O projeto de ética mundial, desenvolvido pelo teólogo ecumênico Hans Küng, propõe que somente por meio de um diálogo inter-religioso é possível estruturar princípios básicos que sejam válidos globalmente e que proporcionem a construção de uma cultura da paz. Essa possibilidade no campo da ética estabelece um amplo diálogo com diferentes autores. No entanto, como o próprio autor assume, o projeto possui limitações, sendo que uma delas é a exclusão de temas que envolvem questões de Bioética que são importantes para (...) as relações em sociedade. Os temas hoje avaliados na área de Bioética são de difícil consenso, entre eles: aborto, uso de embriões, reprodução assistida, questão de gênero. Desse modo, novas frentes de diálogo se fazem necessárias, principalmente no tocante às ciências biológicas, ou seja: a relação entre religião e ciência e cultura e ciência. Para que esse diálogo se torne possível, é necessário reconhecer as possibilidades e os limites do diálogo, numa exigente proposta de transcendência do individualismo, das culturas e da própria religião. Por isso é necessário aprofundar a reflexão começando pela identificação dessas novas questões para se buscar novos espaços de diálogo. Palavras-chave : Ética mundial; Cultura da paz; Bioética; Ética da transcendência.The world ethics project, developed by the ecumenical teologian Hans Küng, indicates that only by a inter-religious dialogue is possible to built basic principles that would be wordly accepted and helpfull in the building of a culture of peace. This possibility on ethics research brings a large dialogue with several thinkers. Although, as the author himself accepts, the project has some limitations, being one of them the exclusion of themes that are discussed in Bioethics and are important to relationship in society. The issues that are studied in Bioethics are of rare consensus, like: abortion, utilization of embryo for research, medically assisted reproduction, gender’s subjects. Thus, new fronts of dialogue are needed, mainly related to biological sciences, it means: relation between religion and sciences, and between culture and sciences. For the dialogue to be possible it is needed to recognize possibilities and limits of it, from an exigent proposal of transcendence of individualism, culture and religion itself. Them, it is needed to deep the thinking starting on identificating this new questions to look for new spaces of dialogue. Key words : World ethics; Culture of peace; Bioethics; Transcendence. (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)

"El repertorio bibliográfico no presenta resumen".

This article extends property-owning democracy to the digital realm and introduces “data-owning democracy,” a new political economic regime characterized by the wide distribution of data as capital among citizens. Drawing on republican theory and acknowledging data's unique role in the digital economy, it proposes a two-tier model that combines different modes of data ownership and corresponding rights. The first layer of “data-owning democracy” is characterized by a digital public infrastructure that enables citizens to collectively generate data and have a say (...) in how their citizen data are used. In the second layer, individuals automatically receive machine-readable copies of their data whenever they are generated—a slightly more advanced form of the European Union's existing right to data portability (Art. 20). With its focus on empowerment, data-owning democracy is designed to be complementary to existing data protection regulations. It also illustrates how political theory more broadly, and republican theory specifically, can be instructive for specifying the normative components of a new political economy dealing with questions of empowerment and digital rights. (shrink)

The first work to offer a comprehensive pragmatist anthropology focusing on sensibility, habits, and human experience as contingently yet irreversibly enlanguaged.

Naïve realism (also called ‘relationalism’ or ‘object view’) is becoming increasingly popular, but the specific outline of its commitments remains often underspecified by proponents and misunderstood by critics. Naïve realism is associated with two claims, both concerning genuine, veridical perceptual experience (where this excludes hallucinations). Constitutive Claim (CC): The phenomenal character of perception is (partly) constituted by the mind-independent objects in one’s surrounding and their properties. Relational Claim (RC): Perception is a relation to mind-independent objects in the environment and their (...) properties. Some philosophers use the two claims interchangeably while talking about naïve realism, while others use only one or the other, although they do not explicitly discuss if the other claim is also a core commitment of naïve realism, or if naïve realism can be held without the other claim. This raises the question of how RC and CC relate to one another, together with the most pressing question of what each claim ultimately commits one to. After discussing the shortcomings of alternative interpretations, I argue that naïve realism should be understood as committed to, first and foremost, RC. This should be understood as a claim about the phenomenal character of perception, rather than about its nature, structure or essence (whatever that means). CC, on the other hand, should be understood as a corollary of RC. This doesn’t only offer a better characterisation of how naïve realists understand phenomenal character: it also helps us understand how we can simultaneously claim that the object of perception is a constitutive element of perception, while also allowing for it to play a causal role in determining perception. (shrink)

