This study aimed to investigate the student-athletes' capability to face the academic, sport, and social challenges during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) lockdown and to disclose novel aspects of dual careers. A 32-item online survey encompassing demographic characteristics, sport and university engagement, support and dual-career benefits, physical activity, sitting time, and the time deemed necessary to recover the previous level of performance was developed. Four hundred sixty-seven student-athletes (males: 57%, females: 43%) from 11 countries, competing in 49 different sports (individual: (...) 63.4%, team: 36.6%) at regional (17.5%), national (43.3%), and international (39.2%) levels, and enrolled at high school (21.9%) and university (78.1%) levels completed the survey. During the lockdown, the respondents decreased the time dedicated to sport and academics, although they maintained an active lifestyle. Student-athletes from countries under severe contagion were more likely to train at home, dedicate to academics, and receive support from the coach but less likely receive support from their teachers. With respect to their team sport counterparts, athletes competing in individual sports trained more and were more likely to receive support from their coaches. International athletes showed the highest training time and support from their coaches and as student-athletes. High school students received more support from their coaches and teachers, whereas university students were more likely considering dual careers useful to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic. This study substantiates the relevant role of competitive sports participation in the maintenance of active lifestyles, with student-athletes considering home training and e-learning valuable resources during the lockdown. Furthermore, their sport and academic commitments helped student-athletes cope with the emergency of the COVID-19 pandemic. (shrink)

Mihaela Miroiu, The road towards autonomy. Feminist Political Theories Polirom, Iasi, 2004.

Vehement resentment and indignation are rife in societies emerging from dictatorship or civil conflict. How should institutions deal with these emotions? Arguing for the need to recognize and constructively engage negative public emotions, Mihaela Mihai contributes theoretically to the growing field of transitional justice. Drawing on an extensive philosophical literature and case studies of democratic transitions in South Africa, South America, and Eastern Europe, her book rescues negative emotions from their bad reputation and highlights the obstacles and the opportunities (...) such emotions create for democracy. By valorizing negative emotions, either through the judicial review of transitional justice bills or the criminal trials of victimizers, institutions realize the value of respect and concern for all while contributing to a public culture hospitable to democracy. (shrink)

This study examines the potential of fake news to produce effects on social media engagement as well as the moderating role of education and government approval. We report on a 2x2x2 online experiment conducted in Romania (N=813), in which we manipulated the level of facticity of a news story, its valence, and intention to deceive. Results show that ideologically driven news with a negative valence (rather than fabricated news or other genres, such as satire and parody) have a greater virality (...) potential. However, neither the level of education nor government approval moderate this effect. Additionally, both positive and negative ideologically driven news stories enhance the probability that people will sign a document to support the government (i. e., potential for political engagement on social media). These latter effects are moderated by government approval: Lower levels of government approval lead to less support for the government on social media, as a consequence of fake news exposure. (shrink)

Nehemiah Grew (1641–1712) devoted more than 10 years of his life to developing a science of plants and vegetation, a project in which observation (often at the microscopic level) and experimentation played a prominent role. Grew started by composing a natural history of plants that was concerned with their anatomical structure and functioning, but, as I suggest, he also aimed to use observations and experiments to develop an experimental science that investigated the causes and principles of vegetation. Apart from studying (...) the structure of plants, Grew also treated them as instruments in which different chemical operations took place (such as filtration, digestion, fermentation, and the separation of particles of matter). At a methodological level, the science of plants and vegetation is a project based on experimental comparisons, variations, and extensions that, in some cases, led Grew to revise his explicative hypothesis. (shrink)

This special issue brings to the attention of the scholarly community some of the common features and some of the subtle, but important, differences between Francis Bacon's and Giovan Battista Della Porta's ways of dealing with the reading, selecting, enacting, and recording of recipes. Focusing on questions of genre, intellectual and material context, strategies of research, and strategies of performing recipes, the four papers of this special issue address two major issues. First, they shed new light on the relationship between (...) Della Porta's Magia naturalis and Francis Bacon's Sylva sylvarum. Second, they show that in the recording of their experimental practices, Bacon and Della Porta depart from the traditional “recipe format” and discover new avenues of experimental research. (shrink)

