Efforts to improve patients’ understanding of their own medical treatments or research in which they are involved are progressing, especially with regard to informed consent procedures. We aimed to design a multisource informed consent procedure that is easily adaptable to both clinical and research applications, and to evaluate its effectiveness in terms of understanding and awareness, even in less educated patients.

Perin argues that theSceptic is engaged in the search for truth and that since this is so, the Sceptic aims to satisfy certain basic rational requirements.

The current study provides data about the immediate risk perceptions and psychological effects of the COVID-19 pandemic among Italian participants. A sample of 1034 volunteers answered a web-based survey which aimed to investigate the many facets of risk perceptions connected to COVID-19 (health, work, economy, social and psychological), and risk-related variables such as knowledge, news seeking, perceived control, efficacy of containment measures, and affective states. Socio-demographic characteristics were also collected. Results showed that although levels of general concern are relatively high (...) among Italians, risk perceptions are highest with regards to the economy and work, and lowest concerning health. Cognitive and affective risk-related variables affected the several risk perception domains differently. COVID-19 knowledge did not affect any risk perception while the perceived control decreased health risk likelihood. The other risk-related variables amplified risk perceptions: News seeking increased work-economy risk; efficacy of containment measures increased all perceived risks; negative affective states of fear, anger and sadness increased health and psycho-social risks; anxiety increased only health risk, and uncertainty increased work-economy and psycho-social risk perceptions. Finally, positive affective states increased health risk perception. Socio-psychological implications are discussed. (shrink)

The ability of a group of adults with high functioning autism (HFA) or Asperger Syndrome (AS) to distinguish moral, conventional and disgust transgressions was investigated using a set of six transgression scenarios, each of which was followed by questions about permissibility, seriousness, authority contingency and justification. The results showed that although individuals with HFA or AS (HFA/AS) were able to distinguish affect-backed norms from conventional affect-neutral norms along the dimensions of permissibility, seriousness and authority-dependence, they failed to distinguish moral and (...) disgust transgressions along the seriousness dimension and were unable to provide appropriate welfare-based moral justifications. Moreover, they judged conventional and disgust transgressions to be more serious than did the comparison group, and the correlation analysis revealed that the seriousness rating was related to their ToM impairment. We concluded that difficulties providing appropriate moral justifications and evaluating the seriousness of transgressions in individuals with HFA/AS may be explained by an impaired cognitive appraisal system that, while responsive to rule violations, fails to use relevant information about the agent’s intentions and the affective impact of the action outcome in conscious moral reasoning. (shrink)

In relation to a thesis put forward by Marx Wartofsky, we seek to show that a historiography of mathematics requires an analysis of the ontology of the part of mathematics under scrutiny. Following Ian Hacking, we point out that in the history of mathematics the amount of contingency is larger than is usually thought. As a case study, we analyze the historians’ approach to interpreting James Gregory’s expression ultimate terms in his paper attempting to prove the irrationality of \. Here (...) Gregory referred to the last or ultimate terms of a series. More broadly, we analyze the following questions: which modern framework is more appropriate for interpreting the procedures at work in texts from the early history of infinitesimal analysis? As well as the related question: what is a logical theory that is close to something early modern mathematicians could have used when studying infinite series and quadrature problems? We argue that what has been routinely viewed from the viewpoint of classical analysis as an example of an “unrigorous” practice, in fact finds close procedural proxies in modern infinitesimal theories. We analyze a mix of social and religious reasons that had led to the suppression of both the religious order of Gregory’s teacher degli Angeli, and Gregory’s books at Venice, in the late 1660s. (shrink)

This article advances some considerations on the current production of hegemonic effects, starting with some problems posed by the work of one of the most influential writers in cultural studies – the American Palestinian critic Edward Said. Said's commentary on the coverage of Islam in the US media in the late 1970s allows for some challenging considerations on how hegemonic strategies directed at the formation of publics and public opinion are increasingly integrated within a global noopolitics of communication whose understanding (...) of the public is not derived from the notion of civil society but from the biopolitical element of the population – and the bio-racist segmentation that constitutes it. As outlined in Michel Foucault's analysis of liberal and neoliberal governmentality, such understanding of the public locates the latter straight within a new dispositif of power which is biopolitical and noopolitical at the same time, that is, which addresses itself at the same time to the biological, economic and spiritual life of the population. Such understanding involves a reconsideration of the constitution of publics and public opinion in times of netwars and information warfare as both subjects and objects of power/knowledge. In as much as such noopolitics affects what Maurizio Lazzarato calls a second bios, the life of the brain, it has the potential to give expression to the virtual power of immaterial events of subjectification which materialize in the bodies which actualize them and the possible, shared worlds that they are capable of producing. (shrink)

