A book that divides its sections like Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophico demands careful reading. Furthermore, the book by Tiziana Andina entitled The Problem of Perception in Nietzsche Philosophy is prefaced by Maurizio Ferraris, who is the Director of a series of studies of The Laboratory for Ontology in Turin. Approaching Andina’s book, one realizes that it is a remarkable work, an important contribution to Nietzsche studies; this is because her scientific and philosophical knowl...

R. M. Friedberg demonstrated the existence of a recursive functional that agrees with no Banach-Mazur functional on the class of recursive functions. In this paper Friedberg's result is generalized to both α-recursive functionals and weak α-recursive functionals for all admissible ordinals α such that $\lambda , where α * is the Σ 1 -projectum of α and λ is the Σ 2 -cofinality of α. The theorem is also established for the metarecursive case, α = ω 1 , (...) where α * = λ = ω. (shrink)

Dans cet article, on soutient que Merleau-Ponty, à la fin de sa production philosophique, réhabilite ontologiquement le naturalisme caractéristique à la psychanalyse freudienne. Le philosophe identifie, dans le naturalisme articulé par Freud dans sa théorie, une description de la Nature qui, contrairement au subjectivisme philosophique des philosophies de la conscience, et aussi contrairement au mécanisme causal des sciences naturelles modernes, ne favorise pas une « image fantastique de l’homme, de l’esprit et de l’histoire » contraposée à l’inexorable existence d’une Nature (...) en soi. Ainsi, faire une « psychanalyse de la Nature », analyser les motifs de la réévaluation positive de la théorie freudienne dans les textes ultimes de Merleau-Ponty, implique faire ce qui a été l’intention du philosophe tout au long de la critique dirigée à la psychanalyse, c’est-à-dire : extraire de la théorie psychanalytique freudienne des conséquences philosophiques d’un certain ordre, ce que Freud n’a pas été capable de faire – et qui n’était pas non plus son but.In this article we maintain that at the end of his philosophical work, Merleau-Ponty ontologically rehabilitates the naturalism characteristic of Freudian psychoanalysis. In the naturalism articulated by Freud in his theoretical work, Merleau-Ponty identifies a description of Nature that, contrary to the subjectivism of philosophies of consciousness and also contrary to the mechanistic causality of the contemporary natural sciences, does not favor the “fantastic image of man, spirit and history,” counter-posed to the inexorable existence of Nature in itself. Consequently, to do a psychoanalysis of Nature, to analyze the motifs of a positive reevaluation of Freudian theory in Merleau-Ponty’s last works, implies fulfilling the intention he held all through his critique of psychoanalysis. That is to say, it implies extracting from Freudian psychoanalytic theory particular philosophical results, which Freud himself was not able to do—and which was not his aim.In questo articolo sosteniamo che Merleau-Ponty, al termine del suo percorso filosofico, arriva a riabilitare ontologicamente il naturalismo caratteristico della psicoanalisi freudiana. Il filosofo identifica nel naturalismo articolato da Freud una descrizione della Natura che, contrariamente al soggettivismo delle filosofie della coscienza, e, simmetricamente, al meccanicismo delle moderne scienze naturali, cessa di promuovere un’“immagine fantastica dell’uomo, dello spirito e della storia” contrapposta all’esistenza inesorabile di una Natura in sé. Così, svolgere l’idea di una “psicoanalisi della Natura”, e analizzare i motivi della rivalutazione della teoria freudiana negli ultimi testi di Merleau-Ponty, significa prolungare quella che è stata l’intenzione del filosofo lungo l’intero percorso della sua critica alla psicoanalisi: e cioè estrarre dalla teoria psicoanalitica freudiana conseguenze filosofiche appartenenti a un ordine che Freud non ha saputo raggiungere né si è dato il compito di raggiungere. (shrink)

