Investigating the bases of inter-individual differences in risk-taking is necessary to refine our cognitive and neural models of decision-making and to ultimately counter risky behaviours in real-life policy settings. However, recent evidence suggests that behavioural tasks fare poorly compared to standard questionnaires to measure individual differences in risk-taking. Crucially, using model-based measures of risk taking does not seem to improve reliability. Here we put forward two possible - not mutually exclusive - explanations for these results and suggest future avenues of (...) research to improve the assessment of inter-individual differences in risk-taking by combining repeated online testing and mechanistic computational models. (shrink)

How is scientific data used to represent phenomena and as evidence for claims about phenomena? In this paper, I propose that a specific type of claims – evidential claims – is involved in data practices to define and restrict the representational and evidential content of a dataset. I present an account of data practices in the epidemiology of the exposome based on the notion of evidential claims, which helps unpack the approaches, assumptions and warrants that connect different stages of research. (...) I identify three different strategies to generate different types of evidential claims in this case. The macro strategy, which individuates the dataset that serves as the initial evidential space for research. The micro strategy, which is used to generate evidential claims about the microscopic and individual component of target phenomena. The association strategy, that uses evidence from the other strategies to identify a dataset as representation of the different levels and relations of exposure and disease. Differentiating between these strategies sheds light on the multi-faceted landscape of biomedical research on environment and health; and the roles of data and evidence in the process of inquiry. (shrink)

Calls for evidence-based approaches to COVID-19 have sparked up discussions on the use of evidence for policy. In this note, we expand these discussions: while the debate has mostly focused on the types of evidence to be used for policy, we argue that the assessment of judgments involved in data practices and evidence production should play a central role in evaluating policy.

I propose an approach that expands philosophical views of scientific change, on the basis of an analysis of contemporary biomedical research and recent developments in the philosophy of scientific change. Focusing on the establishment of the exposome in epidemiology as a case study and the role of data as a context for contrasting views on change, I discuss change at conceptual, methodological, material, and social levels of biomedical epistemology. Available models of change provide key resources to discuss this type of (...) change, but I present the need for an approach that models transfer, alignment, and influence as key processes of change. I develop this as a pragmatic approach to scientific change, where processes might change substantially depending on specific circumstances, thus contributing to and complementing the debate on a crucial epistemological issue. (shrink)

This essay focuses on a little-understood phase of Franco Moretti’s work that spans 1976 to 1986. My aim is to shed light on Moretti’s cultural background as it was formed in that period and to account for the transition from the Trotskyist, politically-militant stance of his first book, Literature and Ideologies in England in the 1930s, to the idiosyncratic, seemingly disengaged character of Signs Taken for Wonders and The Way of the World. Adorno’s concept of ‘unrestrained individuation’ plays a crucial (...) role in the argument. Following a personal political crisis, Moretti opted to enact a form of critical individuation, encoding the explicit social antagonism of the earlier years within a highly personal style and a new theoretical eclecticism. In this way, by disguising it as an alluring form of individualism, Moretti managed to smuggle an antagonistic critical discourse into an increasingly neoliberal world that would soon prove hostile toward it. (shrink)

The aesthetic experience may be defined as people's interactions with, and reactions to, objects, places, but also to the environment. Most psychological perspectives on the aesthetic experience argue that it results from the coordination of different mental processes such as perception, attention, memory, imagination, thought, and emotion. Physiological and neurological responses are also involved. Aesthetic experiences can take place while we observe works of art in museums and galleries as well as in other contexts such as natural and built environments. (...) Looking at a landscape, walking in a park, meeting people in a square, and walking into a building that is architecturally appealing are examples of natural and built environments where we can experience beauty, pleasure, attraction, and interest, among other aesthetic reactions.Research on aesthetic experiences has a long history, and in recent decades, the field has experienced tremendous growth in the number of empirical studies conducted. One of the areas that researchers have yet to fully address is the influence of the context (natural and built environments) on aesthetic experiences. We refer to context according to three broad categories: Context as natural environments, context as built environments, and environments for aesthetic experiences.Context as natural environments: People show a basic tendency to associate the natural environment with positive evaluations. According to an evolutionary explanation know... (shrink)

