The COVID-19 pandemic and its related restrictions significantly impacted individuals' health, wellbeing, and security. Isolation, limitation of movement, social distancing, and forced cohabiting have had a strong influence on all areas of people's lives as well as on their sexuality. Investigating how the COVID-19 outbreak and its consequences impacted people's sexuality was the primary aim of this review. Particularly, we focused on: the variables associated with the improvement or the deterioration of individuals' and couples' lives during the pandemic; the use (...) of sex as a coping strategy; the impact of COVID-19 outbreak on LGBT people. Results have shown that the worsening of sexual life seems to be related to couples' conflict, emotions and psychological difficulties, being female, being single or away from the partner, being a health care worker, and having children. Moreover, a detrimental effect on sexuality was associated with stress, forced cohabitation, routine, anxiety and worry about the job and the pandemic, feeling partner distance, being unhappy with their partner, and lack of privacy. On the other hand, improvements in sexuality were associated with living happily with a partner, being happy and satisfied with a partner, feeling less stressed and more bored, having more free time, having fewer recreation opportunities, and having minor workload. During the pandemic, there was an increase in using sex toys, pornography consumption, masturbating, and trying sexual experimentations. Among LGBT people, an increase was found in the number of casual sexual partners potentially due to the perceived lower likelihood of transmission through sex. Moreover, the increase in sexual activity may have represented a coping strategy to quarantine-related distress. (shrink)

The article presents a series of urban regeneration programmes carried out in the Lazio Region from 2011 to 2016, and financed by the resources of the cohesion policy 2007–2013. It covers: programme background, experience of the Municipality of Aprilia analysed in its most relevant details, some reflections concerning opportunities and limits of the programme, and some key elements to be developed in future research.

Objective. Tako-Tsubo syndrome (TTS) is historically related to the occurrence of psychological (emotional) factors (“broken heart” syndrome). Our aim was conducting a systematic review analyzing the role of psychological factors in TTS. Methods: All studies on TTS and psychological factors from 1991 to April 2019 were scrutinized according to the Cochrane Collaboration and the PRISMA statement. Selected studies were additionally evaluated for the Risk of Bias according to the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale (NOS). Results. Fifteen case-control studies (Mayo Clinic criteria) were finally (...) selected. Most studies analysed the role of stressful life-events or trauma, although with conflicting findings, while a likely role for long-lasting psychological distress seems to be a homogenous result. Among life-time psychopathology, only anxiety seems to have a significant role. Some studies outlined a likely role for personality, but findings are conflicting. Conclusion. A role for psychological factors in TTS requires more studies with stronger research methodology than the existing ones. (shrink)

Starting from the recent quest to investigate the human side of organizational sustainability, this study applies a variety of regression analyses to investigate the effects of Lean Operations, High Involvement Work Practices, and management behaviors on occupational safety. It tests and finds support for the hypotheses that Lean Production systems, High Involvement Work Practices, and two specific management behaviors—workers’ capability development and empowerment —positively affect occupational safety. Furthermore, empowering behaviors positively moderate the effect of Lean Operations on workers’ safety. The (...) study bridges sustainable operations literature with theories related to the ethical side of safety management, sustainable HRM, ethical leadership, and empowerment. In doing so, it contributes to the understanding of occupational safety as constitutive aspect of organizational sustainability. (shrink)

Starting from the recent quest to investigate the human side of organizational sustainability, this study applies a variety of regression analyses to investigate the effects of Lean Operations, High Involvement Work Practices, and management behaviors on occupational safety. It tests and finds support for the hypotheses that Lean Production systems, High Involvement Work Practices, and two specific management behaviors—workers’ capability development and empowerment —positively affect occupational safety. Furthermore, empowering behaviors positively moderate the effect of Lean Operations on workers’ safety. The (...) study bridges sustainable operations literature with theories related to the ethical side of safety management, sustainable HRM, ethical leadership, and empowerment. In doing so, it contributes to the understanding of occupational safety as constitutive aspect of organizational sustainability. (shrink)