During the last decade there has been burgeoning research concerning the ways in which we should think of and apply the concept of responsibility for Artificial Intelligence. Despite this conceptual richness, there is still a lack of consensus regarding what Responsible AI entails on both conceptual and practical levels. The aim of this paper is to connect the ethical dimension of responsibility in Responsible AI with Aristotelian virtue ethics, where notions of context and dianoetic virtues play a grounding role for (...) the concept of moral responsibility. The paper starts by highlighting the important difficulties in assigning responsibility to either technologies themselves or to their developers. Top-down and bottom-up approaches to moral responsibility are then contrasted, as we explore how they could inform debates about Responsible AI. We highlight the limits of the former ethical approaches and build the case for classical Aristotelian virtue ethics. We show that two building blocks of Aristotle’s ethics, dianoetic virtues and the context of actions, although largely ignored in the literature, can shed light on how we could think of moral responsibility for both AI and humans. We end by exploring the practical implications of this particular understanding of moral responsibility along the triadic dimensions of ethics by design, ethics in design and ethics for designers. (shrink)

So-called predatory journals threaten to diminish the quality of papers and of scientific research. This paper defines what constitutes a predatory journal, and provides a short literature overview. The aim of the research is to explore researchers’ and librarians’ awareness of predatory journals, using the example of Croatia, an EU country. Several institutions control the quality of Croatian scientific journals, so there are no predatory journals in Croatia. However, Croatian scientists publish their papers in foreign journals and thus have to (...) be aware of all the threats of predatory journals. An online questionnaire was sent to researchers and librarians in order to find out if they understand what predatory journals are, if the researchers publish in those journals, and if the librarians educate their users about those journals. Results show that almost 90% of researchers are not sure what constitutes a predatory journal. Almost 50% of librarians are familiar with the term, but only less than 10% of librarians provide education on the topic. Raising awareness about predatory journals among scientists could prevent negative consequences such as the loss of scientific integrity and the risk of minimizing the visibility of research results. Libraries should play an important role in providing user education. (shrink)

With this nuanced and interdisciplinary work, political theorist Mihaela Mihai tackles several interrelated questions: How do societies remember histories of systemic violence? Who is excluded from such histories' cast of characters? And what are the political costs of selective remembering in the present? Building on insights from political theory, social epistemology, and feminist and critical race theory, Mihai argues that a double erasure often structures hegemonic narratives of complex violence: of widespread, heterogeneous complicity and of "impure" resistances, not easily (...) subsumed to exceptionalist heroic models. In dialogue with care ethicists and philosophers of art, she then suggests that such narrative reductionism can be disrupted aesthetically through practices of "mnemonic care," that is, through the hermeneutical labor that critical artists deliver—thematically and formally—within communities' space of meaning. Empirically, the book examines both consecrated and marginalized artists who tackled the memory of Vichy France, communist Romania, and apartheid South Africa. Despite their specificities, these contexts present us with an opportunity to analyze similar mnemonic dynamics and to recognize the political impact of dissenting artistic production. Crossing disciplinary boundaries, the book intervenes in debates over collective responsibility, historical injustice, and the aesthetics of violence within political theory, memory studies, social epistemology, and transitional justice. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to analyze the transformation of a tradition of husbandry from moral and political philosophy to natural magic and technology. In the early 1640s there was a shift of approach in the Hartlib circle from the ecclesiastical peace projects to the more experimental and practical projects of husbandry. The discipline of vegetable philosophy defined a new field of interest which could connect the Baconian tradition of experimentation, the desire to compile natural histories, and the dedication (...) to the open character of knowledge and human benefits. I will claim that vegetable philosophy, although operational and practical, and based on the production of transferable technologies, is still grounded on a set of metaphysical assumptions. (shrink)

