This paper describes the disorienting aesthetics of some environments that are characteristic of the Anthropocene. We refer to these environments as ‘mashed-up’ and present three dimensions – phenomenological, epistemological and narrative – of the aesthetic disorientation they can trigger. We then advance the suggestion that a rich, nuanced and meaningful aesthetic experience of mashed-up Anthropocene environments (MAEs) calls for a mode of appreciation grounded on performative practices of aesthetic familiarisation with particular MAEs and entities and processes thereof. Familiarisation with MAEs, (...) we further note, can have disorienting codas of its own. It can reveal and highlight, rather than eliminate or alleviate, the solid strangeness of Earth even in the systemically humanised world of the Anthropocene, and it can expose and tie at least some of our agency, identity and sources of meaning in life to the same unstable evolvability of particular MAEs. (shrink)

Egalitarian theories assume, without defending it, the view that the costs of children should be shared between non-parents and parents. This standard position is called into question by the Parental Provision view. Drawing on the familiar idea that people should be held responsible for the consequences of their choices, the Parental Provision view holds that under certain conditions egalitarian justice requires parents to pay for the full costs of their children, as it would be unfair for non-parents to bear the (...) negative externalities of others’ choices to have children. This article examines closely the Parental Provision view and argues that various possible justifications for it are unsuccessful. In so doing, it brings to light respects in which the choice to have and rear children is special and may not be treated as being on a par with other choices for which we think people should be held responsible. (shrink)

Preference orderings assigned by coherent lower and upper conditional previsions are defined and they are considered to define maximal random variables and Bayes random variables. Sufficient conditions are given such that a random variable is maximal if and only if it is a Bayes random variable. In a metric space preference orderings represented by coherent lower and upper conditional previsions defined by Hausdorff inner and outer measures are given.

Raimond Gaita’s idea that love is the foundation for human rights is both plausible and startling. This paper aims at arguing this point of view by defining the concept of human rights in a philosophical key. Following an investigation on the foundations of human rights in modernity we reach the conclusion that human rights can have no solid, universal foundation within the modern ethos. This doesn’t mean that human rights are illegitimate: it’s exactly the struggle for human rights, the struggle (...) against a conclusion which seems unacceptable what is the most important feature of our dignity. (shrink)

This paper is an exploration of the role of conscience in the justification of human rights. I argue that in both the western tradition of natural rights and the non-western traditions, human rights are justified, in part, because of their appeal to conscience, and not simply because they issue from a divine source or are based on reason. In contrast, contemporary justifications of human rights primarily look for an objective foundation or simply assert the pragmatic importance of human rights as (...) their justification. While there are distinct advantages to this way of arguing, there are also problems, which I will discuss. As an alternative, I outline Arendt's understanding of conscience as the ability to be with and think with one's self as a secular alternative to both a non-secular version of conscience, and the denial of conscience implicit in contemporary theories. Her view of political judgment helps us to understand how conscience can be understood as subjective but not arbitrary. This paper brings Arendt's insights on conscience and judgment to bear on contemporary discourses of human rights. (shrink)

The first issue of Artificial Intelligence and Law journal was published in 1992. This paper offers some commentaries on papers drawn from the Journal’s third decade. They indicate a major shift within Artificial Intelligence, both generally and in AI and Law: away from symbolic techniques to those based on Machine Learning approaches, especially those based on Natural Language texts rather than feature sets. Eight papers are discussed: two concern the management and use of documents available on the World Wide Web, (...) and six apply machine learning techniques to a variety of legal applications. (shrink)

Argumentation is a mechanism to support different forms of reasoning such as decision making and persuasion and always cast under the light of critical thinking. In the latest years, several comput...

