As COVID-19 emerged as a phenomenon of the total environment, and despite the intertwined and complex relationships that make humanity an organic part of the Bio- and Geospheres, the majority of our responses to it have been corrective in character, with few or no consideration for unintended consequences which bring about further vulnerability to unanticipated global events. Tackling COVID-19 entails a systemic and precautionary approach to human-nature relations, which we frame as regaining diversity in the Geo-, Bio-, and Anthropospheres. Its (...) implementation requires nothing short of an overhaul in the way we interact with and build knowledge from natural and social environments. Hence, we discuss the urgency of shifting from current to precautionary approaches to COVID-19 and look, through the lens of diversity, at the anticipated benefits in four systems crucially affecting and affected by the pandemic: health, land, knowledge and innovation. Our reflections offer a glimpse of the sort of changes needed, from pursuing planetary health and creating more harmonious forms of land use to providing a multi-level platform for other ways of knowing/understanding and turning innovation into a source of global public goods. These exemplary initiatives introduce and solidify systemic thinking in policymaking and move priorities from reaction-based strategies to precautionary frameworks. (shrink)

The target articles in this special section shed new light on the old question whether and how emotions influence action. However, what is missing is a straightforward motivational analysis—considering what we have learned from the science of explaining the “why” and “how” of behavior. I posit that emotions can influence the motivation process and thus action by fulfilling at least three functions: First, being grounded in needs, experienced emotions can function as strong need-like motivational states. Second, anticipated emotions can function (...) as incentives and justify action. Third, emotions can inform about progress in goal pursuit permitting behavior calibration. In summary, there is little doubt that emotions influence action. They can do so because they are hypo-phenomena of motivation. (shrink)

Background: The rapid pace of progress in medical research, the consequent need for the timely transfer of new knowledge into practice, and the increasing need for ethics support, is making the work of Ethics Committees (ECs) ever more complex and demanding. As a response, ECs in many countries exhibit large variation in number, mandate, organization and member competences. This cross-sectional study aims to give an overview of the different types of activities of Italian ECs and favour discussion at a European (...) level.Methods: A questionnaire was emailed to all Italian Ethics Committees contained in the national Registry of the Ministry of Health, enquiring whether the EC was conducting, or planning to conduct, 4 specific activities. A telephone interview was conducted to determine reasons for failure to respond.Results: Response rate was 53% (101 respondents out of 191). 20% of ECs restrict their responsibilities to research protocol review, 25% also offer ethical consultation to institutions, support on individual health care decisions and promotes educational initiatives, while the remaining 50% conduct a few of the examined activities to varying degrees. Large variation was observed across different types of hosting institutions and geographical locations.Conclusions: A common European model should be developed, defining EC functions, member selection modalities, necessary member competences, decision-making criteria and measures for work verification. In the absence of sound empirical evidence, it would be interesting to study the effectiveness and efficiency of the different existing models. (shrink)

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

: We discuss the role that transnational corporations should play in developing global governance, creating a framework of rules and regulations for the global economy. The central issue is whether TNCs should provide global rules and guarantee individual citizenship rights, or instead focus on maximizing profits. First, we describe the problems arising from the globalization process that affect the relationship between public rules and private firms. Next we consider the position of economic and management theories in relation to the social (...) responsibility of the firm. We argue that instrumental stakeholder theory and business and society research can only partially solve the global governance issue, and that more recent concepts of corporate citizenship and republican business ethics deliver theoretically and practically helpful, fresh insights. However, even these need further development, especially with regard to the legitimacy of corporate political activity. (shrink)

Several authors in psychology and philosophy have recently raised the following question: when is it permissible to intentionally change the meaning and use of our words and concepts? I argue that an arguably prior question has received much less attention: Even if there were good moral or epistemic reasons for conceptual or semantic changes, this does not yet justify pushing or lobbying for such changes if they are socially and conceptually disruptive. In this paper, I develop the beginnings of an (...) ethics of conceptual disruption as well as a set of norms of linguistic interventions based on it. (shrink)

Using quantitative methods, we investigate the role of logic in analytic philosophy from 1941 to 2010. In particular, a corpus of five journals publishing analytic philosophy is assessed and evaluated against three main criteria: the presence of logic, its role and level of technical sophistication. The analysis reveals that logic is not present at all in nearly three-quarters of the corpus, the instrumental role of logic prevails over the non-instrumental ones, and the level of technical sophistication increases in time, although (...) it remains relatively low. These results are used to challenge the view, widespread among analytic philosophers and labeled here “prevailing view”, that logic is a widely used and highly sophisticated method to analyze philosophical problems. (shrink)

People have various desires, but it is a contested moral issue when a desire becomes of such importance that it legitimizes a moral claim on others. This paper explores how the normative significance of desire satisfaction can be assessed and argues that a normatively significant desire can constitute a pro tanto obligation to help satisfy it. The paper presents a framework that relates the normative significance of a given desire to the general goal of living a reasonably valuable life and (...) inquires how the latter can be given determinate content without excluding a heterogeneity of the personal good. The paper contends that the set of possibly normatively significant desires is thus restricted by considerations about intelligibility, adequacy, and replaceability, which are mediated by societal background theories. (shrink)