Firm–employee relationships are dependent on the wider societal context and on the role business plays in society. Changes in institutional arrangements in society affect the perceived responsibilities of firms to their personnel. In this study, we examine mass media discussions about firm–employee relationships from a social responsibility perspective via a longitudinal study in Romanian society. Our analysis indicates how the expected responsibilities of firms towards employees have altered with the changing role of firms in society since the early 1990s. These (...) transformations correspond to the ideological developments, from communist to market-based thinking, which have taken place in post-communist Eastern Europe. More specifically, our study shows how the diminishing expectations of corporate social responsibility (CSR) are linked in mass media to increasingly important talk of human resource management (HRM). HRM is a modern business approach believed to address personnel needs and organisational objectives simultaneously. The congruency of goals in HRM may mistakenly lead to the conclusion that organisations are inherently responsible toward their personnel. We argue that this may not necessarily be the case. HRM, matching well the new free-market ideology in post-communist Eastern Europe, was eagerly embraced in that it defined firm–personnel relationships. In this study, we question whether this was an adequate theoretical perspective for Romanian firms to adopt as it lacks sufficient ethical grounding. We also call for a higher awareness concerning the role of mass media in the management literature, since its current role in constructing the ‘rightness’ and ‘wrongness’ in firm–personnel relationships is hardly considered. (shrink)

Conference of Mihaela Miroiu, "Fetzele patriarhului".

Bacon’s projects of natural history were extremely popular in the mid-seventeenth century, especially for a group of people devoted to experimental activities, namely the Hartlib Circle. Ralph Austen, one member of the Hartlib Circle, tried to construct his own project of natural history using Bacon’s Sylva sylvarum as a pattern and following the Baconian scheme with particular interest for the methodological aspects entailed by such an endeavor. This paper provides an account of Austen’s at­tempts at writing a natural history as (...) found in his Observations upon some part of Sr Francis Bacon’s Naturall History. It discusses the methodology and aims served by such an enterprise, both practical and theoretical: the role of experimentation in the process of compiling a natural history as the most reliable activity able to provide accurate knowledge of the natural world and the determination to provide general rules and axioms about nature. (shrink)

This paper looks at the current state-of-the-art and at potential changes in CSR thinking in a developing country: Romania. It seeks to understand what kind oftransformations are emerging in this field and what are the reasons behind them. The analysis is interpretative, using discourse analysis and focuses on the articles of the weekly Romanian business publication Capital. The results indicate that the local business environment features the characteristics of wild capitalism, largely contradicting the idea of responsibility. However, foreign actors have (...) recently entered the local environment, acting as travelling vehicles of Western ideas and inducing positive developments in business social behaviour. This study upholds that emerging trends in the business social thinking in Romania are not an outcome of local societal expectations but, rather, are brought from abroad and sold to the local community. (shrink)

In the beginning was the triangle, the apostles of semiology say. In arguing for a semiological approach to literature, this paper highlights first that theconsecrated semiotic triangle seen in perspective proves to be a pyramid, with its faces consisting of minimal semiotic triads; it then suggests that the pyramidalsemiotic constructs within a given context project the figure of infinite semiosis; finally, it proposes an illustration of the literary process of signification using thealchemical image of the clepsydra.

This article will present my autobiographical journey: from communism to capitalism, from the banking system and the pedagogy of the oppressed to problem-posing education. My personal experiences are seen as a way of emigrating internally and as part of the struggle through the process of self-actualisation and self-understanding. In effect, the practice of intellectual freedom shifts from a personal to a civic perspective. My wish for social justice, especially for children from diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds living in a global (...) society, will be considered, with reference to the voluntary work in the Romanian community. Thus, from a postmodern perspective, the autobiographical process is not just about self, but also about the Other. (shrink)

On Friendship – Cicero vs. John of Salisbury. On the topic of friendship, a clear filiation can be traced between Cicero and John of Salisbury. However, it is not a mere quotation, but an organic evolution of thought. For both philosophers, friendship appears as supporting social and political relations, thus making the existence of the commonwealth possible. Their views on the different characteristics of friendship are at the same time both shared and different, thus tracing a development of the concept.