Background: Undergraduate nursing students have been documented to experience ethical distress during their clinical training and felt poorly supported in discussing the ethical issues they encountered. Research aims: This study was aimed at exploring nursing students’ perceived opportunity to discuss ethical issues that emerged during their clinical learning experience and associated factors. Research design: An Italian national cross-sectional study design was performed in 2015–2016. Participants were invited to answer a questionnaire composed of four sections regarding: socio-demographic data, previous clinical learning (...) experiences, current clinical learning experience quality and outcomes, and the opportunity to discuss ethical issues with nurses in the last clinical learning experience. Participants and research context: Participants were 9607 undergraduate nursing students who were attending 95 different three-year Italian baccalaureate nursing programmes, located at 27 universities in 15 Italian regions. Ethical considerations: This study was conducted in accordance with the Human Subject Research Ethics Committee guidelines after the research protocol was approved by an ethics committee. Findings: Overall, 4707 perceived to have discussed ethical issues ‘much’ or ‘very much’; among the remaining, 3683 and 1217 students reported the perception of having discussed, respectively, ‘enough’ or ‘never’ ethical issues emerged in the clinical practice. At the multivariate logistic regression analysis explaining 38.1% of the overall variance, the factors promoting ethical discussion were mainly set at the clinical learning environment levels. In contrast, being male was associated with a perception of less opportunity to discuss ethical issues. Conclusion: Nursing faculties should assess the clinical environment prerequisites of the settings as a context of student experience before deciding on their accreditation. Moreover, the nursing faculty and nurse managers should also enhance competence with regard to discussing ethical issues with students among clinical nurses by identifying factors that hinder this learning opportunity in daily practice. (shrink)

This book systematically addresses the issue of assessing the normative nature of visions of emerging technologies in an epistemologically robust way. In the context of democratic governance of emerging technologies, not only it is important to reflect on technologies' moral significance, but also to address their emerging and future oriented character. The book proposes an original approach to deal with the issue of "plausible" ethical evaluation of new technologies. Taking its start from current debates about Technology Assessment, the proposed solution (...) emerges as a combination of theoretical and methodological insights from the fields of Philosophy of Technology, Science and Technology Studies and a normative justification based on pragmatist ethics. The book's main contribution is to engage a diverse and interdisciplinary audience (ethicists, philosophers, social scientists, technology assessment researchers and practitioners) in a reflection concerning the epistemological challenges that are associated to the endeavour of appraising the moral significance of emerging technologies in the attempt of democratically governing them. It brings together concepts and methodologies from different disciplines and shows their synergy in applying them to two specific case studies of emerging biomedical technologies. (shrink)

Despite the invaluable role that women play in the peacebuilding process, statistics still show this as a male-dominated field. Since media narratives have the power to frame reality providing the public with preferred lenses to understand it, this study asks, How do media narratives frame the role of Afghan women in conflict resolution? To address this question, we combine Frame Theory (Entman, R. M. (1993). Framing: Toward clarification of a fractured paradigm. Journal of Communication, 43(4), 51–58) and Critical Discourse Analysis (...) (van Dijk, T. A. (2015). Critical discourse analysis. In D. Tannen, H. E. Hamilton, & D. Schiffrin (Eds.), The handbook of discourse analysis (pp. 466–485). Wiley Blackwell) to explore media narratives before and after the Taliban came into power in August 2021. The samples include 32 articles published between 2018 and 2022 on different sources ranging from traditional news outlets to magazines, newsrooms, intergovernmental organizations, and think tanks. Findings show that media narratives perpetuate unfair gendered expectations, failing to effectively render the irreplaceable role of women in peacebuilding. Frames confirm the double bind of hegemonic femininity (Schneiker, A. (2021). The UN and women's marginalization in peace negotiations. International Affairs, 97(4), 1165–1182) as women are subject to different expectations – the exception presents them as courageous, yet the norm frames them as being too vulnerable and without a voice. (shrink)

