Human beings inhabit a symbolic reality that articulates meaning. This is culture understood as a web of meanings that actually builds our identity by providing guidance in the complexity of our environment. It is the complex interplay between identity and alterity, between interiority and exteriority, between familiarity and strangeness. Worldviews set up borders that delimit one's own world and others' ground by establishing stereotypes and prejudices. This article presents the results of a research project on prejudices towards the other in (...) students majoring in Education and Psychology with the aim of offering some reflections on what is at stake in social exclusion policies. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine Ruth Barcan Marcus's early formal work on modal systems and the deduction theorem, both for the material and the strict conditional. Marcus proved that the deduction theorem for the material conditional does not hold for system S2 but holds for S4. This last result is at odds with the recent claim that without proper restrictions the deduction theorem fails also for S4. I explain where the contrast stems from. For the strict conditional, Marcus proved the (...) deduction theorem for S4 though restricted to arguments with necessary premises. I discuss Marcus's result and analyze her philosophical position on the significance of the deduction theorem for modal systems designed to express the notion of deducibility. (shrink)

Dès le début de la Guerre civile, les insurgés ont besoin du concours des femmes de la Zone nationale. La Section féminine de la Phalange apparaît bientôt comme l’organisation la plus adéquate pour susciter la mobilisation féminine et pour la contrôler. La propagande diffusée auprès des militantes tend à fomenter un conditionnement idéologique susceptible à la fois :1) de justifier l’utilisation des compétences des femmes en temps de guerre sans entrer en contradiction avec l’idéal traditionnel de la femme au foyer,2) (...) de garantir un retour volontaire — et militant — des femmes au foyer après la guerre. (shrink)

Dès le début de la Guerre civile, les insurgés ont besoin du concours des femmes de la Zone nationale. La Section féminine de la Phalange apparaît bientôt comme l’organisation la plus adéquate pour susciter la mobilisation féminine et pour la contrôler. La propagande diffusée auprès des militantes tend à fomenter un conditionnement idéologique susceptible à la fois :1) de justifier l’utilisation des compétences des femmes en temps de guerre sans entrer en contradiction avec l’idéal traditionnel de la femme au foyer,2) (...) de garantir un retour volontaire — et militant — des femmes au foyer après la guerre. (shrink)

In this article I contrast two opposing forms of essentialism, definitional and transcendental versus productivist and historical, and trace both forms back to Kripke's Naming and Necessity (1980). Definitional essentialism, as developed by Fine, centers on kind-membership. Historical essentialism, as anticipated by Prior and developed by Almog, puts origin at its center. The article focuses on the fundamentally distinct manners in which these two views handle the necessity of origin thesis. In the final section of the article, inspired by a (...) Nietzschean genealogical methodology, I pursue a naturalization strategy and conclude that rather than origin being necessary, it is essentialist necessity that reduces to origin. (shrink)

We argue in favor of merely disjunctive effects, namely cases in which an event or fact, C, is not a cause of an effect, E1, and is also not a cause of a distinct effect, E2, and yet C is a cause of the disjunctive effect (E1 orE2). Disjunctive effects let us retain the additivity and the distributivity of causation. According to additivity, if C is a cause of E1 and C is a cause of E2, then C is a (...) cause of E1 and E2. According to distributivity, if C is a cause of E1 and E2, then C is a cause of E1 and C is a cause of E2. We draw an analogy between causation and intensional notions like believing, wanting, and owing, which also admit of merely disjunctive cases. We argue that both the Lewisian counterfactual account of causation (including its recent emendation by Sartorio) and the contrastive account of causation fail to properly account for this phenomenon. (shrink)

In the last 30 years much philosophical discussion has been generated by Kripke’s proof of the necessity of origin for material objects presented in footnote 56 of ‘Naming and Necessity’. I consider the two most popular reconstructions of Kripke’s argument: one appealing to the necessary sufficiency of origin, and the other employing a strong independence principle allegedly derived from the necessary local nature of prevention. I argue that, to achieve a general result, both reconstructions presuppose an implicit Humean atomistic thesis (...) of recombination, according to which any two (non-overlapping) possible objects can simultaneously coexist in one and the same world. Yet recombination ill accords with the other assumptions of the proofs. I also argue that the locality of prevention does not entail strong independence. (shrink)

