao conceito de “vontade”. Mostrar como ele se afastou da concepção que a tradição tinha desse conceito, e qual é o papel que o mesmo desempenha nas deduções geométricas empregadas em suas demonstrações. Por fim, levando em consideração os dois primeiros livros da sua Ética, pretendo esclarecer em que medida o conceito de “vontade” tornou possível tanto a demonstração do conhecimento quanto da liberdade.

Open futurism is the indeterministic position according to which the future is ‘open’, i.e., there is now no fact of the matter as to what future contingent events will actually obtain. Many open futurists hold a branching conception of time, in which a variety of possible futures exist. This paper introduces two challenges to branching-time open futurism, which are similar in spirit to a challenge posed by Fine to tense realism. The paper argues that, to address the new challenges, open (...) futurists must adopt an objective, non-perspectival notion of actuality and subscribe to an A-theoretic, dynamic conception of reality. Moreover, given a natural understanding of “actual future”, it is perfectly sensible for open futurists to hold that a unique, objectively actual future exists, contrary to a common assumption in the current debate. The paper also contends that recognising the existence of a unique actual future helps open futurists to avoid potential misconceptions. (shrink)

RESUMEN:El presente artículo tiene como objetivo principal el análisis de los estudios de Platón sobre la lengua en su diálogo «Crátilo”. Se interpreta la posición del filósofo, según la cual, si la lengua se aplica sin alteraciones, las palabras explican el contenido de las cosas de una manera correcta y adecuada. Partimos de la idea de que la metodología de Platón, respecto a la interpretación de la palabra, puede aplicarse para analizar la conciencia actual de la gente que vive una (...) crisis de los valores éticos tradicionales.PALABRAS CLAVE:LENGUA, DISCURSO, NOMBRE, SIGNIFICADO, FALSEDAD,CONCIENCIA, EXISTENCIA.ABSTRACT:The article discusses Plato’s theory of language, in the form as it is presented in the Cratylus dialogue. The article elaborates on Plato’s idea that words designate the nature of things they name if the language is used in the correct way. The authors suppose that Plato’s methodology of the interpretation of words can be applied for analyzing self-consciousness of modern man who lives in the era when the traditional ethical values are in crisis.KEYWORDS:LANGUAGE, DISCOURSE, IDEA, NAME, FALSE, CONSCIOUSNESS, EXISTENCE. (shrink)

Para el autor de este artículo, el rechazo kantiano de la identificación de su concepto de a priori con la noción leibniciana de lo innato solo puede comprenderse de manera clara y precisa, si recurrimos a la concepción kantiana de la epigénesis como modelo epistemológico; es decir, si consideramos las facultades cognitivas como fuerzas formativas que se componen con otras fuerzas de la naturaleza para hacer posible la adquisición originaria de intuiciones y conceptos a priori.

Some important ideas in Kelsen's Pure Theory of Law can be traced back to Kantian tradition, which has been very influential in Kelsen's thought, particularly in his early period. Among them we find the distinction between two radically different worlds (the world of facts and the world of norms), the normativity of legal science and the idea of validity as a binding force, based on the famous doctrine of the basic norm. These tenets and, especially, the use of a normative (...) concept of validity prove to be incompatible with Kelsen's positivistic programme of a value‐free legal science. The science of law cannot state that legal norms are obligatory or binding without trespassing the limits of Kelsen's ideal of a legal science; on the other hand, it is possible to define the concept of a legal system without resorting to the basic norm. So, if Kelsen is to be regarded as a consequent positivist, the Kantian ingredients of his theory must be rejected and the descriptive concept of validity as membership must be substituted for the normative notion of validity as a binding force. (shrink)

In this work I argue that Descartes was not a trialist by showing that the main tenets of trialist interpretations of Descartes's theory of substance are either not supported by the text or are not sufficient for establishing the trialist interpretation.

Norms conferring public or private powers, i.e., the competence to issue other norms, play a very important rôle in law. But there is no agreement among legal philosophers about the nature of such norms. There are two main groups of theories, those that regard them as a kind of norms of conduct (either commands or permissions) and those that regard them as non-reducible to other types of norms. I try to show that reductionist theories are not quite acceptable; neither the (...) command-variety (Kelsen, Alf Ross inOn Law and Justice), nor the permission-variety (von Wright, Kanger, Lindahl) provide a satisfactory account of competence norms.Among the authors who maintain that competence norms are different from (and hence not reducible to) norms of conduct are Hart, Ross inDirectives and Norms, and Searle. Ross and Searle distinguish between regulative and constitutive rules as two radically different kinds of rules and classify competence norms among constitutive rules. This distinction runs parallel to von Wright's distinction between rules that are prescriptions and determinative rules. While the first regulate actions (by commanding, prohibiting, or permitting them), determinative rules define certain concepts. To view competence norms as (partial) definitions of certain legal concepts (like those of legislator, judge, etc.) seems to open interesting perspectives and to shed light on at least one aspect of these elusive norms. (shrink)