It is well known that John Dewey was very far from embracing the traditional idea of cognition as something happening inside one’s own mind and consisting in a pictorial representation of the alleged purely external reality out there. His position was largely convergent with enactivist accounts of cognition as something based in life and consisting in human actions within a natural environment. The paper considers Dewey’s conception of cognition by focusing on its potential contributions to the current debate with enactivism. (...) It claims that Dewey’s anti-substantial, continuistic, and emergentistic conception of the mind as a typically human conduct pulls the rug out of the idea of cognition as representation, as well as pushes the current discussion towards a serious reconsideration of representationalist assumptions about conceptuality and language. The paper emphasises that Dewey—differently from enactivists—frames the role of cognition within experience: he argues that cognition concerns those intermediate phases of our experiences of the world which are characterised by an indeterminate or troubled situation, because he claims that human beings’ interactions with their own environment are qualitatively richer and broader than cognition, including as they do many different and intertwined modes of experience. Finally, the author suggests that a coherent development of Dewey’s lines of thought should avoid rigid distinctions and hierarchies between lower and higher degrees of cognition in humans, which are still maintained in certain forms of radical enactivism. Differently, we should consider the impact of the cultural and broadly linguistic configuration of the human–environment even on perception, motor action, and affective sensibility. (shrink)

This paper explores whether natural selection, a putative evolutionary mechanism, and a main one at that, can be characterized on either of the two dominant conceptions of mechanism, due to Glennan and the team of Machamer, Darden, and Craver, that constitute the “new mechanistic philosophy.” The results of the analysis are that neither of the dominant conceptions of mechanism adequately captures natural selection. Nevertheless, the new mechanistic philosophy possesses the resources for an understanding of natural selection under the rubric.

Holobionts are symbiotic assemblages composed by a host plus its microbiome. The status of holobionts as individuals has recently been a subject of continuous controversy, which has given rise to two main positions: on the one hand, holobiont advocates argue that holobionts are biological individuals; on the other, holobiont detractors argue that they are just mere chimeras or ecological communities, but not individuals. Both parties in the dispute develop their arguments from the framework of the philosophy of biology, in terms (...) of what it takes for a “conglomerate” to be considered an interesting individual from a biological point of view. However, the debates about holobiont individuality have important ontological implications that have remained vaguely explored from a metaphysical framework. The purpose of this paper is to cover that gap by presenting a metaphysical approach to holobionts individuality. Drawing upon a conception of natural selection that puts the focus on the transgenerational recurrence of the traits and that supports the thesis that holobionts are units of selection, we argue that holobionts bear emergent traits and exert downward powers over the entities that compose them. In this vein, we argue, a reasonable argument can be made for conceiving holobionts as emergent biological individuals. (shrink)

Within bioethics, Kant’s conception of autonomy is often portrayed as excessively rationalistic, abstract, and individualistic, and, therefore, far removed from the reality of patients’ needs. Drawing on recent contributions in Kantian philosophy, we argue that specific features of Kantian autonomy remain relevant for medical ethics and for patient experience. We use contemporary end-of-life illness narratives—a resource that has not been analyzed with respect to autonomy—and show how they illustrate important Kantian themes, namely, the duty to know oneself, the interest in (...) elaborating universalizable principles, and the emphasis on ideals as points of orientation that guide behavior without ever being fully realized. As Kant does, the patient-authors discussed here perceive the end of life as a moment to reflect on the constitutive principles which have governed that life, thereby offering a privileged moment to pursue self-knowledge. We argue that bioethical conceptions of autonomy stand to gain if they revise their conception of Kantian moral philosophy as too formal, abstract, and detached from emotions and personal relationships to be helpfully applied. (shrink)

§1 According to the paradigmatic formula offered by Kant, the philosopher’s task consists of demonstrating “how we ought to think” as opposed to “how we do think” – that is, logical rules or norms must be separated from the functioning principles of the human mind or from psychological laws. As it is well-known, in the “Preface” to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, the German philosopher stands against “some moderns” who “have thought to enlarge” logic “interpolating psycholo...