Much has happened in modal logic since 1947. In particular, in regard to the problem of interpreting such logics. In that fateful year Quine published his seminal paper “The Problem of Interpreting Modal Logic” from which this work takes inspiration. Since then a certain kind of model theory – universally referred to as “possible worlds semantics” – has come to dominate both advanced research and introductory textbooks. Many would say that the problem of interpreting modal logic has been resolved. In (...) the work below I argue that some of the 1947 problems raised by Quine have indeed been resolved by the possible worlds model theory. But I also claim – perhaps against common perception, but in line with Quine’s persisting fifty-year-old skepticism – that one problem of Quine’s original paper is still alive: the problem of interpreting modal logic. Surprisingly, Quine’s best ally on these matters turns out to be the very philosopher who engineered the possible worlds model theory: Saul Kripke. (shrink)

In this paper I argue against the commonly received view that Kripke's formal Possible World Semantics (PWS) reflects the adoption of a metaphysical interpretation of the modal operators. I consider in detail Kripke's three main innovations vis-à-vis Carnap's PWS: a new view of the worlds, variable domains of quantification, and the adoption of a notion of universal validity. I argue that all these changes are driven by the natural technical development of the model theory and its related notion of validity: (...) they are dictated by merely formal considerations, not interpretive concerns. I conclude that Kripke's model theoretic semantics does not induce a metaphysical reading of necessity, and is formally adequate independently of the specific interpretation of the modal operators. (shrink)

In this paper, I reconstruct Quine’s arguments against quantified modal logic, from the early 1940’s to the early 1960’s. Quine’s concerns were not technical. Quine was looking for a coherent interpretation of quantified-in English modal sentences. I argue that Quine’s main thesis is that the intended objectual interpretation of the quantifiers is incompatible with any semantic reading of the modal operators, for example as expressing analytic necessity, unless the entities in the domain of quantification are intensions, i.e. definitional entities. The (...) difficulty is that it makes no sense to say of an ordinary object that it bears a property necessarily or contingently when the necessity or contingency in question is analytic. However, starting in 1960, Quine claims that quantified-in modal sentences can be coherently interpreted only as essentialist predications. When we say about an object that it necessarily F ’s, we can only coherently mean that it essentially F ’s. In the paper, I argue that adequately qualified the thesis is plausible. Two important qualifications are needed. The first is the assumption that satisfaction is an irreducibly predicative notion, making any explication of satisfaction in terms of truth inadequate. The second is the ontological rejection of purely semantic, i.e. merely definitional, entities. With these qualifications in place, Quine’s rejection of the combination of objectual quantifiers and semantic modalities can be upheld. In this way, we vindicate a qualified version of Quine’s conjecture that quantified modal logic is committed to essentialism. (shrink)

This paper centers on Takashi Yagisawa’s book Worlds and Individuals, Possible and Otherwise (Oxford: 2010), which provides a novel and systematic analysis of modality and time. I consider the overall structure of Yagisawa’s treatment of modality and time, and discuss in detail the following three topics: (i) Possible worlds as modal indices, (ii) Trans-world identity, (iii) The claim that existence, unlike reality, is relative. My main conclusion is that Yagisawa's view of modality is driven by a strong primitivism, leading to (...) the endorsement of possibility, actuality, and presentness, but also possible worlds and times, as irreducible. The resulting view is saddled with the typical problems of primitivism on the one hand, and modal realism on the other. I criticize the view that existence is relative. (shrink)

In her recent defense of predicativism for proper names, Delia Graff Fara proposes the following non-metalinguistic being-called condition for the applicability of names as predicates: A name ‘N’ is true of a thing if and only if it is called N. The BCC is supposed to hold for names only. In this essay I criticize Fara’s BCC by arguing that the word ‘called’ is ambiguous, and that the BCC holds only for the particular sense of ‘calling’ as naming. I revise (...) accordingly Fara’s BCC and propose in its place a non-metalinguistic being-named condition. I also argue, against Fara, that being-named conditions are not unique to proper names: they hold for mass nouns, common count nouns, as well as for family names, which I distinguish from surnames. Finally, I discuss honorific titles and propose a being-entitled condition according to which a title ‘T’ is true of a thing just in case it is dubbed T. I conclude the paper with pragmatic, syntactic, as well as semantic considerations in favor of the thesis that names are a subspecies of non-hereditary, honorific titles. (shrink)