Comment une nouvelle divinité, munie de ses attributs spécifiques, ses timai et ses épiphanies, peut-elle être créée? Par qui? Et à quelles fins? Qui seront ses prêtres et ses fidèles? La documentation hellénistique confère une perspective historique aux aspects cultuels, sociaux et idéologiques de ces phénomènes religieux et les cultes des souverains sont un cas particulier de l’établissement et de l’acceptation de nouveaux dieux. Les cultes de souveraines n’ont que très récemment reçu l’attention qu’ils méritent. L’article étudie les cas de (...) Bérénice Ire, Arsinoé II et Laodice V afin de fournir de nouvelles interprétations de quelques fêtes dynastiques et d’étudier la relation entre les cultes de souverains et la légitima­tion du pouvoir féminin. La discussion repose surtout sur des papyrus et des inscriptions, mais l’analyse conclusive de l’Idylle XVII de Théocrite montre que la logique poétique de la légitimation du pouvoir entre en résonance avec celle qu’attestent les sources non littéraires. (shrink)

The oncological disease experience is counted as a wound in the body and mind attributable to a traumatic experience that fragments and disorients the person’s biography. The neoplasia leaves marks and scars in both somatic and existential level. The illness experience suggests to patient to look for meaning that cannot be unheard. The literature associating the concept of liminality in oncological disease to understand the process of meaning making. The definition of new horizons of meaning, generated by crossing the limen, (...) opens up a new self-awareness and worldview. The autopoietic dimension present in oncological disease reveals new scenarios of generativity and existential planning in the direction of self-realization in the cipher of the possible. The contribution presents the story of Anastasia, a 41-years-old nurse. A few months after her new marriage and close to a professional promotion, she receives the diagnosis of cholangiocarcinoma: a very aggressive, low-incidence, neoplasia, without specific therapeutic lines and with a negative prognosis. Anastasia’s words, thoughts and emotions, collected in the course of some testimonies in a university classroom, are analyzed and deciphered within the pedagogical paradigm, refering to the perspective of pedagogical problematicism and phenomenological pedagogy. (shrink)

The paper aims at identifying similarities and differences between two different ways of using the word “true”, on the one hand when it is used to refer to a property of what we say or believe, here called “words’ truth”, on the other when it is used to refer to a feature of things in general (as when we say “he is a true friend”), here called “things’ truth”. I will point out how such similarities and differences may be usefully (...) described starting from the feature of truth called “transparency” which is often considered as exclusively pertaining to words’ truth. The upshot of the paper will be that Aquinas was right in considering the two kinds of truth as species of the unique genus “adaequatio rei et intellectus”, but that this conclusion can be reached without any commitment to the ideology (in the Quinean sense) of the correspondence theory of truth. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Logic and Logical Philosophy Jahrgang: 22 Heft: 3 Seiten: 255-293.

The arising of smart cities has shown the limitations of the traditional attempts to understand and characterize cities. The smart city marks a relevant step in the evolution of urban systems which is expected to have disruptive impacts in the near future. Indeed, the ‘smartness’ qualification of cities points to relevant changes in the possibilities these complex systems offer mainly due to changes in the information which is made available. This chapter studies the notion of city from an ontological viewpoint, (...) and provides the first elements of a general framework aimed to characterize and unify how to understand the city and its evolution. It starts from historical considerations to isolate the factors that drove the changes from ancient to modern cities, and the complexity that characterizes the nature of cities. Our analysis departs from the traditional views and leads to distinguish three ontological components in the city: the modified physical place, the distributed agentivity, and the knowledge present in the system. The analysis of these components and their interactions, we argue, provides a coherent reading of the city across its evolution steps, and may be used to establish the maturity of today’s smart cities. (shrink)