In this paper, I present the idea of “enlanguaged experience” as a radicalization of the Pragmatists’ approach to the continuity between language and experience in the human world as a concept that can provide a significant contribution to the current debate within Enactivism. The first part of the paper explores some new conceptual tools recently developed by enactivist scholarship, namely linguistic bodies, enlanguaged affordances, and languaging. In the second part, the notion of enlanguaged experience is introduced as involving two main (...) interrelated ideas. The first is the idea that human experience is contingently, yet irreversibly, embedded from each person’s birth within contexts made up of linguistic practices that contribute to continuously redefining what happens. Consequently, the development of individuals’ motor, perceptual, affective, selective, and cognitive capacities does not take place in a silent vacuum, but in a context of linguistic practices that are already there: such practices already operate in, and are shared by, the human groups in which individuals begin their experiences. The second key idea is that enlanguaged experience implies the claim that humans primarily meet language as part of their experience of the world, rather than as an independent system of words and grammar. In the third part of the paper, I argue that the conception of human experience as enlanguaged can fruitfully contribute to the enactivist debate, particularly with reference to three main points: firstly, the idea of a circular continuity, which is to say the claim that the advent of language in human life caused a re-configuration of previously existing forms of sensibility both ontogenetically and phylogenetically; secondly, an ecological view of language, according to which humans find themselves embedded in already operating linguistic practices and habits that are a constitutive part of their naturally social world; and, thirdly, a richer view of language “in the wild”, capable of retrieving the qualitative, affective, or aesthetic components of human enlanguaged experience. (shrink)

This manuscript describes a pilot study in ethics education employing a problem-based learning approach to the study of novel, complex, ethically fraught, unavoidably public, and unavoidably divisive policy problems, called “fractious problems,” in bioscience and biotechnology. Diverse graduate and professional students from four US institutions and disciplines spanning science, engineering, humanities, social science, law, and medicine analyzed fractious problems employing “navigational skills” tailored to the distinctive features of these problems. The students presented their results to policymakers, stakeholders, experts, and members (...) of the public. This approach may provide a model for educating future bioscientists and bioengineers so that they can meaningfully contribute to the social understanding and resolution of challenging policy problems generated by their work. (shrink)

VANESSA ROUSSEAU. — Quelle est selon vous l’ampleur des risques que le changement technico-scientifique fait peser sur les sociétés humaines ?JEAN-JACQUES SALOMON. — Je m’interroge depuis longtemps sur les dérives de la rationalité qui éclairent en grande partie toutes les horreurs que le XXe siècle a connues : des totalitarismes..

Recent research has shown that, although still on a limited scale, the teaching of business ethics in UK higher education has been increasing in recent years. This paper reports on a postal questionnaire survey conducted to investigate the extent to which ethical issues are covered in the teaching of management accounting in higher education. The principal findings are that the majority of management accounting lecturers in the British Isles do not incorporate ethics. About a third of the respondents to the (...) survey do address ethical issues, although about half of those say they do so only implicitly. Various factors underlying the findings and prospects for the future are discussed. (shrink)

This paper discusses possible forms of loss or weakness of the ability to interact with others and the ways in which this arises. In particular, in the context of socio-affective knowledge and related failures, it focuses on certain deficits that primarily involve the body. The article aims to show that the “destiny” of our inner drives and our lives—the specific solutions to which they are forced in their vicissitudes—is less “blind” than it appears, leaving (albeit minimal) margins of escape, also (...) because it has a relational connotation. Starting from Bernhard Waldenfels’s recent work on the relationship between phenomenology and psychoanalysis, in which this question is addressed from a phenomenological-responsive point of view, this article reflects on the problem by establishing a comparison between Waldenfels’s philosophy and Max Scheler’s phenomenology of values. Beyond the differences that their approaches to the problem of relational deficits present, Waldenfels and Scheler can be put in fruitful dialogue with each other, starting from their common interest in Freudian psychoanalysis. Within this framework, it is possible to evaluate, adopting Scheler’s point of view, both a methodological aspect and a psychological presupposition of Freud’s ontogenesis of sympathy and love: associationism. From this perspective, Freud reveals himself in part as an heir to British empiricism. I will argue that, with and beyond Freud, the human being is not reducible to a mere sum of blind sensations or blind drives and that for both at least certain forms of inability to interact with others are derivative—deformations of normal responsivity and aberrations of normal pulsional-(relational) life—rather than originary phenomena. (shrink)

With this paper I intend to rehabilitate the status of orality as medium of the public use of reason in the normative Kantian sense. As a first step, I reconstruct the reasons why Kant rejects the spoken word and designates the written word as the sole medium of public reasoning. As a second step, I argue for the possibility of employing the spoken word as medium of public reasoning while remaining within the normative framework of Kant’s concept of the public (...) use of reason. (shrink)