In this paper I explore three related topics emerging from Prior's work on the logic of time. First, what is the proper province of logic, if any? Is temporal (modal) logic just logic, on a par with the paradigmatic case of first-order quantification theory or even simple propositional logic? Second, what counts as an interpretation of a formal system? In particular, can formal semantics provide an interpretation? Third, what is the proper role of the meta-theory? In connection with this last (...) question we will see how Prior's attitude towards instants of time may teach us something about the analogous case of possible worlds. (shrink)

In this paper I analyze David Kaplan’s essay “Opacity”. In “Opacity” Kaplan attempts to dismiss Quine’s concerns about quantification across intensional (modal and intentional) operators. I argue that Kaplan succeeds in showing that quantification across intensional operators is logically coherent and that quantified modal logic is strictly speaking not committed to essentialism. However, I also argue that this is not in and of itself sufficient to support Kaplan’s more ambitious attempt to move beyond purely logical results and provide unified, uncontroversial (...) interpretations of both “believes” and “necessarily”. In the paper I raise several questions about the subject matter of logic and the role of semantics, with special focus on singular propositions. (shrink)

“Modal logic was conceived in sin: the sin of confusing use and mention.” So quips Quine. The stigma stuck with modal logic for a while. But by the mid-sixties, a whole cluster of mathematically elegant interpretations of modal logic became available. All are natural extensions of the classical Tarskian semantics of predicate logic. By the mid-seventies, Quine’s criticisms seemed obsolete. Today, we teach the model theory of modal logic as a matter of course. Quine’s “interpretive problem” is just forgotten. The (...) purpose of my dissertation is to revamp Quine’s thesis: the very foundations of modal logic—simple propositional modal logic, even before quantifiers are added—are shaky. Quine holds that the natural interpretation of the operator “necessarily” is in terms of a full-blooded metaphysical notion of real necessity. Such a notion, Quine conjectures, is committed to the “metaphysical jungle of Aristotelian essentialism”. Hence, the intended interpretation is to be rejected. Thus Quine: so much the worse for real necessity. An alternative comes to mind: a meta-level, formal rather than real, semantic interpretation of the operator of necessity. In the late forties, Carnap developed this line of interpretation which culminates in the aforementioned model theory (“Kripke’s possible world semantics”) in the sixties. On this basis a formal interpretation is introduced: it grounds necessity in the notion of model theoretic validity. As pointed by friends of the formal interpretation (Marcus, Parsons and Kaplan), no invidious essentialist claim is verified. But have Quine’s concerns been answered? Yes and no. Technical problems regarding quantification across modal operators, substitutivity, matters of scope, and the basis of cross-world identification have indeed been solved. However, no real interpretation of “necessarily” has been provided. I argue that the seeds of such an interpretation are present in Kripke’s philosophical discussion of de re necessities in Naming and Necessity. It is not model theoretic, and it does not reduce necessity to some non-modal notion, just as Quine predicted. Even more in his vein, the real interpretation is (i) metaphysically, grounded indeed in essentialist theses, and (ii) epistemologically, forced to give up Kant’s ideal that all necessities are known a priori. (shrink)

Despite the emergence of computer games as a dominant cultural industry, we know little or nothing about the ethics of computer games. Considerations of the morality of computer games seldom go beyond intermittent portrayals of them in the mass media as training devices for teenage serial killers. In this first scholarly exploration of the subject, Miguel Sicart addresses broader issues about the ethics of games, the ethics of playing the games, and the ethical responsibilities of game designers. He argues (...) that computer games are ethical objects, that computer game players are ethical agents, and that the ethics of computer games should be seen as a complex network of responsibilities and moral duties. Players should not be considered passive amoral creatures; they reflect, relate, and create with ethical minds. The games they play are ethical systems, with rules that create gameworlds with values at play. Drawing on concepts from philosophy and game studies, Sicart proposes a framework for analyzing the ethics of computer games as both designed objects and player experiences. After presenting his core theoretical arguments and offering a general theory for understanding computer game ethics, Sicart offers case studies examining single-player games, multiplayer games, and online gameworlds from an ethical perspective. He explores issues raised by unethical content in computer games and its possible effect on players and offers a synthesis of design theory and ethics that could be used as both analytical tool and inspiration in the creation of ethical gameplay. (shrink)

Why computer games can be ethical, how players use their ethical values in gameplay, and the implications for game design.