Smith maintains that Brentano conceives his own theory of substance as a refined and perfected version of the Aristotelian theory. According to Mulligan and Smith, Brentano argues that a range of different habits and training are necessary preconditions of noticing. McDonnell observes that, for Brentano, our consciousness contains a structural unity of its own. Zahavi emphasizes that, according to Brentano, all mental states are characterized by their intentional directedness, they are all conscious of objects. Albertazzi points out that Brentano’s doctrine (...) tries to conciliate the presence of an often irreducible transcendent foundation of perception with its immanent and equally irreducible categorization by the intentional acts. (shrink)

Hinduism is above all a way of life and a philosophy of life. Looking more closely, we can see that in India life and religion are inseparable. The objective of this paper is to analyze the influences of religion, in time, on the economic growth of India, a continuously changing country. The Indian economy is an economy of contrasts due to its caste system and its legal aspects that govern the society and which have been imposed since ancient times. After (...) analyzing the Hindu culture and civilization and seeing the impact of religion in the social sphere, we can say that, indeed, Hinduism represents a part of the socio-economic system, a way of life. This country was contemporary with the glory of Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome and it saw all of them disappear. No doubt that it is hiding a secret in its way of life and in its spirituality. The secret of life without death, which India knows, results from the primacy of the spirituality. (shrink)

Jules et Jim by François Truffaut or the Unbearable Lightness of the Feminine. Truffaut’s movie Jules et Jim (« Jules and Jim ») is an intimist movie but also a fresco of Europe throughout the first half of the 20th century, as it was torn apart by the two world wars and Nazism. At the same time, the film tells the story of the friendship that began during the Belle Epoque between two intellectuals, a French (Jim) and a German (Jules), (...) both madly in love with an English teacher (Catherine). In the insular tradition of the Elizabethan theatre, this is a story about love, treason, jealousy, hate, and finally murder and suicide. In its structure, it is a mix of farce, sentimental drama turned into tragedy, and which in the end reveals itself as a comedy of errors, with, nevertheless, very serious themes: love and war, desire and drives, femininity, maternity and semblance, competition between men for a woman etc. This movie brilliantly represents the Nouvelle vague and is a proof that Freud and Lacan were right when they established once and for all that the unconscious is a fundamental and necessary scene. Human destiny is set and its mysterious scripts are played out - from sexuality to death, from Eros to Thanatos - as the subject’s fantasy, the window through which he or she tackles reality. (shrink)

The paper seeks to analyse how two domestic courts decided criminal trials under circumstances of emotional mobilisation and political stress. Decisions from Argentina after 1983 and Romania after Ceausescu’s dictatorship illustrate how citizens’ affects influence courts’ choices within penal cases. Both cases show how the judiciary had to enter a dialogue with resentful and indignant claims for redress. However, while the Argentinean court filtered emotions through the strainer of equal respect and thus pushed the cause of democratic justice ahead, the (...) Romanian case serves as a cautionary tale about how not to correct injustices through criminal law. These two cases provide us with important lessons about the obstacles, but also the opportunities associated with public emotions during periods of radical political transformation. (shrink)

Nicu Gavriluţă, România în Starea Bardo: publicistică şi dialoguri culturale (Romania in the Bardo State: Journalistic Writings and Cultural Dialogs) Provopress, Cluj-Napoca, 2006.

