Teacher professional identity is a characteristic of a teacher, which should be developed in a long, consistent, and progressive process and usually shapes in any specific educational and social context. In addition to several factors influencing TPI, such as university education and empowerment courses, experience seems to play a significant role. Moreover, the role of psychological factors is highly undeniable in the formation and development of TPI. Attributional style is defined as the consistent way by which people can explain the (...) reasons for the occurrence of good or bad events. Besides considering ASs as one of the crucial variables for academic success, it can be regarded as one of the aspects of shaping one’s identity in general and the teacher’s identity in particular. In order to study the relationship between AS and TPI of teachers regarding their experience, two questionnaires were distributed among 317 Iranian English as foreign language teachers, and about 80% returned them. The researchers ran correlational analyses and they came up with a positive and significant relationship between TPI and teacher attributional styles of teachers. Moreover, experienced teachers proved to have a significant difference from novice teachers regarding their TPIs. The findings of this study would hopefully be advantageous for teacher educators to educate pre-service teachers by ways of constructing identity, and they may be applicable for Iranian EFL teachers to know and focus on different aspects of their professional identity. Moreover, they learn how to manage the intervening factors and shape and empower different domains of their PI, such as teaching experience, by means of exploring and knowing their ASs. (shrink)

: In line with its foreign policy objectives, Nigeria, since itsindependence, has been participating in Peacekeeping Operations in Africa. It was in recognition of the country’s commitment to the UnitedNations’ objectives of maintaining peace and security that made itcontribute troops to the UN Operation in the Congo for the first timein 1960. For more than fifty years, Nigeria has continued to make giant stridesand commitment in this regard. This paper examines the benefits it derivesfrom participating in PKOs in Africa under (...) the UN, OAU and theECOMOG. Using both primary and secondary data, the paper argues that anormative anxiety was the primary motivating factor for Nigeria’s involvementin PKOs in Africa. This is driven by the idiosyncrasies of the country’s leaderssince its independence in 1960. Nigeria’s decision-makers are confident that itsparticipation in PKOs serves a number of foreign policy goals and provides forthe nation’s interests. The effort promotes the country’s prestige and influencein the comity of nations and in Intergovernmental Organisations. (shrink)

Existence Since Thales fell into the well while gazing at the stars, philosophers have invested considerable effort in trying to understand what, how and why things exist. Even though much ink has been spilled about those questions, this article focuses on the following three questions: What is the nature of existence? Are there … Continue reading Existence →.

We hypothesize that heritable epigenetic changes can affect rates of fitness increase as well as patterns of genotypic and phenotypic change during adaptation. In particular, we suggest that when natural selection acts on pure epigenetic variation in addition to genetic variation, populations adapt faster, and adaptive phenotypes can arise before any genetic changes. This may make it difficult to reconcile the timing of adaptive events detected using conventional population genetics tools based on DNA sequence data with environmental drivers of adaptation, (...) such as changes in climate. Epigenetic modifications are frequently associated with somatic cell differentiation, but recently epigenetic changes have been found that can be transmitted over many generations. Here, we show how the interplay of these heritable epigenetic changes with genetic changes can affect adaptive evolution, and how epigenetic changes affect the signature of selection in the genetic record. (shrink)

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the access to community telecenters and the resulting changes in people's livelihood by focusing on the gendered use of computers and the internet in two Thai CTs.Design/methodology/approachQualitative methods through participant observation and interviews of 37 respondents are privileged. The assessment of the findings in this study is made by analyzing preset indicators created and adapted from a literature review of telecenters, livelihoods, and gender.FindingsFindings suggest that livelihood changes in specific areas, with a (...) rise in self‐esteem being one of the most noticeable changes. Moreover, financial opportunities, including career enhancement and product development, have expanded as a result of accessing CTs. In regard to gender, although it is found that there is only a small difference in financial opportunity between women and men, the findings point to more positive changes for women than men in terms of health enhancement and social connectedness, while men benefit slightly more in self‐esteem and education.Originality/valueThe paper verifies the possibility of information and communication technology as a tool for enhancing the lives of people. It demonstrates that adults in a rural community can get the benefits of ICTs only if they have the opportunity to learn and have access to use. Furthermore, gender differences identified in the paper can support gender‐sensitive projects using ICT for development. (shrink)

