In The Slow Professor, Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber discuss how adopting the principles of the Slow movement in academic life can counter the erosion of humanistic education.

The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT; Frederick, 2005) is designed to measure the tendency to override a prepotent response alternative that is incorrect and to engage in further reflection that leads to the correct response. It is a prime measure of the miserly information processing posited by most dual process theories. The original three-item test may be becoming known to potential participants, however. We examined a four-item version that could serve as a substitute for the original. Our data show that it (...) displays a.58 correlation with the original version and that it has very similar relationships with cognitive ability, various thinking dispositions, and with several other rational thinking tasks. Combining the two versions into a seven-item test resulted in a measure of miserly processing with substantial reliability (.72). The seven-item version was a strong independent predictor of performance on rational thinking tasks after the variance accounted for by cognitive ability and thinking dispositions had been partialled out. (shrink)

I apply the notions of alethic reference introduced in previous work in the construction of several classical semantic truth theories. Furthermore, I provide proof-theoretic versions of those notions and use them to formulate axiomatic disquotational truth systems over classical logic. Some of these systems are shown to be sound, proof-theoretically strong, and compare well to the most renowned systems in the literature.

I put forward precise and appealing notions of reference, self-reference, and well-foundedness for sentences of the language of first-order Peano arithmetic extended with a truth predicate. These notions are intended to play a central role in the study of the reference patterns that underlie expressions leading to semantic paradox and, thus, in the construction of philosophically well-motivated semantic theories of truth.

In the age of web 2.0, the university is constantly challenged to re-adapt its ‘old-fashioned’ pedagogies to the new possibilities opened up by digital technologies. This article proposes a rethinking of the relation between university and (digital) technologies by focusing not on how technologies function in the university, but on their constituting a meta-condition for the existence of the university pedagogy of inquiry. Following Ivan Illich’s idea that textual technologies played a crucial role in the inception of the university, we (...) will first show the structural similarities between university thinking and the text as a profanation of the book. Secondly, we describe university thinking as a type of critical thinking based on the materiality of the text-on-the-page, explaining why the text has been at the centre of university pedagogy since the beginning. In the third part, we show how Illich came to see the end of the culture of the text as a challenge for the university, by describing the new features of the text-as-code incompatible with the idea of reading as study. Finally, we challenge this pessimistic reading of Illich’s and end with a call for a profanatory pedagogy of digital technologies that could mirror the revolutionary thinking behind the mediaeval invention of the text. (shrink)

Weakening classical logic is one of the most popular ways of dealing with semantic paradoxes. Their advocates often claim that such weakening does not affect non-semantic reasoning. Recently, however, Halbach and Horsten have shown that this is actually not the case for Kripke’s fixed-point theory based on the Strong Kleene evaluation scheme. Feferman’s axiomatization $\textsf{KF}$ in classical logic is much stronger than its paracomplete counterpart $\textsf{PKF}$, not only in terms of semantic but also in arithmetical content. This paper compares the (...) proof-theoretic strength of an axiomatization of Kripke’s construction based on the paraconsistent evaluation scheme of $\textsf{LP}$, formulated in classical logic with that of an axiomatization directly formulated in $\textsf{LP}$, extended with a consistency operator. The ultimate goal is to find out whether paraconsistent solutions to the paradoxes that employ consistency operators fare better in this respect than paracomplete ones. (shrink)

Deflationists claim that the truth predicate was introduced into our language merely to full a certain logico-linguistic function. Oddly enough, the question what this function exactly consists in has received little attention. We argue that the best way of understanding the function of the truth predicate is as enabling us to mimic higher-order quantification in a first-order framework. Indeed, one can show that the full simple theory of types is reducible to disquotational principles of truth. Our analysis has important consequences (...) for our understanding of truth. In this paper, we can only touch on one of them: we will argue that the insubstantiality of truth does not imply a conservativity requirement on our best theories of truth. (shrink)