In this article, I report on a Bulgarian female migrant caregiver's “life-story,” especially focusing on her relationship with an old Italian woman, on the care practices performed in her favor in Italy, and on her daughter and parents still living in Bulgaria. I chose to do it by means of an anthropological approach based on experience as field of mediation between personal dimensions and historical and social processes and therefore centered on the body conceived as historical product, the influence of (...) political and social forces on shaping human lives, and finally interest in the specific link between bodies and work. From this analysis, based on language and narratives, I think useful cultural aspects may emerge about “gender” and care practices, regarding the two women linked by an assistance relationship, and the activities/strategies used by the Bulgarian caregiver to fulfill her family obligations. (shrink)

Safety-critical systems manufacturers have the duty of care, i.e., they should take correct steps while performing acts that could foreseeably harm others. Commonly, industry standards prescribe reasonable steps in their process requirements, which regulatory bodies trust. Manufacturers perform careful documentation of compliance with each requirement to show that they act under acceptable criteria. To facilitate this task, a safety-centered planning-time framework, called ACCEPT, has been proposed. Based on compliance-by-design, ACCEPT capabilities permit to design Compliance-aware Engineering Process Plans, which are able (...) to show the planning-time allocation of standard demands, i.e., if the elements set down by the standard requirements are present at given points in the engineering process plan. In this paper, we perform a case study to understand if the ACCEPT produced models could support the planning of space software engineering processes. Space software is safety and mission-critical, and it is often the result of industrial cooperation. Such cooperation is coordinated through compliance with relevant standards. In the European context, ECSS-E-ST-40C is the de-facto standard for space software production. The planning of processes in compliance with project-specific ECSS-E-ST-40C applicable requirements is mandatory during contractual agreements. Our analysis is based on qualitative criteria targeting the effort dictated by task demands required to create a CaEPP for software development with ACCEPT. Initial observations show that the effort required to model compliance and processes artifacts is significant. However, such an effort pays off in the long term since models are, to some extend, reusable and flexible. The coverage level of the models is also analyzed based on design decisions. In our opinion, such a level is adequate since it responds to the information needs required by the ECSS-E-ST-40C framework. (shrink)

Heracles carece de un programa estructurado que incluya muchas de sus aventuras. Este patrón podría originarse en el hecho de que hasta 21 de sus enemigos son descendientes del agua de mar en todas sus manifestaciones mitológicas: Poseidón, Ponto, Forcis, Ceto. Esta revisión se puede comparar con el papel cosmológico de Ninurta y Marduk en la mitología mesopotámica que lucha contra Tiamat y algunos de sus actos y escenarios. Se puede comprobar que Heracles realiza gran parte de sus trabajos: controla (...) montañas y manantiales de agua dulce, organiza cursos de ríos abriendo gargantas o construyendo canales, limpia las desembocaduras y la costa. Heracles sería un buen hijo del dios de la lluvia. (shrink)

Eugenio Bulygin is a distinguished representative of legal science and legal philosophy as they are known on the European continent - no accident, given the role of the civil law tradition in his home country, Argentina. Over the past half-century, Bulygin has engaged virtually all major legal philosophers in the English-speaking countries, including H.L.A. Hart, Ronald Dworkin, and Joseph Raz. Bulygin's essays, several written together with his eminent colleague and close friend Carlos E. Alchourrón, reflect the genre familiar from (...) Alf Ross's On Law and Justice, Hans Kelsen's Pure Theory of Law, and Georg Henrik von Wright's Norm and Action. Bulygin's wide-ranging interests include most of the topics found under the rubric of analytical jurisprudence - interpretation and judicial reasoning, validity and efficacy of law, legal positivism and the problem of normativity, completeness and consistency of the legal system, the nature of legal norms, and the role of deontic logic in the law. The reader will take delight in the often agreeably unorthodox character of Bulygin's views and in his hard-hitting arguments in defence of them. He challenges the received opinion on gaps in the law, on legal efficacy, on permissory norms, and on the criteria for legal validity. Bulygin's essays have been wellnigh inaccessible in the past, appearing in specialized journals, often in Spanish or German. They are now available for the first time in an English-language collection. (shrink)