From Gadamer's Habilitation thesis, “Plato’s dialectical ethics. Phenomenological Interpretations Relating to the Philebus” (1928), this article seeks to highlight the fundamental lines of Plato’s image, outlined in that author’s first philosophical publication (1931). The confrontation with the themes of ethics and dialectic, in the current state of Platonic studies, indicates that in Plato’s image drawn in the early confrontation with the Philebus, clearly influenced by the phenomenological notion of Dasein, one already finds the fundamental features of what will become Gadamer's (...) philosophical hermeneutics, fully emancipated from Heideggerian tutelage. (shrink)

In the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, nomadism works as an approach to the creation of concepts that favour space: geophilosophy. Nomadism is the way in which one crosses the plane of immanence and the many becomings; in fact, nomadism exceeds the ancient rhetoric of the subject because its disposition belongs to the multiple and to the environment in which it can unfold. In this sense, the disorientation in the present appears less disturbing; it is rather a shift in perspective, (...) certainly difficult to understand in the time in which the mega-machine of power is becoming more and more persecutory. Lines of flight, movements of slippage, becoming-woman, becoming-child, becoming-minor refer not only to the exercise of criticism, but also to the production of assemblages that intend to resist the present. (shrink)

The notion of transgenerational community is usually based on two diachronic interactions. The first interaction consists of present generations taking up the legacy (not only economic, but also institutional, artistic, cultural, and so forth) of past generations and giving it continuity, exercising a form of active agency. The second interaction occurs when present generations pass on their legacy to future generations. This is supposed to expand the boundaries of the community in a transgenerational sense (both backward- and forward-looking). In this (...) article we argue that the transgenerational community can be grounded on a different ontological insight: future generations play the role of fictional actors for present generations, i.e., present generations entertain a present-time interaction with future generations, insofar as future generations are functional for the realization of transgenerational actions. This lays the foundations for more solid community-based bonds of intergenerational justice. (shrink)

Background During the first wave of the new coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, the sudden increase in hospitalised patients put medical facilities in southern Switzerland under severe pressure. During this time, bachelor’s degree programs in nursing, physiotherapy and occupational therapy were disrupted, and students in their second year were displaced. Students experienced the continuous reorganisation of their traineeship as healthcare facilities adapted to a climate of uncertainty. Purpose The aim of this study was to investigate the degree of moral distress and the (...) ethical issues most often encountered by physiotherapy, nursing and occupational therapy students enrolled in a traineeship during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in southern Switzerland. Participants and research context The sample consisted of 102 participants, and the response rate was 81.6%. Research design Based on a pragmatic approach, a mixed-method with a convergent design was adopted. Data were collected between 30 April 2020 and 14 May 2020, via a survey administered to all occupational therapy, physiotherapy and nursing students in their fourth semester. Ethical considerations Given that no vulnerable persons were involved, the Ethics Committee of Southern Switzerland waived authorisation. However, all measures were put into place to protect participants by guaranteeing their anonymity and confidentiality. Results and discussion The data analysis showed that the main source for moral distress was ‘poor teamwork’ and that the moral issues encountered most often by students were related to the appropriateness of care and working conditions, with a clear reference to students’ own safety and that of their loved ones; the other concerns reported included the loss of learning opportunities and the perceived lack of technical knowledge and skills. Conclusions This survey offers a faithful overview of physiotherapy, nursing and occupational therapy students’ experience during the first pandemic wave. This study also identifies some key recommendations for healthcare professions’ education. (shrink)

Brazilian women rely on sterilization as the main source of birth control. Sterilization has been one of the causes of the steep decline in fertility in Brazil, at least since the second half of 1970. It is hypothesized that understanding couples’ relationships might be key to explaining this high rate of female sterilizations. Possible reasons for the higher level of fertility among women in unstable unions than among women in stable ones could be the less effective use of contraceptive methods, (...) or that women in unstable unions tend to use less effective or reversible contraceptive methods. In this paper discrete time modelling of the timing of sterilization according to union histories is presented. The analysis uses the calendar data of the 1996 Brazilian DHS. It is shown that women in second or higher order unions have a lower risk of sterilization. This result should be taken into account in the analysis of the determinants of female sterilization in Brazil. (shrink)

In the current debate in political philosophy, the so-called communitarian thinkers intend to offer an alternative to the dominant liberal thought. The ideal of ethicalcommunity as way of life in society in which intersubjective relationships are ruled by laws conceived as public laws, reintroduces the question of virtue in the scope of social and political life, with the requirement of an ethical style of doing politics.