The phenomenon of missed interactions between online users is a specific issue occurring when users of different language games interact on social media platforms. We use the lens of institutional theory to analyze this phenomenon and argue that current online institutions will necessarily fail to regulate user interactions in a way that creates common meanings because online institutions are not set up to deal with the multiplicity of language games and forms of life co-existing in the online social space. We (...) argue for the need to enable and foster grassroots online institutions that can stabilize the norms of interaction by redesigning algorithms and user interfaces. Such online grassroots institutions would facilitate user orientation at three distinct levels: informational, normative, and semantic-pragmatic. We propose user orientation as a principle that would facilitate the formation of institutions aiming to regulate information exchanges between users inhabiting various forms of life. This principle of user orientation should guide design decisions, while designer teams would need to become aware of the institutional power unleashed when they set up interfaces and algorithms for user-generated content. (shrink)

Self-reference has played a prominent role in the development of metamathematics in the past century, starting with Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem. Given the nature of this and other results in the area, the informal understanding of self-reference in arithmetic has sufficed so far. Recently, however, it has been argued that for other related issues in metamathematics and philosophical logic a precise notion of self-reference and, more generally, reference is actually required. These notions have been so far elusive and are surrounded (...) by an aura of scepticism that has kept most philosophers away. In this paper I suggest we shouldn’t give up all hope. First, I introduce the reader to these issues. Second, I discuss the conditions a good notion of reference in arithmetic must satisfy. Accordingly, I then introduce adequate notions of reference for the language of first-order arithmetic, which I show to be fruitful for addressing the aforementioned issues in metamathematics. (shrink)

In this work a double exponential time inseparability result is proven for a finitely axiomatizable first order theory Q₊. The theory, subset of Presburger theory of addition S₊, is the additive fragment of Robinson system Q. We prove that every set that separates Q₊` from the logically false sentences of addition is not recognizable by any Turing machine working in double exponential time. The lower bound is given both in the non-deterministic and in the linear alternating time models. The result (...) implies also that any theory of addition that is consistent with Q₊—in particular any theory contained in S₊—is at least double exponential time difficult. Our inseparability result is an improvement on the known lower bounds for arithmetic theories. Our proof uses a refinement and adaptation of the technique that Fischer and Rabin used to prove the difficulty of S₊. Our version of the technique can be applied to any incomplete finitely axiomatizable system in which all of the necessary properties of addition are provable. (shrink)

The methodology applied for measuring the public sector performance is a disputed topic both in academia and for decision-making policies implementation. Thus, in this paper, we analyze the importance of the topic for researches and also try to identify the methodologies considered within the literature for measuring public sector performance, which would allow comparison between states, and reporting to certain values. The novelty of our approach is that, firstly, we draw a content analysis, with a focus on the methodologies applied (...) for measuring the performance in the public sector in terms of productivity, efficiency, and performance. Secondly, with the support provided by the VOSviewer it is performed a bibliometric analysis and science mapping. We focus our research on keywords co-occurrence, authors co-citation and co-authorship to observe countries and institutions that generate publications on “public sector performance”. On the one hand, our results reveal that entail Analysis of Main Components has proven to be an effective tool to perform complex analysis of public sector performance, through the composite indicator that achieves an aggregation of several important areas of the public sector, considering its complexity and large size. On the other hand, strong links between keywords, researcher’s networks and country and institutions where the research is concentrated where highlighted. (shrink)

The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 3, Page 432, June 2012.