We intended to present in this work an approximation between Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy and Hume’s. Firstly we will show that Deleuze, in his reading of Hume, emphasizes empiricism’s importance for philosophy, though an empiricism distinct from the one offer by the philosophical tradition. We will further intend to show that these two authors share a common set of perspectives, namely, that thinking happens in response to an event, that “relation” is the instance that prompts thinking, and that the latter presents (...) himself as an experience. (shrink)

This paper reports a psychological study of human categorization that looked at the procedures used by expert scientists when dealing with puzzling items. Five professional botanists were asked to specify a category from a set of positive and negative instances. The target category in the study was defined by a feature that was unusual, hence situations of uncertainty and puzzlement were generated. Subjects were asked to think aloud while solving the tasks, and their verbal reports were analyzed. A number of (...) problem solving strategies were identified, and subsequently integrated in a model of knowledge‐guided inductive categorization. Our model proposes that expert knowledge influences the subjects' reasoning in more complex ways than suggested by earlier investigations of scientific reasoning. As in previous studies, domain knowledge influenced our subjects' hypothesis generation and testing; but, additionally, it played a central role when subjects revised their hypotheses. (shrink)

In the last decades, research in science mapping has delivered several powerful techniques, based on citation or textual analysis, for charting the intellectual organization of research fields. To map the social network underlying science and scholarship, by contrast, science mapping has mainly relied on one method, co-authorship analysis. This method, however, suffers from well-known limitations related to the practice of authorship. Moreover, it does not perform well on those fields where multi-authored publications are rare. In this study, a new method (...) for mapping the social structure of research fields is advanced, based on the analysis of the acknowledgments of academic publications. We first discuss the standard account of the function of acknowledgments in scholarly communication, then we introduce a new interpretative framework in which the acknowledgments are intended as positioning signals exchanged by researchers. Next, we provide the formal definition of the four acknowledgments-based networks that stand at the core of the method, and we test it on a humanities field, analytic philosophy. Results show that acknowledgement-based networks allow to reconstruct the fine-grained social structure of analytic philosophy from different perspectives. Furthermore, by comparing the citation-based maps of the field with the acknowledgments-based networks, it permits to shed light on the relationship between the intellectual and social layer of analytic philosophy. We conclude by presenting practical limitations of the method and by sketching some further research lines. (shrink)

In 1911 the Wilson cloud chamber opened new possibilities for physics pedagogy. The instrument, which visualized particles’ tracks as trails of condensed vapour, was adopted by physicists to pursue frontier research on the Compton effect, the positron and the transmutation of atomic nuclei. But as the present paper will show, Wilson's instrument did not just open up new research opportunities, but the possibility of developing a different kind of teaching. Equipped with a powerful visualization tool, some physicists–teachers employed Wilson's instrument (...) to introduce their students to a wide range of phenomena and concepts, ranging from the behaviour of clouds to Einstein's photon, the wave–particle duality and the understanding of the nucleus. This paper uses the notes, books and prototypes of these pioneering physicists–teachers to compose a pedagogical history of the Wilson cloud chamber, documenting an episode of immense ingenuity, creativity and scientific imagination. (shrink)

Principi filosòfic fonamental utilitzat com a principi metodològic per explicar problemes ètics, antropològics, polítics, estètics i metafísics.

In this case, it is clear that the author feels that she has been treated badly by quite a few doctors throughout her life. At first read, the locus of her concern is perhaps a bit less clear. After all, many of her concerns seem to center around uses of humor in which she was not the butt of the joke. Indeed, she was included in the inner circle, treated as a confidant, by her doctors. From the perspective of someone (...) accustomed to being in the inner circle, it may not be immediately obvious why the attempts at humor failed. After all, isn’t humor meant to be a good way to help patients relax? Isn’t it a good way to bond with patients and to make them more comfortable? As Berger (2004) notes “humor offers modes of intimate communication through which these objectives can be achieved. Physicians’ use of quiet, respectful humor may provide patients with the “social license” to enter personal or sensitive content areas” (p. 827). If humor, or joking, is an effective tool in establishing channels of communication, then how or why did it go wrong here? The answer, in brief, is that not all humor is created equal. -/- Before going any further, we should acknowledge a few things. First, in this case the only form of humor that is on offer is joking, but humor is not limited to jokes. Usually, when we refer to humor broadly, as in the quotation above, the point can be taken to apply to jokes. However, if we refer specifically to jokes or joking the point may not apply to humor more broadly. This is so even if the jokes are meant to be humorous. Care should be taken lest we generalize in haste. Second, not all jokes are humorous, nor are all jokes intended to be humorous. Finally, much of what we will consider here—the purpose of joking, the orientation of care, the consideration of content—will be generally applicable to other forms of communication and, mutadis mutandis, should not be restricted to joking and humor. (shrink)