Digital COVID certificates are a novel public health policy to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic. These immunity certificates aim to incentivize vaccination and to deny international travel or access to essential spaces to those who are unable to prove that they are not infectious. In this article, we start by describing immunity certificates and highlighting their differences from vaccination certificates. Then, we focus on the ethical, legal, and social issues involved in their use, namely autonomy and consent, data protection, equity, and (...) international mobility from a global fairness perspective. The main conclusion of our analysis is that digital COVID certificates are only acceptable if they meet certain conditions: that they should not process personal data beyond what is strictly necessary for the aimed goals, that equal access to them should be guaranteed, and that they should not restrict people’s autonomy to access places where contagion is unlikely. We conclude that, if such conditions are guaranteed, digital COVID certificates could contribute to mitigating some of the most severe socioeconomic consequences of the pandemic. (shrink)

This paper aims to analyse how the discourse of CEO letters and other factors influence community involvement and Social Licence to Operate (SLO) in the mining industry. The analysis is based on qualitative information disclosed in sustainability reports and CEO letters from 32 mining firms. Content analysis was undertaken to obtain data for the study, and then a regression analysis and a multiple correspondence analysis were used to test the hypotheses defined in the study. The results indicate that the CEO (...) discourse influences how a firm expresses the importance of gaining its SLO, the philanthropic activities in which companies become involved and the destinations of the investments in the communities in which they operate. The results also show changes in the discourse between 2011 and 2015, which are, in part, explained by the difficult situation experienced by the sector during this period. The paper contributes to the Corporate Social Responsibility literature by integrating different theories from this field into the SLO framework. The analysis carried out and the results obtained are useful for both CEOs and Sustainability Managers, especially in managing their relationships with the communities where they operate or intend to operate. (shrink)

En Los Cuatro Acuerdos, un éxito de ventas en todo el mundo, don Miguel Ruiz revelaba cómo el proceso de educación, o «domesticación», nos hace olvidar nuestra sabiduría innata. A lo largo de la vida establecemos muchos acuerdos que van en nuestra contra y nos causan un sufrimiento innecesario. Los Cuatro Acuerdos nos ayudan a romper estos acuerdos limitadores y a substituirlos por otros que nos aportan libertad, felicidad y amor. Ahora don Miguel Ruiz, junto con su hijo (...) don Jose Ruiz, nos ofrece una nueva perspectiva de Los Cuatro Acuerdos y un acuerdo nuevo y poderoso para transformar nuestra vida en nuestro cielo personal: el quinto acuerdo. El Quinto Acuerdo nos permite adquirir una conciencia más profunda del poder del yo verdadero y recuperar la autenticidad con la que nacimos. En esta absorbente continuación del libro que ha cambiado la vida de millones de personas de todo el mundo, se nos recuerda el mejor regalo que podemos hacernos: la libertad de ser quienes realmente somos. Más sobre el libro Imagínate llevando una vida totalmente nueva: una vida en la que eres libre de ser quien realmente eres. Ya no te riges por lo que los demás piensan de ti. Imagínate viviendo sin juzgarte a ti mismo ni juzgar a los demás, sin temer ser juzgado. Te aceptas tal como eres y aceptas a los demás tal como son. Imagínate viviendo sin estar en conflicto contigo ni con la gente. Te respetas a ti mismo y a los demás, y a cambio ellos te respetan a ti. Imagínate viviendo sin miedo a expresarte ni a explorar la vida. Vives sin temor, sin culparte, sin avergonzarte, sin arrepentirte. Imagínate que te encanta ser como eres. Te gusta tu cuerpo tal como es, te gustan tus emociones tal como son. Imagínate siendo tú mismo. Eres feliz y disfrutas verdaderamente de tu vida. ¡Imagínate viviendo con esta clase de libertad personal! Esta manera de vivir es completamente posible. Otros lo han conseguido y tú también lo harás. Sólo necesitas hacer de los Cinco Acuerdos tu estilo de vida y pronto vivirás tu sueño personal del cielo. (shrink)