In questo articolo i doni di cui Gerolamo ringrazia Eustochio e Marcella (epist. 31 e 44) sono riletti alla luce della tradizione classica dello scambio di regali, collegata specialmente ai Saturnalia: infatti, da un lato, essi trovano riscontro negli Xenia e negli Apohoreta di Marziale; dall’altro, Gerolamo, quando ne fornisce un’interpretazione, si conforma a un tipo di ricezione attiva del dono – una sua “decifrazione” –, che talora è attestata nella tradizione antica, specialmente saturnalizia (cfr. e.g. Petron. 56). In (...) termini più generali, Gerolamo realizza un’appropriazione cristiana dello scambio dei regali, offrendo un saggio di come la nuova “aristocrazia della fede”, da lui propugnata, non disdegni di rivivere i “riti” e l’etichetta propri delle élites, con l’intenzione sia di esserne legittimata agli occhi del mondo, sia – forse – di restituirli al loro significato vero. (shrink)

Many of our attitudes are non-culpable: there was nothing that we should have done to avoid holding them. I argue that we can still be blameworthy for non-culpable attitudes: they can impair our relationships in ways that make our full practice of apology and forgiveness intelligible. My argument poses a new challenge to indirect voluntarists, who attempt to reduce all responsibility for attitudes to responsibility for prior actions and omissions. Rationalists, who instead explain attitudinal responsibility by appeal to reasons-responsiveness, can (...) make sense of blameworthiness for non-culpable attitudes. In response, voluntarists could propose a revision of our actual practices. This would lead us into a quite different debate. (shrink)

Stephen Davies taught philosophy at the University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand. His research specialty is the philosophy of art. He is a former President of the American Society for Aesthetics. His books include Definitions of Art (Cornell UP, 1991), Musical Meaning and Expression (Cornell UP, 1994), Musical Works and Performances (Clarendon, 2001), Themes in the Philosophy of Music (OUP, 2003), Philosophical Perspectives on Art (OUP, 2007), Musical Understandings and Other Essays on the Philosophy of Music (OUP, 2011), The Artful (...) Species: Aesthetics, Art, and Evolution (OUP, 2012), The Philosophy of Art (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016 second ed.), and Adornment: What Self-decorations Tells Us about Who We Are, (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020). (shrink)

Massimo Reichlin, Fondamenti di bioetica; Antonio D'Aloia, a cura di, La tempesta del Covid. Dimensioni bioetiche; Maria Zanichelli, a cura di, La persona come categoria bioetica. Prospettive umanistiche; Ferruccio Andolfi, a cura di, L'uomo e l'unico; Roberto Cipriani, L'incerta fede. Un'indagine quanti-qualitativa in Italia; Marcella D'Abbiero, Affetti privati, pubbliche virtù. La psiche come fattore politico.

As a scientific, materialist worldview becomes increasingly difficult to repudiate, and as philosophers increasingly uncover and articulate the conceptual nature of morality and distinctively moral normativity, the threat of moral anti-realism becomes more and more real. This perspective is argued in Chapter One. Chapter Two discusses how laws and bioethical trends that pertain to the clinical management of patients in a vegetative coma differ from country to country and continue to give rise to unresolved legal debates and scientific controversy. Chapter (...) Three covers how caregivers in palliative care must be supported to better understand patients hopes and needs, making them comfortable to decide when or how much they want to eat. Chapter Four synthesises findings from four empirical studies conducted in Western Africa (Togo) on topics related to the autonomy (end of life decision-making among terminally-ill patients), benevolence and non-malevolence (breaking bad news to elderly patients and their families), and justice (informal payments to physicians, criminal prosecution in cases of HIV transmission) principles of bioethics. Finally, Chapter Five argues that expert members in Ethics committees have an unfair upper-hand, with their decisions trumping other debates in committee deliberations. Qualitative research is brought to bear which illustrates this and which also notes how expertise dilutes the training given to newly appointed ethics committee members. (shrink)