Conventional quantitative methods for the measurement of organizational legitimacy consider mainly three sources that make judgments about organizations visible: news media, accreditation bodies, and surveys. Over the last decade, however, social media have enabled ordinary citizens to bypass the gatekeeping function of these institutional evaluators and autonomously make individual judgments public. This inclusion of voices beyond functional and formally organized stakeholder groups potentially pluralizes the ongoing discussions about organizations. The individual judgments in blogs, tweets, and Facebook posts give indication about (...) the broader fit between an organization’s perceived behavior and heterogeneous social norms and therefore constitute an indicator of organizational legitimacy that can be accessed and measured. We propose the use of social media data and sentiment analysis to study the affect-based responses to organizational actions by citizens. We critically discuss and compare the method with existing quantitative methods for legitimacy measurement and apply them to a recent case in the banking industry. We discuss the value of the method for studying the process of legitimacy construction as the expression and negotiation of normative judgments about organizations by various evaluators. (shrink)

Decidability of monadic first-order classical logic was established by Löwenheim in 1915. The proof made use of a semantic argument and a purely syntactic proof has never been provided. In the present paper we introduce a syntactic proof of decidability of monadic first-order logic in innex normal form which exploits G3-style sequent calculi. In particular, we introduce a cut- and contraction-free calculus having a (complexity-optimal) terminating proof-search procedure. We also show that this logic can be faithfully embedded in the modal (...) logic T. (shrink)

We present a general approach to quantified modal logics that can simulate most other approaches. The language is based on operators indexed by terms which allow to express de re modalities and to control the interaction of modalities with the first-order machinery and with non-rigid designators. The semantics is based on a primitive counterpart relation holding between n-tuples of objects inhabiting possible worlds. This allows an object to be represented by one, many, or no object in an accessible world. Moreover (...) by taking as primitive a relation between n-tuples we avoid some shortcoming of standard individual counterparts. Finally, we use cut-free labelled sequent calculi to give a proof-theoretic characterisation of the quantified extensions of each first-order definable propositional modal logic. In this way we show how to complete many axiomatically incomplete quantified modal logics. (shrink)

Em “O Mito do Conhecimento”, Laurence BonJour defende a tese de que a concepção “falibilista” de conhecimento, assumida de modo preponderante pelos epistemólogos na era pós-Gettier, “está errada”, pois tal concepção “fraca” de conhecimento proporciona pouca satisfação da perspectiva filosófica e é inexistente no âmbito do senso comum, constituindo tão-somente um “mito filosófico”.

Em “O Mito do Conhecimento”, Laurence BonJour defende a tese de que a concepção “falibilista” de conhecimento, assumida de modo preponderante pelos epistemólogos na era pós-Gettier, “está errada”, pois tal concepção “fraca” de conhecimento proporciona pouca satisfação da perspectiva filosófica e é inexistente no âmbito do senso comum, constituindo tão-somente um “mito filosófico”.

Introduzione Nel codice della sua Bibliotheca consacrato a recensire la produzione letteraria di Temistio, il patriarca Fozio testimonia di aver letto – oltre ad alcune opere filosofiche – un corpus di trentasei discorsi politici (λόγοι πολιτιϰοιλς), tra cui alcuni indirizzati a Costanzo, a Valente e Valentiniano II, a Teodosio, non tutti pervenuti. Ora, l'opera oratoria di Temistio, quale noi moderni leggiamo, comprende trentatrè orazioni, pubbliche e private, di cui due (o forse tre) incomplete. È molto probabile che gli altri tre (...) discorsi che Fozio ugualmente leggeva siano da identificare con orazioni perdute, di cui sopravvivono talune notizie: il discorso recitato nel 357 dinanzi al senato di Costantinopoli in occasione di un'ambasceria a Roma, il panegirico indirizzato nel 363 all'imperatore Giuliano per il suo quarto consolato e l'orazione sulla tolleranza religiosa indirizzata a Valente tra gli anni 375–376. Verrebbe, in questo modo, confermata la notizia della Bibliotheca circa l'esistenza di un corpus di complessivi trentasei discorsi ed in particolare rafforzata l'ipotesi, ventilata da taluni studiosi, secondo cui la silloge temistiana in nostro possesso corrisponderebbe in buona sostanza al ‘libro’ recensito da Fozio. (shrink)