This paper aims to demonstrate how museum collection sustainability is grounded in a range of concrete care practices that are social and material. It explores the unstable nature of heritage materials, drawing on the ecological approach of infrastructure and maintenance studies in the field of art and museums. To do this, I analyse the role of mundane operations in the daily functioning of an exhibition area, presenting data from fieldwork I conducted from 2015–2016 at the Musée du quai Branly in (...) Paris, which preserves collections of art and ethnology from outside Europe. I observed the museum's preventive conservation practices, which work to minimise the risks of material deterioration of heritage objects, focusing attention on stabilising the relationship between objects and their environments. These practices contribute to the construction of the temporalities of museum objects. In exploring the means and devices of preserving these heritage objects, the very assumption of perpetuation is destabilised. Environments continually unfold with the silent material metamorphosis of objects. The exhibition becomes a place of flows, where a multitude of entities circulate and cohabit at different scales, such as insects, dust, and powdery fragments. The daily human work of vacuuming, cleaning, trapping, and measuring provide a set of actions united with other entities engaged in the material life of the exhibited object. As we zoom in on the exhibition space, different timelines emerge that are inextricably linked to the different lives of the museum. (shrink)

In On Local Motion in the Two New Sciences, Galileo distinguishes between ‘time’ and ‘quanto time’ to justify why a variation in speed has the same properties as an interval of time. In this essay, I trace the occurrences of the word quanto to define its role and specific meaning. The analysis shows that quanto is essential to Galileo’s mathematical study of infinitesimal quantities and that it is technically defined. In the light of this interpretation of the word quanto, Evangelista (...) Torricelli’s theory of indivisibles can be regarded as a natural development of Galileo’s insights about infinitesimal magnitudes, transformed into a geometrical method for calculating the area of unlimited plane figures. (shrink)

The article focuses on the relation established by Foucault in the two lecture courses Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics between life, nature and political economy. It explores the ways in which liberalism constructs a notion of economic nature as a phenomenon of circulation of aleatory series of events and poses the latter as an internal limit to sovereign power. It argues that the entwinement of vital and economic processes provides the means of internal redefinition of the raison (...) d’État and uses such an explanation to understand the emergence of the network topos as a technology of regulation of the unstable co-causality of milieus of circulation. The article also follows Foucault’s argument that the neoliberal market is significantly different from the liberal market inasmuch as, unlike the latter, it is not defined as an abstract logic of exchange among equals but as an ideal logic of competition between formal inequalities. Finally it asks whether new theories of social production and sympathetic cooperation, in the work of authors such as Yochai Benkler and Maurizio Lazzarato, can offer an alternative to the neoliberal logic of market-based competition as the basis for the production of new forms of life. (shrink)

Did Leibniz exploit infinitesimals and infinities à la rigueur or only as shorthand for quantified propositions that refer to ordinary Archimedean magnitudes? Hidé Ishiguro defends the latter position, which she reformulates in terms of Russellian logical fictions. Ishiguro does not explain how to reconcile this interpretation with Leibniz’s repeated assertions that infinitesimals violate the Archimedean property (i.e., Euclid’s Elements, V.4). We present textual evidence from Leibniz, as well as historical evidence from the early decades of the calculus, to undermine Ishiguro’s (...) interpretation. Leibniz frequently writes that his infinitesimals are useful fictions, and we agree, but we show that it is best not to understand them as logical fictions; instead, they are better understood as pure fictions. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction The Structure of Skeptical Arguments The Arguments of the Ancient Skeptics Reasons for Doubt vs. Reasons for Suspending Judgment Two Puzzles References and Further Reading.

Research question and aimClinical Ethics Committees (CECs) aim to support healthcare professionals (HPs) and healthcare organizations to deal with the ethical issues of clinical practice. In 2020,...

Quando Platão trata das “afecções e as formas que ela [a alma] tem na vida humana”, ele a descreve segundo um esquema tripartite, tal como aparece também na exposição dos seus gêneros na República. No Timeu, ao tomar a via mais longa para expor a natureza da alma, Platão apresenta a Ideia da alma cósmica como uma mistura de três Ideias intermediárias procedentes de um princípio bipolar. Assim como na alma do mundo, também a alma humana possui uma estrutura tripartite (...) hierarquizada segundo o mesmo princípio bipolar que governa a realidade. O artigo pretende mostrar que essas perspectivas não se contradizem, mas se completam na obra platônica. (shrink)

This study provides an integrated analysis of ϑυμός. A psychosomatic concept, found in Greek epics and medicine, θυμός designates courage as a “vital force around the chest”. Later, its meaning has been specified in two fields: 1) ϑυμός, thymós, the irascible soul, parallel to the concupiscible soul and opposite to the rational one, according to Plato’s tripartition; 2) ϑύμος, thymus, a cardiac gland of the vascular system. Today, the idea that θυμός, courage, and ϑύμος, cardiac gland, could have a common (...) semantic root – θύειν “to sacrifice by blowing and burning” – seems almost impossible. Our aim is to reconstitute the concept of ϑυμός, demonstrating how it has been reduced to a polarisation rational/irrational, and marginalised. We will examine the notion of ϑυμός in Greek tradition and describe one of its widespread manifestations, tattooing, both as a painful solicitation of interiority and for how the tattooed pictures reflect the personality of their wearers. (shrink)