In the past two decades academic and research literature on “corruption” has flourished. During the same period organizations and initiatives fighting against corruption have also significantly expanded, turning “anti-corruption” into a new research subject. However, despite a few exceptions there is a division of labor between scholars who study corruption itself and those who study the global anti-corruption industry. Juxtaposing corruption’s local discourses and anti-corruption international practices, this article is an attempt to bring together these two intertwined research dimensions and (...) explore how an ethnographic approach might contribute to framing them together. Firstly, it describes how corruption in Romania is often conceptualized and explained in terms of national heritage, something related to old and recent cultural history, including traditional folklore. Secondly, it explores how anti-corruption works in practice, focusing on international legal cooperation projects monitoring the progress and shortcomings both prior to and post Romania’s accession to the European Union. Finally, revealing the articulations of these two apparently unrelated research fields, the article argues that corruption’s local explanations and the circular logic of auditing observed within the anti-corruption industry share a common developmental ideology mirroring the crypto-colonialist structure of power relations and dependency among European nation-states emerging out of the Cold War. (shrink)

According to the form of logical pluralism elaborated by Beall and Restall there is more than one relation of logical consequence. Since they take the relation of logical consequence to reside at the very heart of a logical system, different relations of logical consequence yield different logics. In this paper, we are especially interested in understanding what are the consequences of endorsing Beall and Restall’s version of logical pluralism vis-à-vis the normative guidance that logic is taken to provide to reasoners. (...) In particular, the aim of this paper is threefold. First, in Sections 2 and 3, we offer an exegesis of Beall and Restall’s logical pluralism as a thesis of semantic indeterminacy of our concept of logical consequence – i.e. understood as indeterminacy logical pluralism. Second, in Sections 4 and 5, we elaborate and critically scrutinize three models of semantic indeterminacy that we think are fit to capture Beall and Restall’s indeterminacy logical pluralism. Third, in Section 6, following Beall and Restall’s assumption that the notion of logical consequence has normative significance for deductive reasoning, we raise a series of normative problems for indeterminacy logical pluralism. The overall conclusion that we aim to establish is that Beall and Restall’s indeterminate logical pluralism cannot offer an adequate account of the normative guidance that logic is taken to provide us with in ordinary contexts of reasoning. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophy is beginning to pay to problems of linguistic justice the attention that they deserve in today’s heavily interconnected world. However, contemporary philosophy, as a part of today’s world, has problems of linguistic justice of its own which deserve meta-philosophical attention. At least in the philosophical tradition that is mainstream in much of the world today, viz. analytic philosophy, methodological and sociological mechanisms make it the case that the voices of non-native-speaking philosophers are substantially less heard. In this essay, (...) I briefly outline the problems non-native speakers face in contemporary analytic philosophy. I then move on to analysing the possible causes of the current problems. Among these reasons, I argue, is the emphasis given to linguistic style and appearances as signs of clarity, precision and rigour in the treatment of philosophical problems. I argue that the current emphasis on linguistic style in analytic philosophy is not justifiable, in part because it deprives contemporary analytic philosophy of a wider variety of philosophical perspectives. I argue that an important remedy for the emphasis on linguistic appearances within philosophy is to foster greater linguistic diversity. I conclude by presenting and motivating a recent initiative that aims to achieve such a goal. (shrink)

This book offers a clear, analytic, and innovative interpretation of Heidegger's late work. This period of Heidegger's philosophy remains largely unexplored by analytic philosophers, who consider it filled with inconsistencies and paradoxical ideas, particularly concerning the notions of Being and nothingness. This book takes seriously the claim that the late Heidegger endorses dialetheism--namely the position according to which some contradictions are true--and shows that the idea that Being is both an entity and not an entity is neither incoherent nor logically (...) trivial. The author achieves this by presenting and defending the idea that reality has an inconsistent structure. In doing so, he takes one of the most discussed topics in current analytic metaphysics, grounding theory, into a completely unexplored area. Additionally, in order to make sense of Heidegger's concept of nothingness, the author introduces an original axiomatic mereological system that, having a paraconsistent logic as a base logic, can tolerate inconsistencies without falling into logical triviality. This is the first book to set forth a complete and detailed discussion of the late Heidegger in the framework of analytic metaphysics. It will be of interest to Heidegger scholars and analytic philosophers working on theories of grounding, mereology, dialetheism, and paraconsistent logic. (shrink)

This book explores the various connections between Law and Opera, providing a comprehensive, multinational, and multidisciplinary resource on the subject. Further, it makes a valuable contribution to studies on law and the humanities. While, for example, the relationship between law and literature has been extensively researched, the relationship between Law and Opera remains largely overlooked. The book approaches the topic from three perspectives in three main sections: Law in Opera, Law on Opera, and Law around Opera.