Stephen Yablo [23,24] introduces a new informal paradox, constituted by an infinite list of semi-formalized sentences. It has been shown that, formalized in a first-order language, Yablo’s piece of reasoning is invalid, for it is impossible to derive falsum from the sequence, due mainly to the Compactness Theorem. This result casts doubts on the paradoxical character of the list of sentences. After identifying two usual senses in which an expression or set of expressions is said to be paradoxical, since second-order (...) languages are not compact, I study the paradoxicality of Yablo’s list within these languages. While non-paradoxical in the first sense, the second-order version of the list is a paradox in our second sense. I conclude that this suffices for regarding Yablo’s original list as paradoxical and his informal argument as valid. (shrink)

Truth predicates are widely believed to be capable of serving a certain logical or quasi-logical function. There is little consensus, however, on the exact nature of this function. We offer a series of formal results in support of the thesis that disquotational truth is a device to simulate higher-order resources in a first-order setting. More specifically, we show that any theory formulated in a higher-order language can be naturally and conservatively interpreted in a first-order theory with a disquotational truth or (...) truth-of predicate. In the first part of the paper we focus on the relation between truth and full impredicative sentential quantification. The second part is devoted to the relation between truth-of and full impredicative predicate quantification. (shrink)

A perennial debate in the field of global ethics revolves around the possibility of a universalist ethics as well as arguments over the nature, and significance, of difference for moral deliberation. Decolonial literature, in particular, increasingly signifies a pluriverse – one with radical ontological and epistemological differences. This book examines the concept of the pluriverse alongside global ethics and the ethics of care in order to contemplate new ethical horizons for engaging across difference. Offering a challenge to the current state (...) of the field, this book argues for a rethinking of global ethics as it has been conceived thus far. (shrink)

El cambio a la educación en línea que se produjo durante la pandemia del coronavirus puso en primer plano las preguntas sobre el valor y la conveniencia de una universidad totalmente en línea. Este artículo explora hasta qué punto es deseable una universidad totalmente en línea desde una perspectiva educativa, en la que la educación se considera una experiencia valiosa tomada en sí misma, independientemente de su resultado. Parto de la hipótesis de que una dimensión fundamental de las prácticas de (...) estudio en la universidad es la experiencia del pensamiento colectivo desencadenado por acuerdos materiales y sociales específicos. Procedo a describir las condiciones materiales para desencadenar el pensamiento en términos de lo que llamo desplazamiento mediático, que es una forma de integrar los medios en las prácticas educativas que permite un tipo de atención fluctuante. El artículo concluye argumentando que necesitamos desarrollar nuevas tecnologías para la educación en línea y entrenar nuestra atención deliberadamente para los entornos en línea estableciendo nuevos protocolos para tratar la dispersión digital de la atención. (shrink)

This article explores the norms that govern regular users’ acts of sharing content on social networking sites. Many debates on how to counteract misinformation on Social Networking Sites focus on the epistemic norms of testimony, implicitly assuming that the users’ acts of sharing should fall under the same norms as those for posting original content. I challenge this assumption by proposing a non-epistemic interpretation of (mis) information sharing on social networking sites which I construe as infrastructures for forms of life (...) found online. Misinformation sharing belongs more in the realm of rumour spreading and gossiping rather than in the information-giving language games. However, the norms for sharing cannot be fixed in advance, as these emerge at the interaction between the platforms’ explicit rules, local norms established by user practices, and a meta-norm of sociality. This unpredictability does not leave us with a normative void as an important user responsibility still remains, namely that of making the context of the sharing gesture explicit. If users will clarify how their gestures of sharing are meant to be interpreted by others, they will implicitly assume responsibility for possible misunderstandings based on omissions, and the harms of shared misinformation can be diminished. (shrink)

In her 2015 article, Helena Olofsdotter Stensöta notes that ‘the ethics of care is often used as a lens to dissect the current arrangement of care provision (or rather non-care provision) in polici...