We introduce quantificational modal operators as dynamic modalities with (extensions of) Henkin quantifiers as indices. The adoption of matrices of indices (with action identifiers, variables and/or quantified variables as entries) gives an expressive formalism which is here motivated with examples from the area of multi-agent systems. We study the formal properties of the resulting logic which, formally speaking, does not satisfy the normality condition. However, the logic admits a semantics in terms of (an extension of) Kripke structures. As a consequence, (...) standard techniques for normal modal logic become available. We apply these to prove completeness and decidability, and to extend some standard frame results to this logic. (shrink)

Gegenstand der vorliegenden Arbeit ist die Pr fung der Frage, ob und inwieweit die Mitgliedstaaten der Europ ischen Gemeinschaft Kulturg ter im Privateigentum als nationales Kulturgut einstufen und ihre Verbringung ins Ausland verbieten d rfen, wenn die Eigent mer solcher Kulturg ter ihr Recht auf Freiz gigkeit aus ben. Kernpunkt dieser Studie ist, das Spannungsverh ltnis zwischen dem nationalen Kulturg terschutz und der europarechtlichen Freiz gigkeit der Unionsb rger aufzuzeigen.

This article adopts a transmedial perspective in order to investigate narrative similarities and differences between print and online travel writing. Texts, which are contemporary and Western-authored, are written either in English, French and Italian and they all focus on China as the travel destination. Drawing upon Gérard Genette and Mieke Bal's studies on the narrative discourse, it is contended that travel books and travel blogs, despite sharing basic generic features, present substantial differences. In the former, readers are presented with a (...) coherent and self-exhaustive narrative. This means that the representation of both China and the traveller results as a progressive discovery. On the other hand, travel blogs provide fragmented and objectified accounts rich in touristic tips. As a consequence, the narrative loses its internal development and takes on an informative value in which the portrayal of China and the traveller recede to the background. (shrink)

Per conoscere la medicina sono necessari strumenti teorici, pratici, tecnologici e culturali, ma non solo: come mostra il volume, anche la riflessione filosofica può svolgere un ruolo cruciale sui suoi vari aspetti. Analizzando esempi concreti e grazie ai contributi di medici, epidemiologi e ingegneri, il libro fornisce strumenti filosofici per leggere le caratteristiche fondamentali della medicina contemporanea, i suoi recenti sviluppi e le sfide che è chiamata ad affrontare: una lente di grande utilità per la formazione dei medici e per (...) la ricerca dei filosofi che vogliano guardare realmente da vicino le scienze biomediche. (shrink)

The adjective ἱερός is a central term in Greek religion and is used in various contexts. Generally translated ‘sacred’, it indicates that an object has been conceded to the gods and is now in relation with them (relation of belonging, protection, etc.). It appears frequently in Greek inscriptions in the expression τὰ ἱερά, to designate sacred objects or, in a more abstract meaning, sacred matters.

The idea that certain mental phenomena (e.g. emotions, depression, anxiety) can represent risk factors for certain somatic diseases runs through common thinking on the subject and through a large part of biomedical science. This idea still lies at the focus of the research tradition in psychosomatic medicine and in certain interdisciplinary approaches that followed it, such as psychoneuroimmunology. Nevertheless, the inclusion in the scientific literature of specifically mental phenomena in the list of risk factors pertaining to a specific pathological condition (...) would seem, to say the least, problematic when not completely absent, unlike what happens for certain behavioural factors, such as smoking, sedentary life, and alcohol abuse. It is also significant that insurance companies and health and welfare services do not pay for interventions and treatment for states of anxiety, disorders of mood and of the personality, alexithymia and stress reduction, as means of prevention or treatment of somatic diseases, as instead they do for the treatment of tobacco addiction. However, as I shall endeavour to argue here, there are numerous and well grounded reasons why this different consideration of psychic conditions compared with behaviours is valid and must be maintained in the evaluation of pathogenetic risk factors. (shrink)