Starting from R. K. Merton's now classic criticism of 'holistic' functionalism, i.e. of a functionalism which postulates social unity, universality and functional in-dispensability, the author stresses certain implications of this criticism more than they have been stressed hitherto. Classical and holistic functionalism) from H. Spencer, B. Malinowski, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, etc to T. Parsons, postulates certain total unities (a global culture, an integrated system, etc.) in which each item (existence, actions, structures, etc.) is considered and defined on the grounds of (...) its consequences for the maintenance of the system as a whole; therefore holistic functionalism as a method is, in effect, the study of the consequences of the system on the items that compose it, since each of these items is defined within the sphere of the system and of its integrative functions. Merton's 'neo-functionalism', on the other hand, is remarkable not only in that it takes into account the 'dysfunctional' and 'nonfunctional' consequences of certain items on the system, but more especially because, within the context of functional analysis, it stresses the possible existence of structural substitutes and alternatives of functions, and therefore of latent structures which are foreign to objective functional consequences, as well as being able to deal with unanticipated and unexpected items and their consequences on the system. 'Neo-functionalism', which is susceptible of further development, is not limited to the study of the consequences of the system on its items: it can also reverse this scheme and study the consequences of certain items on the system. Merton's criticism of holistic functionalism therefore implies a broadening of the scientific resources of this method and a renewal of its interpretative scheme, thanks to which functional analysis ceases to appear as 'the* method of explaining sociology as a science, and becomes an interpretative method which complements the analysis of social structures and relations. Seen in this light the concept of structure becomes emancipated and independent of the concept of system and function; whereas, within the framework of universal functionalism, it was ancillary to the concept of function. Finally, latent structures and unconscious structures, conditions of possibility and subjective dispositions are favourable to social structures and social relations, not excluding those that are neither visible nor observable. This analysis, the author notes, is extremely meaningful and has great possibilities of development, especially in view of the structuralism recently to be noted in the human and social sciences: anthropology, history, linguistics, etc. (shrink)

COVID-19 has brought to light the severity of economic inequalities by testing the capacity of the poorest families to make ends meet. Food insecurity has in fact soared all over the UK, with many people forced to rely on food support providers to not go hungry. This paper uses a unique dataset on 55 food support organizations active in Greater Manchester during the first COVID-19 wave, and 41 semi-structured interviews with food aid spokespersons and stakeholders, to shed light on what (...) they overcame, the complications and drawbacks of the food emergency response plan put in place. The results indicate that food aid organizations that remained open were surprisingly effective despite the growth in user demand and the decrease in volunteers. However, the necessity to maintain a timely supply food at all costs came with important drawbacks. The lockdown measures that followed COVID-19 not only affected the financial stability and management of the organizations, and the availability of food, but undermined the ways in which food support providers used to operate. Owing to physical distancing measures and to the increasing numbers of users, more or less intangible forms of support such as financial advice, empathic listening and human warmth were partially lost, probably when they were needed more than ever. (shrink)

PurposeInternational organizations are working on an unprecedented number of development initiatives relevant to people with disabilities. This makes it essential for the global disability community to be able to participate effectively in the decision-making processes associated with these programs. In light of this, this study aims to explore whether information technologies can help create a more inclusive global governance, forming the basis for equitable development for people with disabilities.Design/methodology/approachThe results of a global survey of disabled people’s organizations’ leaders are discussed. (...) This asked disability rights advocates about their experiences with accessibility and barriers to effective participation, low-cost accessible technological solutions for remote participation and freely available “off-the-shelf” online technologies – in particular social media platforms – to bridge the gap between the disability community and global governance processes.FindingsAlthough only a small number of international conferences offer accessible virtual participation through web conferencing and other tools, responses from DPO advocates suggest that there is a strong demand for this technology and provide evidence of its potential for improving accessibility in global governance. Furthermore, disability organizations all over the world have embraced social media platforms to liaise with their grassroots and enable them to part-take in policy-making processes.Originality/valueThis study highlights community-backed technological solutions to persisting barriers that systematically exclude people with disabilities from fundamental global governance processes, illuminating the nexus of disability, accessibility, and participation. (shrink)