Spatial region concepts such as “front,” “back,” “left,” and “right” reflect our typical interaction with space, and the corresponding surrounding regions have different statuses in memory. We examined the representation of spatial directions in the auditory space, specifically in how far natural response actions, such as orientation movements toward a sound source, would affect the categorization of egocentric auditory space. While standing in the middle of a circle with 16 loudspeakers, participants were presented acoustic stimuli coming from the loudspeakers in (...) randomized order, and verbally described their directions by using the concept labels “front,” “back,” “left,” “right,” “front-right,” “front-left,” “back-right,” and “back-left.” Response actions varied in three blocked conditions: (1) facing front, (2) turning the head and upper body to face the stimulus, and (3) turning the head and upper body plus pointing with the hand and outstretched arm toward the stimulus. In addition to a protocol of the verbal utterances, motion capture and video recording generated a detailed corpus for subsequent analysis of the participants’ behavior. Chi-square tests revealed an effect of response condition for directions within the left and right sides. We conclude that movement-based response actions influence the representation of auditory space, especially within the sides’ regions. Moreover, the representation of auditory space favors the front and the back regions in terms of resolution, which is possibly related to the physiological characteristics of the human auditory system, as well as to the ecological requirements of action control in the different regions. (shrink)

Aristotle often describes virtue in an idealized way, indicating that the virtuous person will never err or have a bad desire. Yet, drawing from empirical work on character and personality, many philosophers and psychologists believe that most people’s behavior stems from situational factors and that good behavior often stems from the wrong motives, such as maintaining a good mood or relieving feelings of guilt. Further, some suggest that the variability in most people’s behavior raises a challenge to traditional categories of (...) character such as virtue, vice, continence, and incontinence. Thus, it may seem impossible to develop virtue and that people lack character as Aristotle conceived of it. Drawing from Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Politics, I develop accounts of actual virtue and the character of ordinary people and respond to these two concerns. (shrink)

The globalism objection poses two distinct challenges to Aristotelian views of virtue. On the one hand, the consistency thesis demands that a virtue is behaviorally expressed in a wide range of trait-relevant situations. On the other hand, the evaluative integration thesis suggests that the presence of one virtue increases the probability of other, similar virtues, posing a problem for Aristotle’s reciprocity of the virtues thesis. I show that, by contrast to contemporary Aristotelian views and views attributed to Aristotle, Aristotle’s own (...) theory of virtue escapes the globalism objection. I address the consistency thesis by showing that each of Aristotle’s moral virtues are narrower than commonly assumed. I then address the evaluative integration thesis through a discussion of practical wisdom, showing that Aristotle believed one could fall short of perfect virtue, while still being fully virtuous. The upshot is that, despite idealizations of virtue throughout the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle held a realistic account of virtue, one that is different from contemporary Aristotelian views, and one that is empirically adequate insofar as it allows for more than a few virtuous people. (shrink)

This contribution contextualizes the relationship between fragility and education in the light of people’s changing conditions and perspectives, and their impact on educational processes, focusing in particular on the consequences of the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. By doing so, it introduces this focus, illustrates its coherence, and explains the basic methodological choice, namely the adoption of the Systematic Review, to explore different aspects of the relationship between fragility and education.

The article proposes looking at children's literature, particularly the form of the picture book, as an educational resource for producing body awareness in school. Eight reading steps for as many bodily actions aimed at naming the body, activating it, getting to know it and moving it in space, on and off the pages; between grounding, listening, breathing, playing and moving, the rediscovery of gestures and anatomical truths invites to deepen self-knowledge as a preliminary act to the encounter and relationship with (...) the other and with the environment. The picture books by their specificities of short form and cross-over, offer, even in non-fiction production, the possibility of bringing attention back to the body dimension within the school and educational debate, where it lives today in a state of malaise and oblivion. Meaningful conversations, explorations and relationships flow from the pages of the albums: research on language as a tool that gives dignity and value to each person, and encounters with the artistic representation of the world as an infinite mirror of its multiplicity and variety, constitute valuable opportunities for an education that is aware of the wholeness of learners and teachers and the integrated, erotic and embodied dimension of their relationship. (shrink)