The fall of the Berlin Wall stood for a symbol of change and freedom across the socialist bloc and inspired the inhabitants in Eastern Europe to take action and revolt against dictatorial regimes. A long and often painful process of social, economic and political transformation began. Scholars grouped their research dealing with such transformations under the label of “Transitology” and the developing subfields of “transitional justice” and “memory studies” expanded and caught the academic interest. The present argument looks at the (...) emergence and evolvement of these fields in parallel with a growing and changing society. (shrink)

In this article I trace back Whitehead's concept of feeling to its psychological sources. I argue that Whitehead's way of conceiving feeling was made possible by the works of British psychologists-philosophers, most importantly G. F. Stout. The latter's Analytic Psychology, a work of great authority read by Whitehead very early, contains the conceptual resources Whitehead needed to elaborate his concept of feeling as immediate experience, in partial contrast to the similar concept proposed by F. H. Bradley. I suggest that Bradley, (...) Stout, and other prominent representatives of British philosophy-psychology are more relevant to understanding the genesis of Whitehead's ideas than William James and his followers. (shrink)

In this paper, I sketch a fictionalist interpretation of Whitehead’s metatheory of metaphysics fromProcess and Reality. I hold that he engages in a program of foundational research in philosophical cosmology and I interpret his metatheoretical remarks accordingly, in the framework of scientific structuralism.

The study of vegetables represents one of the main topics in Bacon’s Sylva sylvarum. Not only in quantitative terms, because plants occupy about a third of the entire book, but the centuries on plants are among the most structured, and this reveals Bacon’s particular interest for the topic. The key to understanding Bacon’s interest can be found in both his Sylva sylvarum and the Historia vitae et mortis, where Bacon explains how the results of studying certain processes in plants can (...) be later transferred and applied to animals and humans. In the context of his discussion of nourishing foods and drinks, Bacon addresses the question of how nourishment gets assimilated in the body. One of the ways in which the... (shrink)

Sustainable entrepreneurship is a vital and growing area of entrepreneurship studies. Although charged with multiple potentially conflicting discourses, sustainable entrepreneurship is usually viewed from a binary logic of business versus sustainability. This article uses an aesthetic process approach to sustainable entrepreneurship to move beyond this binary logic and unearth the tensions between multiple discourses. The authors introduce the construct of embodied multi-discursivity that addresses this issue methodologically as well as conceptually. By combining discourse analysis with aesthetic inquiry, the article pushes (...) the boundaries of “traditional” qualitative methods. The aim is to encourage sustainable entrepreneurship scholars to expand their methodological horizon to capture the emotionally charged, value-laden processes they study. Embodied multi-discursivity shows how multi-discursive processes of entrepreneurship come into being, how they are disrupted, and how they can break into a duality that ignores the variety of discourses. The authors conclude by drawing some implications for sustainable entrepreneurship. (shrink)

Silence features prominently in both political and academic debates about resistance and complicity with repressive orders. On the one hand, the dictum ‘silence is complicity’ is frequently taken for granted. On the other hand, heroes are thought to be those who ‘speak up’ or ‘break the silence’, contest the regime and its henchmen, agitate and take up arms. This paper troubles these assumptions about silence as complicity and speech as resistance. It argues that silence provides an interesting and productive angle (...) for criticising the idealised, temporally static, voluntarist, act-centred and virtuous vision view of heroes that usually dominates national-myth making. The many ways in which resisters deployed silence selectively, strategically, sometimes courageously, sometimes cowardly is erased from redemptive, idealising national narratives of heroism. It is by looking at these silences theoretically and historically that I hope to decentre this hegemonic heroic understanding of resistance. The work of Nobel Laureate Herta Müller serves as an illuminating example. (shrink)