The last quarter of a century has featured a surge in interest and studies on the commons, spearheaded, of course, by the efforts of Elinor Ostrom. These efforts have problematized the once well-established paradigm of the tragedy of the commons most clearly described by Garrett Hardin in 1968. One could say that the commons, thus, have become a fundamental field of study in most social sciences. This is not the case in the field of legal scholarship, which leads me to (...) the overarching issue of this essay, namely the difficult relationship between jurists and the commons. The phrase?difficult relationship? does not refer to an explicit antagonism, but to something even worse: complete indifference and a scandalous lack of knowledge. While my main purpose is to try to explain this sorry state of affairs, I also hope to make a more general point on the nature of law and legal change. In this sense, the commons can be considered a case-study in legal theory. The main issue of this paper is to tackle following sub-questions. What is the status of commons in the Western European legal discourse? Why do most legal scholars pay such a poor attention to the growing literature on the commons in other disciplines? What factors contribute to this peculiar case of cultural deafness? What promise of improvement does the future hold? nema. (shrink)

In Savoring Disgust, Carolyn Korsmeyer argues that disgust is peculiar amongst emotions, for it does not need any of the standard solutions to the so-called paradox of fiction. I argue that Korsmeyer’s arguments in support of the peculiarity of disgust with respect to the paradox of fiction are not successful.

We show in rather informal terms how witness sets can be useful in both explicating some basic intuitions about scope and understanding how particular denotational semantic differences between noun phrases affect their abilities to bear out certain scopal patterns. More generally we suggest that the usual notion of scope needs to be factored into variation distributivity and maximality. This part lays some groundwork for several of the subsequent chapters and is thus of interest to all readers. The second part shows (...) that already in this initial raw form the above insights can be applied to make a novel claim concerning the availability of so-called branching readings. In logical terms a branching reading can be defined for any sentence with a subject and a direct object. However speakers of English accept only a fraction of these readings, so the question arises how the data can be predicted from the meanings of the participating quantifiers and the syntactic structure of the sentence. We propose that thinking about the behavior of quantifiers along the lines introduced in the first part leads to a simple answer to this question. (shrink)

In recent years, increasing attention has been devoted to the underrepresentation, exclusion or outright discrimination experienced by women and members of other visible minority groups in academic philosophy. Much of this debate has focused on the state of contemporary Anglophone philosophy, which is dominated by the tradition of analytic philosophy. Moreover, there is growing interest in academia and society more generally for issues revolving around linguistic justice and linguistic discrimination (sometimes called ‘linguicism’ or ‘languagism’) (see e.g. Van Parijs 2011). Globalization (...) and the increasing adoption of English as global linguistic vehicle or lingua franca push these issues at the forefront of much of the world’s attention. The convergence of these two trends suggests the appropriateness of an analysis of the condition of non-native speakers of English in analytic philosophy. (shrink)

In Propelled, Elpidorou persuasively argues that the three prima facie undesirable conditions of boredom, frustration and anticipation are, in fact, importantly valuable to human life. His method is an interesting combination of existentialist explorations and reporting of cognitive science research, all written in a style more friendly to the analytic-philosophical tradition. However, I argue, the book’s precision and depth of philosophical analysis have some limitations. This is so in two main respects: first, in the relative lack of discussion of important (...) philosophical antecedents, and secondly, in the relative lack of critical engagement with some of the empirical literature the book discusses. (shrink)

Empathy can be viewed as an intervening variable to explain complex webs of causation between multiple factors and the resulting responses. The mediating role of emotion, implicit in the concept of an intervening variable, can be at the basis of the flexibility of empathic responses. Knowledge of the underlying neurophysiological mechanisms is needed for empathy to be considered as a biologically functional intervening variable.