Phenomenology in medicine’s main contribution is to present a first-person narrative of illness, in an effort to aid medicine in reaching an accurate disease diagnosis and establishing a personal relationship with patients whose lived experience changes dramatically when severe disease and disabling condition is confirmed. Once disease is diagnosed, the lived experience of illness is reconstructed into a living-with-disease narrative that medicine’s biological approach has widely neglected. Key concepts like health, sickness, illness, disease and the clinical encounter are being diversely (...) and ambiguously used, leading to distortions in socio-medical practices such as medicalization, pharmaceuticalization, emphasis on surveillance medicine. Current definitions of these concepts as employed in phenomenology of medicine are revised, concluding that more stringent semantics ought to reinforce an empirical phenomenological or postphenomenological approach. (shrink)

Using evidence from experimental psychology, some social psychologists, moral philosophers and organizational scholars claim that character traits do not exist and, hence, that the philosophical tradition of virtue ethics is empirically inadequate and should dispose of the notion of character to accommodate the empirical evidence. In this paper, I systematically address the debate between dispositionalists and situationists about the existence, status and properties of character traits and their manifestations in human behavior, with the ultimate goal of responding to the question (...) whether virtue ethicists need to abandon the very enterprise of building a character-based moral theory in business ethics and organizational behavior. In the course of this paper, I shall defend the claim that the situationist argument relies on a misinterpretation of the experimental evidence. (shrink)

Presents advice on how to gain personal freedom by following the wisdom of the Toltecs.

A strikingly original work, Friends of Interpretable Objects re-anchors aesthetics in the object of attention even as it redefines the practice, processes, ...

ABSTRACT:To have a virtue is to possess a certain kind of trait of character that is appropriate in pursuing the moral good at which the virtue aims. Human beings are assumed to be capable of attaining those traits. Yet, a number of scholars are skeptical about the very existence of such character traits. They claim a sizable amount of empirical evidence in their support. This article is concerned with the existence and explanatory power of character as a way to assess (...) the possibility of achieving moral virtue, with particular attention paid to business context. I aim to unsettle the so-called situationist challenge to virtue ethics. In the course of this article, I shall defend four claims, namely, that virtues are more than just behavioral dispositions, that at least some virtues may not be unitary traits, that psychologists cannot infer virtues from overt behavior, and that the situationist data do not account for the observational equivalence of traits. Since it rests on a misconception of what virtue is, the situationist objection remains unconvincing. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:The language of virtue is gaining wider appreciation in the philosophical, psychological, and management literatures. Ethicists and social scientists aim to integrate normative and empirical approaches into a new “science of virtue.” But, I submit, they are talking past each other; they hold radically different notions of what a virtue is. In this paper, I shall examine two conflicting conceptions of virtue, what I call the reductive and the non-reductive accounts of virtue. I shall critically study them and argue that (...) the non-reductive view is the best philosophical account of virtue and the only one that can account for the way we talk about virtue in business and in everyday life. We can only understand what it means to act virtuously through the examination of the attitudes, beliefs, desires, and inclinations of the virtuous agent. I shall illustrate the differences between the reductive and non-reductive accounts by considering the virtue of gratitude. (shrink)

This paper aims to analyse how the discourse of CEO letters and other factors influence community involvement and Social Licence to Operate (SLO) in the mining industry. The analysis is based on qualitative information disclosed in sustainability reports and CEO letters from 32 mining firms. Content analysis was undertaken to obtain data for the study, and then a regression analysis and a multiple correspondence analysis were used to test the hypotheses defined in the study. The results indicate that the CEO (...) discourse influences how a firm expresses the importance of gaining its SLO, the philanthropic activities in which companies become involved and the destinations of the investments in the communities in which they operate. The results also show changes in the discourse between 2011 and 2015, which are, in part, explained by the difficult situation experienced by the sector during this period. The paper contributes to the Corporate Social Responsibility literature by integrating different theories from this field into the SLO framework. The analysis carried out and the results obtained are useful for both CEOs and Sustainability Managers, especially in managing their relationships with the communities where they operate or intend to operate. (shrink)