The Freud Wars offers a comprehensive introduction to the crucial question of the justification of psychoanalysis. Part I examines three powerful critiques of psychoanalysis in the context of a recent controversy about its nature and legitimacy: is it a bankrupt science, an innovative science, or not a science at all but a system of interpretation? The discussion makes sense of the entrenched disagreement about the validity of psychoanalysis, and demonstrates how the disagreement is rooted in the theoretical ambiguity of the (...) central concept of psychoanalysis, the unconscious. This ambiguity is then presented as the pathway to a new way of understanding psychoanalysis, based on a mode of thinking that precedes division into mental and physical. The reader is drawn into a lively and thought-provoking analysis of the central issues: · What would it mean for psychoanalysis to count as a science? · Is psychoanalysis a form of hermeneutics? · How can mental and physical explanations coincide? Part II contains the source material for Part I: the influential critiques of psychoanalysis by Adolf Grünbaum, Thomas Nagel and Jürgen Habermas. No specialised knowledge is assumed, and the book is clear and accessible while still conveying the complexity and richness of the subject. It provides a fascinating introduction to philosophical thinking on psychoanalysis for students and practitioners of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and philosophy. (shrink)

So often deployed as a jingoistic, even menacing rallying cry, or limited by a focus on passing moments of liberation, the rhetoric of freedom both rouses and repels. Does it remain key to autonomy, justice, and well-being, or is freedom's long star turn coming to a close? Does a continued obsession with it enliven and emancipate, or reflect a deepening nihilism (or both)? On Freedom examines such questions by tracing the concept's complexities in four realms: art, sex, drugs, and climate. (...) Drawing on a vast range of material, Maggie Nelson explores how we might think, experience, or talk about freedom in ways responsive to the conditions of our day. Her abiding interest lies in ongoing "practices of freedom" by which we negotiate our interrelation with others, with all the care and constraint that entails, while accepting difference and conflict as integral to our communion. As with all of Nelson's work, how she thinks-and how that thinking expresses itself in style-is crucial to the book's achievement. Through her generosity, rigor, and willingness to critically engage reigning pieties, Nelson shows that new forms of thinking and talking are available to us, ones that welcome a chorus of voices, and recommit us to our entanglement, even at its most difficult. On Freedom is an ambitious, essential book that reinvigorates the art of criticism. (shrink)

This paper aims to reconstruct a possible answer to the classical Newman’s objection which has been used countless times to argue against structural realism. The reconstruction starts from the new strand of structural realism – informational structural realism – authored by Luciano Floridi. Newman’s objection had previously stated that all propositions which comprise the mathematical structures are merely trivial truths and can be instantiated by multiple models. This paper examines whether informational structural realism can overcome this objection by analysing the (...) previous attempts to answer this objection, attempts which either try to save the Ramseyfication of mathematical propositions or give up on it. The informational structural realism way is to attempt a third way, the neo-Kantian way inspired by the work of Ernst Cassirer, but also to change the formalism from a mathematical to an informational one. This paper shows how this original combination of neo-Kantianism, informational formalism and the method of levels of abstraction provide the tools to overcome Newman’s objection. (shrink)

In this chapter we argue that emotions are mediated in an incomplete way in online social media because of the heavy reliance on textual messages which fosters a rationalistic bias and an inclination towards less nuanced emotional expressions. This incompleteness can happen either by obscuring emotions, showing less than the original intensity, misinterpreting emotions, or eliciting emotions without feedback and context. Online interactions and deliberations tend to contribute rather than overcome stalemates and informational bubbles, partially due to prevalence of anti-social (...) emotions. It is tempting to see emotions as being the cause of the problem of online verbal aggression and bullying. However, we argue that social media are actually designed in a predominantly rationalistic way, because of the reliance on text-based communication, thereby filtering out social emotions and leaving space for easily expressed antisocial emotions. Based on research on emotions that sees these as key ingredients to moral interaction and deliberation, as well as on research on text-based versus non-verbal communication, we propose a richer understanding of emotions, requiring different designs of online deliberation platforms. We propose that such designs should move from text-centred designs and should find ways to incorporate the complete expression of the full range of human emotions so that these can play a constructive role in online deliberations. (shrink)