The history of so-called ‘linguistic relativity’ is an odd and multifaceted one. After knowing alternate fortunes and being treated by different academic branches, today there are some new ways of investigating the language-thought-reality problem that put into dialogue the latest trends in language-related disciplines generate room for philosophical themes previously overlooked, reassess the very idea of linguistic relativity, despite its popularized versions which have circulated for decades and which have led an otherwise fruitful debate to extremes. It is argued that (...) a multidisciplinary approach is desirable in order to broaden future research. In the last few years the opportunity to study this matter following a common trend in several disciplines has been created. Language, and cognition too, are now conceived as intrinsically social phenomena. It is argued that relativistic effects should be investigated in social realms, and that analytic philosophy could help with this task. (shrink)

Per l’antropologo Pierre Clastres, i concetti di “Stato” e di “politico” sono sempre stati colti, nel mondo occidentale, come due elementi interdipendenti: lo Stato è politico, non c’è politica senza Stato. I suoi studi etno-antropologici tentano di ribaltare questa visione, concettualizzando le società primitive come “senza” e “contro lo Stato”. Il presente testo esamina i testi di Clastres cercando di inserire le sue riflessioni all’interno di paradigmi giuridici e politologici consolidati e di dimostrare come l’antropologia politica e le scienze politiche (...) possano mettersi in comunicazione. (shrink)

This paper considers Niccolò Machiavelli’s contribution to a theory of constituent power. Modern authors who have analysed the concept of constituent power generally agree on its ambiguous, paradoxical and apparently contradictory essence. With few exceptions, Machiavelli is absent from both the historical reconstructions of and the theoretical debates on the origin of constituent power. My argument is built around two main theses: reintroducing Machiavelli to the debate on constituent power offers an original response to the theoretical fallacies and inconsistencies identified (...) by modern scholars. In particular, Machiavelli’s philosophy contributes to the comprehension of constituent power as a living force within social order. My second thesis is that by tracing the source of constituent power back to Machiavelli, we can overcome the main theoretical problem implied by this concept, namely the problem of the priority of the factual or the juridical, by providing a vision that emphasises their immanent coexistence. (shrink)

Some time ago, the philosopher Luciano Floridi suggested that Western philosophy, and the mainstream contemporary approach to it traditionally called ‘analytic philosophy’, is in dire need of a reboot. The concern was that the discipline might be in a period of decadence. Analytic philosophy would be benefited by greater internationalization, wider and more transparent decision-making, and the reduction (as much as possible) of conflicts of interest as well as of its current habit of hiring and providing publication opportunities on the (...) basis of contacts, networking, and academic pedigree. If we are right, then we need a reconditioning of the institutional framework of analytic philosophy that adjusts it to the current global and interconnected world. (shrink)

Within the framework of Meinongianism, nothingness turns out to have contradictory features—it seems to be an object and not. In this paper, we explore two different kinds of Meinongian accounts of nothingness. The first one is the consistent account, which rejects the contradiction of nothingness, while the second one is the inconsistent account, which accepts the contradiction of nothingness. First of all, after showing that the consistent account of nothingness defended by Jacquette fails, we express some concerns on the general (...) possibility of consistently characterizing nothingness. Secondly, starting from Priest’s inconsistent characterization of nothingness :146–158, 2014b), we will introduce our own inconsistent account. The key idea of our account is to take nothingness as the complement of the totality. Finally, we will make formal sense of it by constructing an inconsistent mereological system, which is the development of the paraconsistent mereology proposed by Weber and Cotnoir. (shrink)

Currently, the autonomy of artificial systems, robotic systems in particular, is certainly one of the most debated issues, both from the perspective of technological development and its social impact and ethical repercussions. While theoretical considerations often focus on scenarios far beyond what can be concretely hypothesized from the current state of the art, the term autonomy is still used in a vague or too general way. This reduces the possibilities of a punctual analysis of such an important issue, thus leading (...) to often polarized positions. The intent of this paper is to clarify what is meant by artificial autonomy, and what are the prerequisites that can allow the attribution of this characteristic to a robotic system. Starting from some concrete examples, we will try to indicate a way towards artificial autonomy that can hold together the advantages of developing adaptive and versatile systems with the management of the inevitable problems that this technology poses both from the viewpoint of safety and ethics. Our proposal is that a real artificial autonomy, especially if expressed in the social context, can only be achieved through interdependence with other social actors, through continuous exchanges and interactions which, while allowing robots to explore the environment, guarantee the emergence of shared practices, behaviors, and ethical principles, which otherwise could not be imposed with a top-down approach, if not at the price of giving up the same artificial autonomy. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIt is well known that, from the beginning to the end of his philosophical trajectory, Martin Heidegger tries to develop a fundamental ontology which aims at answering the so-called question...