Feminist authors claim that many of the advertising messages are promoting stereotypical images of the genders. However, if in social sciences, gender stereotypes have been facilitated and enforced by religious ideologies, the connections between gender stereotypes in advertising and religious ideologies remain to be investigated. The purpose of this paper is to analyze these connections. Using the tools and methods of philosophy of communication, the paper attempts to emphasize a double discourse of advertising: an external one that derives from existing (...) religious ideologies, and an internal one that borrows the structure and elements of modern religiosity. If the first one is enforcing the gender stereotypes, the second one is more innovative and less related to stereotypical images of genders. When advertising is approached from the perspective of philosophy of communication, its most conspicuous aspect is its narrative dimension. One way in which narratives of advertising are constructed is in the form of myth. We can see that, in some circumstances, advertising has a function similar to myth, or includes structures of depth coming from the world of myth or of religion understood in a broader sense. The power of those elements is derived not from the realm of merchandise value, but from the one of traditional mentalities and cultural representations. In order to illustrate my research on the relation between gender, religion and advertising, I choose a sample of ads, that I analyze using the tools of philosophy of communication. Thus, my research has led me to a nuanced understanding of the relation between gender stereotypes and religion in advertising. (shrink)

Deep learning AI systems have proven a wide capacity to take over human-related activities such as car driving, medical diagnosing, or elderly care, often displaying behaviour with unpredictable consequences, including negative ones. This has raised the question whether highly autonomous AI may qualify as morally responsible agents. In this article, we develop a set of four conditions that an entity needs to meet in order to be ascribed moral responsibility, by drawing on Aristotelian ethics and contemporary philosophical research. We encode (...) these conditions and generate a flowchart that we call the Moral Responsibility Test. This test can be used as a tool both to evaluate whether an entity is a morally responsible agent and to inform human moral decision-making over the influencing variables of the context of action. We apply the test to the case of Artificial Moral Advisors and conclude that this form of AI cannot qualify as morally responsible agents. We further discuss the implications for the use of AMAs as moral enhancement and show that using AMAs to offload human responsibility is inadequate. We argue instead that AMAs could morally enhance users if they are interpreted as enablers for moral knowledge of the contextual variables surrounding human moral decision-making, with the implication that such a use might actually enlarge human moral responsibility. (shrink)

Many voices and stories have been systematically silenced in interpersonal conversations, political deliberations and historical narratives. Recalcitrant and interrelated patterns of epistemic, political, cultural and economic marginalisation exclude individuals as knowers, citizens, agents. Two questions lie at the centre of this article, which focuses on the epistemically – but also politically, culturally and economically – dominant: How can we sabotage the dominant’s investment in their own ignorance of unjust silencing? How can they be seduced to become acute perceivers of others’ (...) experiences of oppression and reckon with their own participation in it? Situated at the intersection between political theory, aesthetics and epistemology, this article contributes a so-far-unexplored suggestion: that certain literary works create epistemic friction between shared, entrenched prejudices on the one hand, and representations of epistemic exclusion or authority, on the other. Their power to illuminate ideational, moral and experiential limitations makes them valuable tools in problematising, rendering visible and dislocating epistemic injustice, as well as other marginalisations it intersects with. To advance this argument, the article relies on insights from aesthetics, unpacking fiction’s multidimensional epistemic potential. Audre Lorde exemplifies literary works’ ability to seductively sabotage bias and provide audiences with prosthetic visions of unfamiliar experiences of marginalisation. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

This article advances research on moral responsibility in organizations by drawing on both philosophical virtue ethics grounded in the Aristotelian tradition and Positive Organizational Scholarship research concerned with virtuousness. The article discusses the very conditions that make possible the realization of virtues and virtuousness, respectively. These conditions ground notions of moral responsibility and the resulting praise or blame on organizational contexts. Thus, we analyze the way individuals and organizations may be ascribed interconnected degrees of retrospective moral responsibility and blame as (...) depending on the interplay between the individual conditions leading to virtue and the organizational conditions leading to virtuousness. Based on this analysis, we develop a two‐level account of moral responsibility in organizations that connects individual and organizational moral responsibility through the concepts of virtue and virtuousness. This is further operationalized into practical guidelines to ascribe degrees of individual and organizational blame, which can be used as a tool by managers, policymakers, or industry regulators. (shrink)