What requirements must deflationary formal theories of truth satisfy? This chapter argues against the widely accepted view that compositional and Tarskian theories of truth are substantial or otherwise unacceptable to deflationists. First, two purposes that a formal truth theory can serve are distinguished: one descriptive, the other logical (i.e., to characterise the correctness of inferences involving ‘true’). The chapter argues that the most compelling arguments for the incompatibility of compositional and Tarskian theories concern descriptive theories only. -/- Second, two requirements (...) that any deflationist truth theory intended to serve a logical purpose must satisfy are put forward. These requirements, it is argued, suggest that (i) many well-known compositional and Tarskian theories are acceptable from a deflationist standpoint (including CT); (ii) certain other popular theories of truth (including KF and FS) are not similarly acceptable; (iii) there are no conclusive reasons to impose a conservativeness requirement on deflationary theories of truth. (shrink)

According to Frantz Fanon, the psychological and social-political are deeply intertwined in the colonial context. Psychologically, the colonizers perceive the colonized as inferior and the colonized internalize this in an inferiority complex. This psychological reality is co-constitutive of and by material relations of power—the imaginary of inferiority both creates and is created by colonial relations of power. It is also in this context that violence takes on significant political import: violence deployed by the colonized to rebel against these colonial relations (...) and enact a different world will also be violent in its fundamental disruption of this imaginary. The ethics of care, on the other hand, does not seem to sit well with violence, and thus Fanon’s political theory more generally. Care ethics is concerned with everything we do to maintain and repair our worlds as well as reasonably possible. Violence, which ruptures our psycho-affective, material, and social-political realities, seems antithetical to this task. This article seeks to reconsider this apparent antinomy between violence and care via a dialogue between Fanon and the ethics of care. In so doing, this article mobilizes a relational conceptualization of violence that allows for the possibility that certain violences may, in fact, be justifiable from a care ethics perspective. At the same time, I contend that violence in any form will also eventually demand a caring response. Ultimately, this productive reading of Fanon’s political theory and the ethics of care encourages both postcolonial philosophers and care ethicists alike to examine critically the relation between violence and care, and the ways in which we cannot a priori draw lines between the two. (shrink)

Lecturing is the only educational form inherited from the universities of the middle ages that is still in use today. However, it seems that lecturing is under threat, as recent calls to do away with lecturing in favour of more dynamic settings, such as the flipped classroom or pre-recorded talks, have found many adherents. In line with the post-critical approach of this book, this chapter argues that there is something in the university lecture that needs to be affirmed: at its (...) best, the university lecture functions as a technique for thinking together or for making collective thinking happen in a lecture hall. The lecture offers the set-up, both technological and architectural, to forge a common experience that binds together the listeners and the speakers; that experience can be characterised as visualising ideas or seeing things as if they had taken on a ‘bodily form’. By looking at several examples of lecturing moments experienced by Gadamer as a student and later recounted in his autobiography, we can better understand the paradigmatic experience that characterises the lecture – as an ideal to be sought, even if, perhaps, not always actualised in everyday lectures. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied on social media by an explosion of information disorders such as inaccurate, misleading and irrelevant information. Countermeasures adopted thus far to curb these informational disorders have had limited success because these did not account for the diversity of informational contexts on social media, focusing instead almost exclusively on curating the factual content of user’s posts. However, content-focused measures do not address the primary causes of the infodemic itself, namely the user’s need to post content (...) as a way of making sense of the situation and for gathering reactions of consensus from friends. This paper describes three types of informational context—weak epistemic, strong normative and strong emotional—which have not yet been taken into account by current measures to curb down the informational disorders. I show how these contexts are related to the infodemic and I propose measures for dealing with them for future global crisis situations. (shrink)

Recently, a new algebraic structure called pseudo-equality algebra has been defined by Jenei and Kóródi as a generalization of the equality algebra previously introduced by Jenei. As a main result, it was proved that the pseudo-equality algebras are term equivalent with pseudo-BCK meet-semilattices. We found a gap in the proof of this result and we present a counterexample and a correct version of the theorem. The correct version of the corresponding result for equality algebras is also given.