Increasingly, biologists are using computers to model and to create biological representations. However, the exponential growth in available biological dataposes a challenge for experimental and theoretical researchers in both Biology and in Computer Science. In short, when even the simple retrieval of relevant biological information for a researcher becomes a complex task — its analysis and synthesis with other biological information will become even more daunting and unlikely. In this context, specially organized ‘structures of representation’ are needed for the efficient (...) interpretation of experimentally generated data. The “semantic Web” is a recent trend in networking techniques that we will examine here as a possible strategy for the computation of biological data — one that may allow us to take into account both the semiotic dimensions of biological processes, as well as their dynamic organization into stable and systemic levels. Thereupon, we propose that a semantic network for biology could benefit from principles rooted in such previous representation efforts as computer-generated ‘landscapes’ and ‘physical attractors’ — and that such principles could, in turn, then be better integrated into biological research through the development of a more semiotically informed user / computer interface design. (shrink)

Is freedom a plausible political value for animals? If so, does this imply that animals are owed legal personhood rights or can animals be free but remain human property? Drawing on different conceptions of freedom, I will argue that while positive freedom, libertarian self-ownership, and republican freedom are not plausible political values for animals, liberal ‘option-freedom’ is. However, because such option-freedom is in principle compatible with different legal statuses, animal freedom does not conceptually imply a right to legal self-ownership. Nonetheless, (...) a concern for animal option-freedom means that humans do have a pro tanto duty of non-interference. Arguments familiar from the liberal tradition moreover imply that such a duty speaks for drastic reforms of existing animal law. But it does not imply wholesale abolitionism: it neither rules out positive duties towards animals nor means that we should abandon all interactions with animals. (shrink)

This qualitative classroom study investigated the development of pragmatic competence in academic discussions through content analysis of student reflective writing. The aims of the study were: to understand the greatest challenges that students faced during the learning process, the causes of those challenges, and the most successful strategies that students employed to overcome the challenges. In addition, the analysis investigated other significant themes in the reflective writing that related to the students’ experiences in developing their pragmatic competence in discussions. Five (...) advanced English for Academic Purposes (EAP) students at a Sino-US institution in China participated over the course of a semester. Results showed that common challenges included: hesitation resulting in missed opportunities to speak, lack of clarity when speaking, inability to repair communication breakdowns, and difficulty with listening comprehension. Self-reflection allowed the learners to understand the various reasons for the challenges they faced and to develop appropriate pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic strategies for coping with them. It also enabled the instructor to make suggestions suited to learners’ specific needs. In addition to revealing specific challenges, causes, and strategies that students employed, themes that emerged through content analysis included the impact of students’ emotional lives on their learning and performance, as well as the value of authentic communication in the development of pragmatic competence for academic discussions. This exploratory classroom investigation provides suggestions for teaching pragmatic competence in academic discussions and for additional classroom explorations that empower learners to develop autonomy. (shrink)

ArgumentFollowing an international trend, Italy has reformed its university system, especially concerning methods and tools for research evaluation, which are increasingly focused on a number of bibliometric indexes. To study the effects of these changes, we analyze the changing profiles of economists who have won competitions for full professorship in the last few decades in the country. We concentrate on individual characteristics and on scientific production. We show that the identification of a univocal and standardized concept of “research quality” within (...) the new research assessments has progressively imposed a strategy of “homologation,” especially for women. We find that women economists are at a higher risk of discrimination than their male colleagues and thus they are more likely to conform their research activities to the standardized profile imposed by the gender-blind application of simplistic bibliometric methods. (shrink)

_ Source: _Page Count 26 Is freedom a plausible political value for animals? If so, does this imply that animals are owed legal personhood rights or can animals be free but remain human property? Drawing on different conceptions of freedom, I will argue that while positive freedom, libertarian self-ownership, and republican freedom are not plausible political values for animals, liberal ‘option-freedom’ is. However, because such option-freedom is in principle compatible with different legal statuses, animal freedom does not conceptually imply a (...) right to legal self-ownership. Nonetheless, a concern for animal option-freedom means that humans do have a _pro tanto_ duty of non-interference. Arguments familiar from the liberal tradition moreover imply that such a duty speaks for drastic reforms of existing animal law. But it does not imply wholesale abolitionism: it neither rules out positive duties towards animals nor means that we should abandon all interactions with animals. (shrink)