This paper describes the Eunomos software, an advanced legal document and knowledge management system, based on legislative XML and ontologies. We describe the challenges of legal research in an increasingly complex, multi-level and multi-lingual world and how the Eunomos software helps users cut through the information overload to get the legal information they need in an organized and structured way and keep track of the state of the relevant law on any given topic. Using NLP tools to semi-automate the lower-skill (...) tasks makes this ambitious project a realistic commercial prospect as it helps keep costs down while at the same time allowing greater coverage. We describe the core system from workflow and technical perspectives, and discuss applications of the system for various user groups. (shrink)

In this paper, we introduce the methodology and techniques of metaargumentation to model argumentation. The methodology of meta-argumentation instantiates Dung's abstract argumentation theory with an extended argumentation theory, and is thus based on a combination of the methodology of instantiating abstract arguments, and the methodology of extending Dung's basic argumentation frameworks with other relations among abstract arguments. The technique of meta-argumentation applies Dung's theory of abstract argumentation to itself, by instantiating Dung's abstract arguments with meta-arguments using a technique called flattening. (...) We characterize the domain of instantiation using a representation technique based on soundness and completeness. Finally, we distinguish among various instantiations using the technique of specification languages. (shrink)

In this paper, we introduce the methodology and techniques of meta-argumentation to model argumentation. The methodology of meta-argumentation instantiates Dung’s abstract argumentation theory with an extended argumentation theory, and is thus based on a combination of the methodology of instantiating abstract arguments, and the methodology of extending Dung’s basic argumentation frameworks with other relations among abstract arguments. The technique of meta-argumentation applies Dung’s theory of abstract argumentation to itself, by instantiating Dung’s abstract arguments with meta-arguments using a technique called flattening. (...) We characterize the domain of instantiation using a representation technique based on soundness and completeness. Finally, we distinguish among various instantiations using the technique of specification languages. (shrink)

A single global authority is not sufficient to regulate heterogenous agents in multiagent systems based on distributed architectures, due to idiosyncratic local situations and to the need to regulate new issues as soon as they arise. On the one hand institutions should be structured as normative systems with a hierarchy of authorities able to cope with the dynamics of local situations, but on the other hand higher authorities should be able to delimit the autonomy of lower authorities to issue valid (...) norms. In this paper, we study the interplay of obligations and strong permissions in the context of hierarchies of authorities using input/output logic, because its explicit norm base facilitates reasoning about norm base maintenance, and it covers a variety of conditional obligations and permissions. We combine the logic with constraints, priorities and hierarchies of authorities. In this setting, we observe that Makinson and van der Torre’s notion of prohibition immunity for permissions is no longer sufficient, and we introduce a new notion of permission as exception and a new distinction between static and dynamic norms. We show how strong permissions can dynamically change an institution by adding exceptions to obligations, provide an explicit representation of what is permitted to the subjects of the normative system and allow higher level authorities to limit the power of lower level authorities to change the normative system. (shrink)

The article investigates what happens when philosophy meets and begins to establish connections with two formal research methods such as game theory and network science. We use citation analysis to identify, among the articles published in Synthese and Philosophy of Science between 1985 and 2021, those that cite the specialistic literature in game theory and network science. Then, we investigate the structure of the two corpora thus identified by bibliographic coupling and divide them into clusters of related papers by automatic (...) community detection. Lastly, we construct by the same bibliometric techniques a reference map of philosophy, on which we overlay our corpora to map the diffusion of game theory and network science in the various sub-areas of recent philosophy. Three main results derive from this study. Philosophers are interested not only in using and investigating game theory as a formal method belonging to applied mathematics and sharing many relevant features with social choice theory, but also in considering its applications in more empirically oriented disciplines such as social psychology, cognitive science, or biology. Philosophers focus on networks in two research contexts and in two different ways: in the debate on causality and scientific explanation, they consider the results of network science; in social epistemology, they employ network science as a formal tool. In the reference map, logic—whose use in philosophy dates back to a much earlier period—is distributed in a more uniform way than recently encountered disciplines such as game theory and network science. We conclude by discussing some methodological limitations of our bibliometric approach, especially with reference to the problem of field delineation. (shrink)

Leo Pardi was the initiator of ethological research in Italy. During more than 50 years of active scientific career, he gave groundbreaking contributions to the understanding of social life in insects, especially in Polistes wasps, an important model organism in sociobiology. In the 1940s, Pardi showed that Polistes societies are organized in a linear social hierarchy that relies on reproductive dominance and on the physiological and developmental mechanisms that regulate it, i.e. on the status of ovarian development of single wasps. (...) Pardi’s work set the stage for further research on the regulatory mechanisms governing social life in primitively eusocial organisms both in wasps and in other insect species. This article reconstructs Pardi’s investigative pathway between 1937 and 1952 in the context of European ethology and American animal sociology. This reconstruction focuses on the development of Pardi’s physiological approach and presents a new perspective on the interacting development of these two fields at the origins of our current understanding of animal social behavior. (shrink)