A major challenge in the philosophy of mathematics is to explain how mathematical language can pick out unique structures and acquire determinate content. In recent work, Button and Walsh have introduced a view they call ‘internalism’, according to which mathematical content is explained by internal categoricity results formulated and proven in second-order logic. In this paper, we critically examine the internalist response to the challenge and discuss the philosophical significance of internal categoricity results. Surprisingly, as we argue, while internalism arguably (...) explains how we pick out unique mathematical structures, this does not suffice to account for the determinacy of mathematical discourse. (shrink)

An increasingly popular solution to the anti-scientific climate rising on social media platforms has been the appeal to more critical thinking from the user's side. In this paper, we zoom in on the ideal of critical thinking and unpack it in order to see, specifically, whether it can provide enough epistemic agency so that users endowed with it can break free from enclosed communities on social media (so called epistemic bubbles). We criticise some assumptions embedded in the ideal of critical (...) thinking online and, instead, we propose that a better way to understand the virtuous behaviour at hand is as critical engagement, namely a mutual cultivation of critical skills among the members of an epistemic bubble. This mutual cultivation allows members within an epistemic bubble (in contrast, as we will show, with the authority-based models of epistemic echo chambers) to become more autonomous critical thinkers by cultivating self-trust. We use the model of relational autonomy as well as resources from work on epistemic self-trust and epistemic interdependence to develop an explanatory framework, which in turn may ground rules for identifying and creating virtuous epistemic bubbles within the environments of social media platforms. (shrink)

If the classic history of events is written in the spirit of winners, the approaches of collective mental reveal that wars are disasters and collective traumas for all of the involved communities. In the following pages we will present the decantation in long term memory of a relevant fact – the deportation of German ethnics from Romania to forced labor in the Soviet Union. On the base of a secret directive, sent by Stalin, approximately 75 000 Romanian citizens of German (...) ethnicity were forced to work three-four years, some even more, at the reconstruction of the “Soviet country”. The source of the decision, its place and extent, and also the way to atone for the “collective guilt” was hidden from the deportees. At the end of the punishment, they were forbidden to speak about the deportation in the public and private space. When they returned home, all of their material evidence of the years spent in the Soviet Union was confiscated and destroyed. In a project financed by the European Union, 50 interviews with survivors of deportation and their descendants were published. The resulting accounts allowed this psycho-sociological analysis of the memory of deportation, centered on ethical and religious aspects of the behaviors and attitudes of victims and their descendants. (shrink)

De acuerdo con Shapiro , el deflacionismo debe buscar la conservatividad de sus teorías de la verdad sobre cualquier teoría base. De lo contrario, la noción de verdad que ellas presentan daría lugar a más afirmaciones acerca de la ontología de la teoría base que ésta misma. Así, la verdad tendría poder explicativo y, por tanto, sería en algún sentido una noción metafísicamente sustantiva. El objetivo del artículo es rechazar esta tesis para algunas teorías de la verdad cuyos axiomas son (...) instancias del esquema Tde Tarski, mostrando que las causas de la no conservatividad de estas teorías respecto de teorías base no descansan en sus principios de la verdad sino en la necesidad de introducir en el lenguaje de la teoría base y en su ontología los objetos de los cuales tiene sentido predicar verdad, previamente a la adopción de cualesquiera principios para el predicado veritativo. Shapiro argues that deflationist theories of truth must be conservative over any base theory. For otherwise the principles of truth involved in them would state more about the ontology of the base theory than the base theory itself. Then, truth would have explanatory power, and the deflationist would tie herself down to a substancial notion. The aim of this paper is to argue against Shapiro’s thesis, showing that the real causes of the non-conservativeness of those deflationist theories whose axioms are given by some restricted vesion of the T-scheme do not rely on their truth principles at all. On the contrary, non-conservativeness in these cases depends on the need to add to the language of the base theory those objects than may be true, before adopting such and such principles of truth. (shrink)