This article aims to show that the artistic creativity at work in improvised dance depends on the acquisition of automatisms through the capacity of gestural repetition to dissolve the instrumental character of the movements performed and leads to a focus on the mode of their performance. After illustrating how the rupture and experimental character of postmodern dance relies on repetition and the guiding role of feeling in contact improvisation, an analysis is made of how the abandonment of feeling—conveyed by the (...) abandonment of gravity—that takes place in contact improvisation is indicative of the transition from a controlling attitude aimed at “problem solving” to a creative attitude aimed at “problem finding”. The recourse to the Straussian notion of pathicity, the valorisation of an aesthetic—affective, expressive, emergent, and relational—character of creativity, and the adoption of a neophenomenological approach will be functional in showing that improvisational artistic creativity arises from the acquisition of a sensitivity to otherness that makes one accustomed to respond in ever new ways to the affective stimuli coming from the circumstances and the affective state underlying the dance style and one’s own interpretation of it. (shrink)

This book is a philosophical analysis of the ethical treatment of refugees and stateless people, a group of people who, though extremely important politically, have been greatly under theorized philosophically. The limited philosophical discussion of refugees by philosophers focuses narrowly on the question of whether or not we, as members of Western states, have moral obligations to admit refugees into our countries. This book reframes this debate and shows why it is important to think ethically about people who will never (...) be resettled and who live for prolonged periods outside of all political communities. Parekh shows why philosophers ought to be concerned with ethical norms that will help stateless people mitigate the harms of statelessness even while they remain formally excluded from states. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to present the activities and research methodologies of CTL, a laboratory of the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, founded and directed by Lina Bolzoni. CTL’s objective is to investigate the complex structure of relationships between the linguistic and the figurative code in literary tradition, paying particular attention to the XVth, XVIth and XVIIth centuries and using information technologies both as an auxiliary research tool and as a medium for scientific dissemination. Here I shall be (...) discussing the Centre’s digitalization projects, and in particular the project concerned with the Orlando Furioso and its remediation into images. This project, active since 2007, is, I believe, particularly representative of the progressive implementation within CTL of both traditional and computer-related methodologies in the planning of digital collections dedicated to words and images. (shrink)

Drawing from extensive, eye-opening first-person accounts, No Refuge puts a spotlight on the millions of refugees worldwide who have to leave home but find nowhere to resettle. As political philosopher Serena Parekh argues, this is not just a problem for politicians. Citizens also have a moral duty to help resolve the global refugee crisis and to end the suffering and denial of human rights that refugee are forced to endure, often for years. While the media usually focus on the (...) challenges that Western states have with the arrival of large numbers of asylum seekers and refugees, the real problem is that millions are stuck in inhumane conditions in refugee camps and urban centers, with little chance of finding a more permanent solution. Grounded in powerful testimony from refugees and meticulous research on the conditions in which so many suffer worldwide, No Refuge shows why, as states but also as citizens, we cannot afford to wait any longer to end this crisis. (shrink)

Are inequalities of income created by the free market just? In this book Serena Olsaretti examines two main arguments that justify those inequalities: the first claims that they are just because they are deserved, and the second claims that they are just because they are what free individuals are entitled to. Both these arguments purport to show, in different ways, that giving responsible individuals their due requires that free market inequalities in incomes be allowed. Olsaretti argues, however, that neither (...) argument is successful, and shows that when we examine closely the principle of desert and the notions of liberty and choice invoked by defenders of the free market, it appears that a conception of justice that would accommodate these notions, far from supporting free market inequalities, calls for their elimination. Her book will be of interest to a wide range of readers in political philosophy, political theory and normative economics. (shrink)

Study of the thought of A. Palomes, Sicilian publisher and typographer, writer in Sicilian and Italian on significant historical events in Sicily and determined critic of the Unity of Italy.