In their recent article, Brown et al analyse several ethical aspects around immunity passports and put forward some recommendations for implementing them. Although they offer a comprehensive perspective, they overlook two essential aspects. First, while the authors consider the possibility that immunological passports may appear to discriminate against those who do not possess them, the opposite viewpoint of immune people is underdeveloped. We argue that if a person has been tested positive for and recovered from COVID-19, becoming immune to it, (...) she cannot be considered a hazard to public health and, therefore, the curtailment of her fundamental rights is not legitimate. Second, they omit that vaccine distribution will create similar problems related to immunity-based licenses. Vaccine certificates will de facto generate a sort of immunity passport. In the next phases of the pandemic, different immunity statuses will be at stake, because the need to identify who can spread COVID-19 is unavoidable. If a person does not pose a threat to public health because she cannot spread the infection, then her right to freedom of movement should be respected, regardless of how she acquired that immunity. (shrink)

The objective of this article is to analyze the consequences that affect the First Metaphysical Principles when the Ontological Argument is established. Saint Anselm and Descartes do not share the same consideration about the first principles. My intention is to show the differences between their points of view and at the same time contrast these ideas with Polo's theory.

In this article we aim to support the thesis that Nietzsche, from his first work The Birth of Tragedy, to his last texts, such as Twilight of the Idols, in What I owe to the ancients, proposes a radical transvaluation of the meaning of suffering human. He adopts a completely different perspective from Western metaphysical and religious conceptions, which considered suffering as an objection to life, arising from faults, failures, “sins”, which must be expiated through countless constraints, until inexorable death. (...) The nietzschean transvaluation, with its unique tragic perspective, inaugurated in The Birth of Tragedy and sustained throughout his entire work, far from considering suffering as an objection or imperfection of existence, values it and even exalts it as another modality of becoming. vital, consubstantial and inherent in every affirmation, every pleasure, every possibility of joy. (shrink)

Resumo: Abordamos a interpretação nietzschiana sobre “liberdade” e “necessidade” e como o filósofo contesta noções da tradição, vinculadas a essa problemática: “causa e efeito”, “sujeito”, “vontade”, etc. Ele assinala como esses conceitos seriam construtos antropomórficos que não conseguem desvendar as ações geridas apenas pela dinâmica da vontade de potência. Mostramos que Nietzsche, mesmo com sua crítica aos conceitos da tradição, continua empregando noções como “fatalidade”, “necessidade”, que parecem reeditar uma conceituação antropomórfica. Indicamos como ele ultrapassa objeções passíveis de serem feitas (...) a um pensamento oscilante, que parece negar e afirmar a liberdade. Concordamos com intérpretes que destacam como seu estilo suscita deliberadamente paradoxos e aporias, já que seu objetivo, antes que estabelecer uma doutrina ou uma teoria consolidada, visa instigar novas reflexões e experiências de pensamento sobre o agir do homem.: We address nietzschiana interpretation on the issue of freedom and necessity. We show how the German philosopher disputes notions of philosophical tradition, linked to this problem, as “cause and effect”, “subject”, “i”, “will” etc. He points how these concepts would be just anthropomorphic constructs that cannot unravel the nature of the actions; managed only by the power control game of the will of power. We show that Nietzsche, even with this radical criticism of the concepts of tradition, continues to employ notions such as “fatality”, “necessity” that seem to resend to the anthropomorphic conceptualization questioned. We indicate how the author of Zaratustra manages to overcome the objections that may be made to an oscillating thought, which sometimes seems to deny and affirm freedom at different times of his work. We agree with interpreters who point out that Nietzsche’s style deliberately chooses to raise paradoxes and apparent apores, since his goal, before establishing a doctrine or a consolidated theory about freedom and necessity, is an attempt to instigate new reflections, new thought experiences, new paths of meditation on the action of man. (shrink)