Basic research is often weird, and it's often boring. It's the years spent mapping the neurons of zebra fish, so that future scientists can have a more detailed biological model to work with. It's the chemical analysis that has to happen, so that two decades from now somebody else can discover a new cancer-fighting drug. Basic research is about curiosity, and knowledge for knowledge's sake. By it's very nature, basic research relies on public funding. But by it's very nature, it's (...) hard to explain how the public benefits from the basic research we fund. (shrink)

Maggie Günsberg explores the intersection between gender portrayal and other social categories of class, age and the family in the Italian theatre from the Renaissance to the present day. She examines the developing relationship between patriarchal strategies and the formal properties of the dramatic genre such as plot, comedy and realism. She also considers conventions specific to drama in performance, including images of both femininity and masculinity. An interdisciplinary approach, drawing on semiotics, psychoanalysis, philosophy, theories of spectatorship and dramatic theory (...) from a feminist perspective, informs Günsberg's critique of landmarks in Italian theatrical history, including work by Machiavelli, Ariosto, Goldoni, D'Annunzio and Pirandello. The book concludes with a chapter on the plays of Franca Rame, assessing the impact of this important figure on contemporary Italian theatre. (shrink)

This paper proposes a conceptual framework for evaluating how social networking platforms fare as epistemic environments for human users. I begin by proposing a situated concept of epistemic agency as fundamental for evaluating epistemic environments. Next, I show that algorithmic personalisation of information makes social networking platforms problematic for users’ epistemic agency because these platforms do not allow users to adapt their behaviour sufficiently. Using the tracing principle inspired by the ethics of self-driving cars, I operationalise it here and identify (...) three requirements that automated epistemic environments need to fulfil: (a) the users need to be afforded a range of skilled actions; (b) users need to be sensitive to the possibility to use their skills; (c) the habits built when adapting to the platform should not undermine the user’s pre-existing skills. I then argue that these requirements are almost impossible to fulfil all at the same time on current SN platforms; yet nevertheless, we need to pay attention to these whenever we evaluate an epistemic environment with automatic features. Finally, as an illustration, I show how Twitter, a popular social networking platform, will fare regarding these requirements. (shrink)

Children are presumptively regarded as incompetent to make their own medical decisions, and the responsibility for making such decisions typically falls to parents. Parental authority is not unlimited, however, and ethical guidelines identifying appropriate bounds on this authority are needed. One proposal currently gaining support is the Harm Threshold (HT), which asserts that the state may only legitimately intervene in parental decision-making when serious and preventable harm to children is likely. This paper considers two questions: in virtue of what underlying (...) principle or property does the HT gain its purported justification?; and does this underlying principle or property ground the HT as its proponents conceive of it? I identify two separate grounds represented in the literature: (i) J.S. Mill’s Harm Principle; and (ii) the liberty interests of parents. I find that the HT is not sufficiently grounded in either of these, revealing a substantial conceptual difficulty for its advocates. (shrink)

Building on agency and resource-based view theories, this study investigates the level of environmental disclosure (ED) practices of family versus non-family firms and explores the moderating role of board gender diversity. We test our hypotheses on a 3-year (2018–2020) panel data sample comprising 324 observations of Italian small- and medium-sized enterprises traded on the Euronext Growth Milan. Findings show that, compared to non-family firms, companies with a family firm status are characterized by lower levels of ED. Gender diversity on the (...) board, however, moderates this relationship, reducing this gap, to the extent that the family firm status is associated with higher ED when the number of women directors is high enough to constitute a critical mass. We consequently contribute to the studies on family business, corporate governance, and corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