The axiomatic bases of Special Relativity Theory (SRT) are thoroughly re-examined from an operational point of view, with particular emphasis on the status of Einstein synchronization in the light of the possibility of arbitrary synchronization procedures in inertial reference frames. Once correctly and explicitly phrased, the principles of SRT allow for a wide range of “theories” that differ from the standard SRT only for the difference in the chosen synchronization procedures, but are wholly equivalent to SRT in predicting empirical facts. (...) This results in the introduction, in the full background of SRT, of a suitable synchronization gauge. A complete hierarchy of synchronization gauges is introduced and elucidated, ranging from the useful Selleri synchronization gauge (which should lead, according to Selleri, to a multiplicity of theories alternative to SRT) to the more general Mansouri–Sexl synchronization gauge and, finally, to the even more general Anderson–Vetharaniam–Stedman’s synchronization gauge. It is showed that all these gauges do not challenge the SRT, as claimed by Selleri, but simply lead to a number of formalisms which leave the geometrical structure of Minkowski spacetime unchanged. Several aspects of fundamental and applied interest related to the conventional aspect of the synchronization choice are discussed, encompassing the issue of the one-way velocity of light in inertial and rotating reference frames, the global positioning system (GPS)’s working, and the recasting of Maxwell equations in generic synchronizations. Finally, it is showed how the gauge freedom introduced in SRT can be exploited in order to give a clear explanation of the Sagnac effect for counter-propagating matter beams. (shrink)

Creativity is intrinsic to Humanities and STEM disciplines. In the activities of artists and engineers, for example, an attempt is made to bring something new into the world through counterfactual thinking. However, creativity in these disciplines is distinguished by differences in motivations and constraints. For example, engineers typically direct their creativity toward building solutions to practical problems, whereas the outcomes of artistic creativity, which are largely useless to practical purposes, aspire to enrich the world aesthetically and conceptually. In this essay, (...) an artist (DHS) and a roboticist (GS) engage in a cross-disciplinary conceptual analysis of the creative problem of artificial consciousness in a robot, expressing the counterfactual thinking necessitated by the problem, as well as disciplinary differences in motivations, constraints, and applications. We especially deal with the question of why one would build an artificial consciousness and we consider how an illusionist theory of consciousness alters prominent ethical debates on synthetic consciousness. We discuss theories of consciousness and their applicability to synthetic consciousness. We discuss practical approaches to implementing artificial consciousness in a robot and conclude by considering the role of creativity in the project of developing an artificial consciousness. (shrink)

This essay questions the self-sufficiency of abstract, non-consequentialist, principles as a defence of a libertarian regime. The argument focuses on the difficulties involved in attempts to defend the priority of negative rights if an attractive conception of freedom and an agent-relative view about our reasons to respect rights are to be upheld. The paper closes by suggesting how libertarianism could gain support from various, and perhaps mutually irreducible and even conflicting, considerations in a wide consequentialist system.

Different interpretations of Bradley’s regress argument are considered. On the basis of textual evidences, it is argued that the most persuasive is the one that sees the argument as primarily addressing the general issue of unity or connectedness.

when r. g. collingwood began to write his autobiography in 1938, he was only 49 years old, still very young for drawing up a final balance. Only three years earlier, he had been appointed to the prestigious Waynflete Chair of Metaphysical Philosophy in Oxford. By then, Collingwood was already severely ill and he knew that he only had a few more years to live. Therefore, he did not only present his past evolution in his autobiography; his attention rather went to (...) those subjects for which he feared there was not enough time left to elaborate. The project that in his mind deserved the most attention was the defence of the possibility of a contemporary metaphysics. Less than one year later, Collingwood elaborated this .. (shrink)

‘As in a view from afar’. Vondel’s epistemological objections to Spinoza’s circle From a philosophical and theological stance, Spinoza and Vondel are traditionally portrayed as downright antipodes. Whereas Spinoza is seen as a pre-eminent representative of ‘radical Enlightenment’, Vondel is generally considered as a rather reactionary author who does not fit at all in this radical version of Enlightenment. The central aim of this article is to modify this generally agreed perception. On the basis of recent historical research in the (...) relation between the circle of Spinoza and Vondel, the affinities between both authors can be brought to the fore, in particular when looking at their writings on the relation between politics and religion. The gap between their views becomes only apparent when their respective views of God are at stake: there is an undeniable contrast between Spinoza’s naturalist pantheism and Vondel’s classic theism. In order to understand that very difference, the focus will be laid on two writings, conceived in more or less the same period: Vondel’s philosophical-theological poem Bespieghelingen van Godt en Godsdienst and Spinoza’s Verhandeling over de verbetering van het verstand (Treatise on the Emendation of Understanding). The central difference between the two authors in these writings relates to their methodological approach of existential questions about God and salvation, in particular to their dissent concerning the epistemological role of the geometrical method and the specific role of language. One of the hypotheses I propound in this respect is that Vondel’s relation to Lodewijk Meyer has been of utmost importance in order to explain their different methodological positions. Finally, I indicate the topical relevance of this methodological difference for contemporary philosophical reflection. (shrink)

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