This paper presents medieval Guelphism as an `ideological constellation', in which libertas played a prominent role, and argues that, because it was lumped together with references to the French dynasty and the Church, the ordinary concept of liberty in late medieval Italy needs to be understood within the context of partisan struggles. New studies on medieval factions in the fifteenth century support the idea that a concept of libertas derived from the Guelph tradition could fulfill surprisingly different ideological functions, particularly (...) when mobilized in debates and struggles concerning the nature of sovereignty. Pragmatic political documents, in fact, show that a libertas-empire, such as that of the Florentine republic, was by no means the dominant concept of liberty in Quattrocento Italy. (shrink)

Some studies highlighted that patients with narcolepsy type-1 experience high lucid dream frequency, and this phenomenon has been associated with a creative personality. Starting from the well-known “pandemic effect” on sleep and dreaming, we presented a picture of dream activity in pharmacologically treated NT1 patients during the Italian lockdown. Forty-three NT1 patients completed a web-survey during Spring 2021 and were compared with 86 matched-controls. Statistical comparisons revealed that: NT1 patients showed greater sleepiness than controls; controls showed higher sleep disturbances than (...) NT1 patients, and this result disappeared when the medication effect in NT1 was controlled; NT1 patients reported higher lucid dream frequency than controls. Focusing on dreaming in NT1 patients, we found that nightmare frequency was correlated with female gender, longer sleep duration, higher intrasleep wakefulness; dream recall, nightmare and lucid dream frequency were positively correlated with sleepiness. Comparisons between low and high NT1 lucid dreamers showed that patients more frequently experiencing lucid dreams reported a greater influence of dreaming during wakefulness, especially concerning problem-solving and creativity. Overall, our results are consistent with previous studies on pandemic dreaming carried out on healthy subjects. Moreover, we confirmed a link between lucidity and creativity in NT1 patients. Considering the small sample size and the cross-sectional design, our findings cannot provide a causal relationship between lucid dreams and the COVID-19 lockdown. Nevertheless, they represent a first contribution to address future studies on this issue, suggesting that some stable characteristics could interact with changes provoked by the pandemic. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Der Islam Jahrgang: 94 Heft: 1 Seiten: 279-283.

Considering the whole _corpus_ of Mary Wollstonecraft’s writings, this paper focuses on her view of rights, seen as moral claims and rhetoric tools. Firstly, it is argued that, in the author’s perspective, their technical and judicial dimension is peripheral, where “rights” are human features within a religious conception of life. Secondly, some consequent aspects are analysed, such as the rights’ effectiveness, their nature, their content and their entitlement.

In this paper I attempt a formalization of Descartes’ causal argument for the existence of God presented in the Third Meditation. By taking into account the philosophical setting of Descartes’ Meditations, I argue that the best logical theory to carry out the formalization is quantified modal logic where free logic is used for the first-order axioms. This fact is related to Descartes’ distinction between formal and objective reality which — to my mind — suggests both the adoption of modality (e.g. (...) true in formal vs true in objective reality) and the possibility of using empty names (i.e. names which lack reference in “formal reality”). After presenting the formal system and the reconstruction of Descartes’ proof, I will discuss some issues related to the philosophical import of the formalization, such as the understanding of rigid designation and lack of reference. I will argue that the formalization of Descartes’ argument has an intrinsic philosophical value for it sheds light on the structure of argument, its implicit difficulties, and the use of logic itself to understand the philosophical tradition. (shrink)

In its broadest sense, globalization refers to the economic, social, cultural, and political processes of integration that result from the expansion of transnational economic production, migration, communications, and technologies. This article outlines the ways in which predominantly Western feminist philosophers have articulated and addressed the challenges associated with its economic and political dimensions.

Research into television's ethical value has mostly focused on scandal genres, such as Big Brother, Jersey Shore, and Jerry Springer. Only recently have researchers started to explore television's moral content with a broader focus. In this study we explore and describe the types of morality and moral content of a night of Dutch prime time television with an open and inductive approach through a qualitative content analysis. Our results revealed 13 types of morality and a basic differentiation between morals that (...) react on violations and transgressions, focusing on restricting behavior, and morals that are focused on ideals and values and stimulate social behavior. Lastly, we differentiated three moral meta-themes that permeate all genres, as well as six moral themes that arose only in specific genre-clusters. (shrink)