Beatrice Erskine Lane Suzuki (1878–1939) is mainly known for being the wife of D.T. Suzuki鈴木大拙 (1870–1966), the Japanese religious studies scholar and intellectual who promoted the popularization of Buddhism in the Western world. However, she was also an active researcher and prolific writer in the same field, boasting deep theoretical and practical knowledge of the subject and an original, brilliant interpretative style. Her research led her to appreciate and assimilate cultural values quite different from those of her Scottish and American (...) background influenced by Catholicism. The fact that she left her homeland to research an entirely different culture was what she had in common with Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965), her contemporary and eclectic intellectual and philosopher who left Alsace to engage in religious and anthropological studies in Africa. Although she dedicated numerous enthusiastic reflections to Schweitzer in her writings, those refuting Schweitzer's theories assume great relevance. In his comparison between Western and Eastern spirituality, Schweitzer fiercely attacked the latter, expressing the absolute superiority of the Christian doctrine, which he fervently supported. Lane, on the contrary, was strongly fascinated by Buddhism, and found in it a source of faith and a creed to live by. This article aims to retrace the analysis made by both authors to outline their different perspectives, despite their shared cultural background. (shrink)

Manipulationism holds that information about the results of interventions is of utmost importance for scientific practices such as causal assessment or explanation. Specifically, manipulation provides information about the stability, or invariance, of the relationship between X and Y: were we to wiggle the cause X, the effect Y would accordingly wiggle and, additionally, the relation between the two will not be disrupted. This sort of relationship between variables are called 'invariant empirical generalisations'. The paper focuses on questions about causal assessment (...) and analyses the status of manipulation. It is argued that manipulationism is trapped in a dilemma. If manipulationism is read as providing a conceptual analysis of causation, then it fails to provide a story about the methods for causal assessment. If, instead, manipulationism is read as providing a method for causal assessment, then it is at an impasse concerning causal assessment in areas where manipulations are not performed. Empirical generalisations are then reassessed, in such a way that manipulation is not taken as methodologically fundamental. The paper concludes that manipulation is the appropriate tool for some scientific contexts, but not for all. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to shed light on some of the most original elements of Fichte’s conception of morality as expressed in his account of specific obligations. After some remarks on Fichte’s original classification of ethical duties, the paper focuses on the prohibition of lying, the duty to communicate our true knowledge, and the duty to set a good example. Fichte’s account of those duties not only goes beyond the mere justification of universally acknowledged demands, but also deploys (...) different arguments than his contemporaries, most notably Kant. Fichte thereby sketches a conception of morality in which the agent is crucially required to contribute to the morality of others. The chapter explores the contrast between Fichte’s view and Kant’s thought of an end in itself and suggests that Fichte’s view of morality amounts to a form of normative perfectionism that is qualified by the underlying claim of the agent-neutral character of moral demands. (shrink)

My chapter deals with an important part of how Wolff pursued the normative ambitions of his ethics in giving practical guidance with regard to specific moral issues. I first consider how Wolff’s ethics tackles the duties to others, which traditionally represent a difficult issue for moral perfectionism. In this regard, I argue that Wolff’s strategy combines two aspects: (a) he includes in perfection non-active aspects and (b) operates with an agent-neutral notion of perfection, in spite of important passages that might (...) suggest differently. I then focus on Wolff’s treatment of the duties concerning veracity and lying, and show how it follows that general strategy. Combining its two aspects, Wolff examines specific moral issues by adopting a non-welfarist notion of benefit and harm as the standard that can give guidance about practical cases. (shrink)

This review article discusses the book Understanding How Science Explains the World by Kevin McCain, published by Cambridge University Press (2022). With an impressive combination of clarity and depth, McCain provides the reader with a firm grasp of how science works, of what science aims to achieve, and of what makes science a successful epistemic enterprise. The review article reconstructs the book’s overall dialectic and identifies one potential point of tension which concerns the role of truth or accuracy in scientific (...) knowledge. -/- . (shrink)

Social and cultural contexts influence power dynamics and shape gender perceptions, roles, and decisions regarding the management of agrobiodiversity for dealing with and adapting to climate change. Based on a feminist political ecology framework and a mixed method approach, this research performs an empirical analysis of two case studies in the northern of India, one in the Himalayan Mountains and another in the Indian-Gangetic plains. It explores context-specific influence of gender roles and responsibilities on on-farm agrobiodiversity management gendered expertise and (...) knowledge related to agrobiodiversity and gendered preferences for practices and institutional arrangements for agrobiodiversity conservation linked to adaptation to climate change. In the Himalayan mountains women actively participate in crop and seed management decisions and tasks, and maintain informal institutions for seed and services exchanges in the case of crisis, which simultaneously favours high levels of agrobiodiversity and enhances women’s social status. By contrast, in the Indio-Gangetic plains, where women from better-off households are socially secluded and women from poorer households work mainly as labourer to respond to high out-migration of men, they exercise less public control over agrobiodiversity, with their role being mainly invisible at the homestead and related to post-production tasks. We finally discuss as improved understanding of the links between gendered spaces, crops, tasks, social status, and agrobiodiversity management can facilitate the design of gender-sensitive policy interventions for conservation and adaptation to climate change. (shrink)