Why should one take action to move toward a greener world if doing so will cause the birth of a totally different group of future people? This chapter starts from the metaphysical evidence that many collective climate actions imply a change in the identity of future generations, as opposed to a counterfactual laissez-faire attitude. The climatic fallout from the non-identity paradox introduced by Derek Parfit is examined to determine if and how a principle of transgenerational responsibility can be defended against (...) this metaphysical complexity. The paradox is divided into a moral argument, based on the person-affecting view of harm, and a metaphysical premise, treating non-identity as a result of variations in timing and pair combination of a person’s conception. Three strategies to circumvent the moral argument are explored: non-consequentialist accounts of harm, moral thresholds, and impersonal ethics. However, it is argued that all three strategies fall short or come with too high a cost. The metaphysical premise is then examined through the introduction of transgenerational actions in relation to the climate crisis. A principle of transgenerational responsibility applicable to climate change mitigation is inferred from the hypothetical consent to be obtained from those who will continue transgenerational actions in the future. (shrink)

In this study, we investigated the relationships between judgments of intentionality and moral evaluation in individuals with High Functioning Autism (HFA) or Asperger Syndrome (AS). HFA or AS are neurodevelopmental disorders characterised by severe deficits in communication and social functioning. Impairments in Theory of Mind (ToM), i.e., the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and to others, are thought to be the core features of autism. Of all mental states, the concept of ‘intentional action’ is particularly important. People normally (...) distinguish between actions that are performed intentionally and those that are performed unintentionally and this distinction plays a crucial role in social understanding and moral judgment. Recently, Knobe (Analysis 63: 190–193, 2003a ), (Philosophical Psychology 16: 309–324, 2003b ) showed that people’s moral evaluations might serve as input to the process by which people intuitively arrive at the intentionality judgments. Here, by using two pairs of vignettes, the Knobe’s Harm/Help cases and Murder/Bull’s-eye cases, we showed that, as already observed in typical population, in individuals with HFA/AS judgment of intentional action is informed by the moral appreciation of the action outcome. However, the two groups differed on praise judgments and moral justifications, suggesting that these processes were poorly influenced by the agent’s psychological states. We concluded that, although under certain circumstances, individuals with HFA/AS and people with typical development have similar intuitive judgments of intentionality, over-assignment of praise judgments and the reduced use of folk-psychological concepts in moral judgment likely reflect difficulties using intentionality information for moral reasoning. (shrink)

The nature of space and time is one of the most fascinating and fundamental areas of the philosophy of physics. This study aims to provide a complete account of current debates in the application of spacetime to string theory. String theory has been an important discipline within physics for many years but is only now being applied to the problems faced by philosophers of science. This emerging area of physics is discussed in relation to a number of theories including general (...) relativity, T-duality and moduli space, and set in the context of current and future research. (shrink)

Four hundred seventy-six nuclear power plants are in operation or under construction around the world. Are concepts for designing and operating plants safely sufficient? Conventional approaches are premised on expectations of predictability and control of radiation release and on assumptions that plant operations are closed systems. Field observations in the industry find, however, that the periodic necessity to refuel, test safety equipment, and continuously upgrade plant designs introduces challenges to control not originally calculated. The social and cultural contexts of markets, (...) regulation, and work systems create additional contingencies. In this dynamic environment, reactor operations produce invaluable data about the states of the entire technology and organizational system. Rereading these dynamics as "experiments" suggests an alternative epistemol ogy that synthesizes science's values of doubt, discovery, and documentation with engineering's values of efficiency, optimization, and problem solving. This redefines plant-based risk handlers as ethologists, geologists, and anthropologists of an ecology of visible and invisible hazards. (shrink)

Lue et appréciée par Schelling et Hegel, mais férocement critiquée par Lobeck et les cercles philologiques rationalistes, la Symbolik de Creuzer ne manqua pas d'exercer son influence sur Bachofen et le jeune Nietzsche, jusqu'à Klages, Frobenius, W. Fr. Otto et Kerényi. Point de repère incontournable de toute recherche historique et philologique sensible aux racines mystériques, dionysiaques et orientales de la grécité, la Symbolik a eu le mérite de conjuguer l'érudition typique du XVIII e siècle et une vision métaphysique et religieuse (...) de l'histoire de l'antiquité et de son immense patrimoine symbolique et mythologique. (shrink)

Ever since the last century art seems to be characterized by a powerful metareflective vocation. The works of Mimmo Paladino represent an effective barrier in this deconstructive movement and allow art to preserve the memory of its own narrative vocation.