The main research question that this paper aims to answer is: ‘In what does today’s attack on humanities consist and how can humanities be defended?’ In order to answer this research question, one needs first to describe how the humanities have argued for their usefulness before the Bologna Process; second, provide reasons for the claim that the Bologna Process would be a new type of attack; and third, analyse the new defences for the humanities, so as to discuss whether these (...) are suitable. The main finding of this study was to show that, before deciding what type of education society needs, we need to understand who we are educating through our universities. Taking a stance on “who should we educate?” is prior to being able to judge educational policies. This decision requires a previous justification that requires arguments taken from the field of social justice: Who needs to be educated and who has the right to be educated? Furthermore, we have seen that all answers we have examined to the question underlying educational policies, i.e. ‘who is being educated?’, were linked at some level with the citizenship issue. By defining who is a full citizen, an answer to the question who had the right to a humanistic education was implicitly answered. Nussbaum’s project to universalise the definition of democratic citizenship would ensure a basis for providing humanistic education for all. Such a line of arguing would provide humanities to the well-regarded status they had starting from the Renaissance times, but this time not as a device for exclusion, but inclusion for all. We have tried to show that, by defending the humanities, one defends the idea of a plurality of educational purposes, the right to build one’s life based on an education that is not submitted to the political goals of the day, ultimately the right to have a dissenting voice and a different perspective on life. By defending humanities, one defends the true ‘usefulness’ of education, namely its potential for constructing democratic citizenship for all. (shrink)

The practice of taking hand-written notes in lectures has been rediscovered recently because of several studies on its learning efficacy in the mainstream media. Students are enjoined to ditch their laptops and return to pen and paper. Such arguments presuppose that notes are taken in order to be revisited after the lecture. Learning is seen to happen only after the event. We argue instead that student’s note-taking is an educational practice worthy in itself as a way to relate to the (...) live event of the lecture. We adopt a phenomenological approach inspired by Vilém Flusser’s phenomenology of gestures, which assumes that a gesture like note-taking is always an event of thinking with media in which a certain freedom is expressed. But Flusser’s description of note-taking focusses on the individual note-taker. What about students’ note-taking in a lecture hall as a collective gesture? Nietzsche considered note-taking ‘mechanical,’ as if students were automatons who mindlessly transcribed a verbal flow, while Benjamin considered it an inaesthetic gesture: at best, boring; at worst, ‘painful to watch.’ In contrast, we argue that the educational potentiality of note-taking—or better, note-making—can be grasped only if we account for its mediaticity (as writing that displaces the voice), together with but distinct from its political potentiality as a collective mediality (as a ‘means without end’). Note-taking enables us to see how collective thinking emerges in the lecture, a kind of thinking that belongs neither to the lecturer nor the student, but emerges in the relation of attention established between the lecturer, students and their object of thought. (shrink)

From the perspective of meta-analysis done in a qualitative structure, the study puts forward an inventory of the communist regime studies in the following ways: 1. The re-evaluation of the social ideology-propaganda-practice relationship of the equality between sexes in the communist regime. 2. The contextualization and the evolution of the social representations of a woman's role. 3. The effects of some political decisions, which can count as aggressiveness of a state towards its citizens (770/1966 Decree).

Many low-income college students are barred from food assistance for no reason other than the fact that they are pursuing a college education. Based on 22 interviews that capture the experiences of food insecure college students as they attempt to navigate SNAP, this study shows how low enrollment in the program and food insecurity are the predictable outcomes of policy decisions intended to restrict access to both free public higher education and public assistance in the 1980’s and 1990’s and were (...) shaped by the racialized politics of deservingness. By documenting the barriers students encounter attempting to access food assistance, this study shows how these policies play out in the lives of students at the City University of New York today. Ultimately, the politics of deservingness create significant direct and indirect barriers to SNAP enrollment for students and limit policy makers’ and advocates’ attempts to expand SNAP and address food insecurity on college campuses. (shrink)