This book investigates the unresolved issue of democratic legitimacy in contexts of pervasive disagreement and contributes to this debate by defending a relational version of political liberalism that rests on the ideal of co-authorship. According to this proposal, democratic legitimacy depends upon establishing appropriate interactions among citizens who ought to ascribe to one another the status of putative practical and epistemic authorities. To support this relational reading of political liberalism, the book proposes a revised account of the civic virtue of (...) reasonableness along with an investigation of the epistemic-specific dimension of political equality. By engaging with political epistemology and social theory, this book explores ways to address inherent tensions within the liberal paradigm, using the following strategies of addressing these tensions: first, it defends a twofold model of legitimacy that distinguishes the goals, methodologies, and justificatory tasks of both ideal and nonideal phases of the two-level justificatory framework; second, it contends that democratic legitimacy requires an engaged and contextual critical appraisal of the injustices that characterize our daily social lives, illustrating how structural forms of injustice represent a profound betrayal of the liberal ideal of democratic legitimacy. (shrink)

We argue that the health sciences make causal claims on the basis of evidence both of physical mechanisms, and of probabilistic dependencies. Consequently, an analysis of causality solely in terms of physical mechanisms or solely in terms of probabilistic relationships, does not do justice to the causal claims of these sciences. Yet there seems to be a single relation of cause in these sciences - pluralism about causality will not do either. Instead, we maintain, the health sciences require a theory (...) of causality that unifies its mechanistic and probabilistic aspects. We argue that the epistemic theory of causality provides the required unification. (shrink)

BackgroundThe measures taken to contain the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, such as the lockdown in Italy, do impact psychological health; yet, less is known about their effect on cognitive functioning. The transactional theory of stress predicts reciprocal influences between perceived stress and cognitive performance. However, the effects of a period of stress due to social isolation on spatial cognition and exploration have been little examined. The aim of the present study was to investigate the possible effects and impact of the (...) COVID-19 pandemic on spatial cognition tasks, particularly those concerning spatial exploration, and the physiological leftward bias known as pseudoneglect. A right-hemisphere asymmetry for spatial attention processes crucially contributes to pseudoneglect. Other evidence indicates a predominantly right-hemisphere activity in stressful situations. We also analyzed the effects of lockdown on coping strategies, which typically show an opposite pattern of hemispheric asymmetry, favoring the left hemisphere. If so, then pseudoneglect should increase during the lockdown and be negatively correlated with the efficacy of coping strategies.MethodsOne week before the start of the lockdown due to COVID-19 in Italy, we had collected data from a battery of behavioral tests including tasks of peri-personal spatial cognition. During the quarantine period, from late April to early May 2020, we repeated the testing sessions with a subgroup of the same participants. At both testing sessions, participants performed digitized neuropsychological tests, including a Cancellation task, Radial Arm Maze task, and Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices. Participants also completed a newly developed COVID-19 Student Stress Scale, based on transactional models of stress, and the Coping Orientation to Problems Experienced—New Italian Version to assess coping orientation.ResultsThe tendency to start cancelation from a left-sided item, to explore first a left-sided arm of the maze, and to choose erroneous response items on the left side of the page on Raven’s matrices increased from T1 to T2. The degree of pseudoneglect increment positively correlated with perceived stress and negatively correlated with Positive Attitude and Problem-Solving COPE-NIV subscales.ConclusionLockdown-related stress may have contributed to increase leftward bias during quarantine through a greater activation of the right hemisphere. On the other hand, pseudoneglect was decreased for better coping participants, perhaps as a consequence of a more balanced hemispheric activity in these individuals. (shrink)

Articulating a non-representational perspective on knowledge production and artistic practices, combined with an analysis of space, this book offers a new performative and relational re-turn to representation in contemporary technospaces. The radically materialist, posthumanist and performative position from which this situated aesthetics of technospaces is elaborated, aligns this book not only with non-representational theory, but also with the theories of material feminism, feminist geography, situated epistemologies, science and technology studies, actor-network theory, performance studies and new media studies.