Résumé Cet article offre une nouvelle lecture et interprétation des premières lignes préservées du décret issu par la cité éolique d’Aigai en l’honneur du roi Séleucos I et de son fils Antiochos, à la suite de la bataille de Kouroupédion. Le commentaire se focalise sur le rapport entre la syntaxe et le message du texte, sur l’utilisation de la dénomination sôteres, entre nom commun et épiclèse cultuelle, ainsi que sur la manière de laquelle les citoyens d’Aigai ont justifié l’octroi des (...) plus grands honneurs cultuels, par lesquels leurs bienfaiteurs sont adressés en qualité de divinités qui se sont manifestées. (shrink)

Cet article réexamine la documentation sur le sanctuaire extra-urbain d’Asklépios et le temple ionique de la terrasse du théâtre à Pergame. Ces deux cas d’étude permettent d’étudier les développements diachroniques du paysage sacré de la cité et de ses alentours pendant la « longue période hellénistique » (fin du ive s. av. J.-C. – début du iiie ap. J.-C.). Cette analyse interdisciplinaire combine les sources textuelles, archéologiques et numismatiques pour étudier la distribution topographique des cultes pour les dieux et les (...) chefs politiques, leurs relations et changements à travers le temps. Pour ce faire, plusieurs questions méthodologiques sont examinées : les critères permettant de distinguer la présence du temple d’un dieu des traces diffuses de son culte à travers le paysage urbain ; la topographie de la dissémination et du remploi des textes et des artéfacts anciens et le type d’information qu’elle livre sur leur situation et fonction originaires ; l’équilibre entre continuité et innovation dans les modèles d’intégration des cultes pour les chefs politiques dans l’espace et le temps sacrés de la communauté. L’article apporte un nouveau soutien à la thèse selon laquelle Pergame n’abrita jamais un deuxième Asklépieion à l’intérieur de ses murs. (shrink)

L’articolo si propone di individuare somiglianze e differenze fra due usi del termine “vero”, quello per cui esso è usato per riferirsi a una caratteristica esclusiva delle cose che diciamo e pensiamo, detta nel testo “verità-delle-parole”, e quello per cui è usato per riferirsi a una caratteristica di cose di qualsiasi tipo (come quando diciamo “quello è un vero amico”), detta nel testo “verità-delle-cose”. L’idea centrale dell’articolo è che tali somiglianze e differenze possano essere proficuamente descritte a partire da quella (...) caratteristica della verità, solitamente considerata esclusiva della verità delle cose, detta “trasparenza”. (shrink)

La critica all’antirealismo costruttivista del pensiero postmoderno è al centro della riflessione di Maurizio Ferraris per lo meno a partire da Il mondo esterno (Ferraris 2001). Forme radicali di costruttivismo sono state però difese anche al di fuori del pensiero postmoderno tanto nella tradizione della filosofia analitica quanto, più recentemente, nell’ambito delle scienze cognitive. Nell’articolo viene dapprima presentata e criticata un’affermazione dal netto sapore costruttivista fatta da Vittorio Gallese e George Lakoff in uno degli articoli più influenti nel dibattito degli (...) ultimi anni sulla natura dei concetti: The Brain’s Concepts (Gallese, Lakoff 2005). Tale posizione viene quindi messa in relazione con quella forma di antirealismo costruttivista, detta anche relativismo concettuale, difesa, in modi e con esiti diversi, da filosofi quali Nelson Goodman, Hilary Putnam e Richard Rorty. Si sostiene quindi che tutte queste forme di antirealismo costruttivista incorrono in un dilemma: o esse abbracciano la problematica tesi metafisica di un’efficacia causale a ritroso delle nostre menti sul mondo oppure si riducono a una plausibile, ma ontologicamente innocua, affermazione dell’esistenza, in linea di principio, di molteplici modi di categorizzare la realtà e, nel caso delle teorie cosiddette incarnate della cognizione, della dipendenza di tali modi dalle forme che assume l’interazione senso-motoria di un organismo col suo ambiente. Viene infine mostrato come dall’osservazione dei molteplici modi in cui è possibile categorizzare la realtà sia possibile trarre conclusioni metafisiche di segno opposto all’antirealismo costruttivista. (shrink)