Mobile applications are increasingly regarded as important tools for an integrated strategy of infection containment in post-lockdown societies around the globe. This paper discusses a number of questions that should be addressed when assessing the ethical challenges of mobile applications for digital contact-tracing of COVID-19: Which safeguards should be designed in the technology? Who should access data? What is a legitimate role for “Big Tech” companies in the development and implementation of these systems? How should cultural and behavioural issues be (...) accounted for in the design of these apps? Should use of these apps be compulsory? What does transparency and ethical oversight mean in this context? We demonstrate that responses to these questions are complex and contingent and argue that if digital contract-tracing is used, then it should be clear that this is on a trial basis and its use should be subject to independent monitoring and evaluation. (shrink)

In questo lavoro intendo confrontare le posizioni di Searle e Dennett nell’ambito della teoria della mente con la teoria husserliana della coscienza. Mostrerò come questi autori modifichino la nozione fenomenologica di intenzionalità, trasformandola in un modello di descrizione in “terza persona”. Tale cambiamento ha conseguenze problematiche riguardanti la distinzione fra un atto mentale e il suo contenuto e la conseguente critica alla teoria rappresentazionale della mente; l’argomento del teatro cartesiano, quello dell’omuncolo e lo smantellamento della nozione di soggettività; il rifiuto (...) dell’inconscio. Mostrerò come le concezioni di Searle e Dennett nascano da un concetto contraddittorio di riduzionismo, implicito anche negli sviluppi della “fenomenologia naturalizzata” e della neurofenomenologia. Queste difficoltà non si possono risolvere adattando o applicando il metodo fenomenologico alle scienze cognitive, né tornando semplicemente alla teoria husserliana. Bisogna invece individuare i problemi specifici affrontabili fenomenologicamente all’interno di un contesto scientifico: per esempio, la struttura temporale della coscienza e la questione dei contenuti inconsci della mente. (shrink)

The concern of this book is to see whether the phenomenological effervescence of politics is still possible to retrace the nucleolus of the political in its archetypical form.

Can we transmit understanding via testimony in more or less the same way in which we transmit knowledge? The standard view in social epistemology has a straightforward answer: no, we cannot. Three arguments supporting the standard view have been formulated so far. The first appeals to the claim that gaining understanding requires a greater cognitive effort than acquiring testimonial knowledge does. The second appeals to a certain type of epistemic trust that is supposedly characteristic of knowledge transmission (and maybe of (...) the transmission of epistemic goods in general) and that is allegedly incompatible with understanding. The third aims to show that there is a certain aspect of understanding (what epistemologists these days like to call “grasping”) that cannot be passed on to another person via testimony alone. In this article, I show that all of these arguments can be resisted. Thus, there seem to be no compelling reasons to embrace the standard view. (shrink)

Testimony spreads information. It is also commonly agreed that it can transfer knowledge. Whether it can work as an epistemic source of understanding is a matter of dispute. However, testimony certainly plays a pivotal role in the proliferation of understanding in the epistemic community. But how exactly do we learn, and how do we make advancements in understanding on the basis of one another’s words? And what can we do to maximize the probability that the process of acquiring understanding from (...) one another succeeds? These are very important questions in our current epistemological landscape, especially in light of the attention that has been paid to understanding as an epistemic achievement of purely epistemic value. Somewhat surprisingly, the recent literature in social epistemology does not offer much on the topic. The overarching aim of this paper is to provide a tentative model of understanding that goes in-depth enough to safely address the question of how understanding and testimony are related to one another. The hope is to contribute, in some measure, to the effort to understand understanding, and to explain two facts about our epistemic practices: the fact that knowledge and understanding relate differently to testimony, and the fact that some pieces of testimonial information are better than others for the sake of providing one with understanding and of yielding advancements in one’s epistemic standing. (shrink)