Recent research has shown that, although still on a limited scale, the teaching of business ethics in UK higher education has been increasing in recent years. This paper reports on a postal questionnaire survey conducted to investigate the extent to which ethical issues are covered in the teaching of management accounting in higher education. The principal findings are that the majority of management accounting lecturers in the British Isles do not incorporate ethics. About a third of the respondents to the (...) survey do address ethical issues, although about half of those say they do so only implicitly. Various factors underlying the findings and prospects for the future are discussed. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to explore the presuppositionality of factive verbs, with special emphasis on the verbs know and regret. The hypothesis put forward here is that the factivity related to know and the factivity related to regret are two different phenomena, as the former is a semantic implication that is licensed by the conventional meaning of know, while the latter is a purely pragmatic phenomenon that arises conversationally. More specifically, it is argued that know is factive in (...) the sense that it both entails and presupposes p, while regret is factive in the sense that it only presupposes p. In a recent article, Hazlett, 497–522, 2010) shows with authentic examples how know is used non-factively in ordinary language, and he observes in these examples, as he says, “a threat to Factivity.” I argue that non-factive uses of factive verbs, such as know and regret, far from being a threat to factivity, show that, on the one hand, know is ambiguous between a factive and a non-factive sense; on the other hand, in the case of regret, the presupposition of factivity has to be intended as a merely pragmatic implication which can be suspended by the speaker herself. (shrink)

This paper reconstructs the merits of John Dewey’s conception of language by viewing it within the context of communication as the act of making something in common, as social and instrumental action. It shows that on the one hand this approach allows us to avoid the problems of the linguistic turn: the self-entanglement of language, the overemphasizing of language at the expense of the plurality of our world experiences, and the unquestioned, but sterile, supremacy of interpretation. On the other hand, (...) the paper supports the thesis that Dewey’s perspective on language does not produce a new form of foundationalism – according to which language itself is founded on experience, liable to be independently designated – by providing some arguments to interpret the relationship between language and experience in non-contrastive ways. In particular, the essay suggests a non-dualistic interpretation of the distinction between immediate qualitative experience and language, that is knowing in actu, by arguing that language cannot be reduced to the ordered discourse of inquiry since it also structurally includes qualitative and aesthetic aspects. (shrink)

At the time of the fragile Weimar Republic, when the crisis of parliamentary democracy was accompanied by a “frightening massification of life” and of public opinion, Scheler posed a challenge: How to achieve a cultural and spiritual transformation that can contribute to a true rebirth of Germany and Europe? If this renaissance is to be achieved, Germany and Europe must be examined as a whole, and the ideas underlying their institutions must be renewed. Cosmopolitanism and the age of integration – (...) for example the integration of rationalism, which has traditionally characterized Europe, and irrationalism, of which the “revolt of pulsions” is, according to Scheler, an eloquent testimony – impose this renewal. Against this backdrop, this paper examines the possible “costs and benefits” of a Freudian-inspired sublimation from a Schelerian perspective, with particular attention to the problem of Bildung. (shrink)

In this paper we investigate some important trends in contemporary naturalist aesthetics in relation to two decisive issues. Firstly, it is important to explicitly clarify what kind of naturalism is at stake within the debate, more specifically whether an account of the topic involves forms of physical reductionism, emergentism, and/or continuistic views of art and culture with nature. Secondly, we argue that it is necessary to define what conception of art is assumed as paradigmatic: whether this conception deals with basically (...) autonomist approaches to art, assuming aesthetic experience to coincide with the disinterested contemplation of formal features, independently of cognitive, practical, and ethical implications, or whether the arts are considered an enhancement of the features of human expe- rience and developments of other human behaviours. The second part of the paper will investigate some recent developments in current neuroaesthetics and fresh enactivist proposals in the aesthetic field which display a tendency toward a non-reductive naturalism, views of the arts as continuous with other modes of behav- iour and more conscious attitudes about the risks of scientism within scientific in- vestigations. Generally speaking, we espouse an idea of culture as the natural development of human organic experience that involves new emerging properties depending on the re-organization of already existing natural resources and favour continuistic and emergentist views as more suited to dealing with specific prob- lems in the field of the arts and as better responding to the criticism of irrelevancy directed against the latter, compared to reductive naturalist approaches. (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)

Vortragstext für die VI. Tagung für Praktische Philosophie Universität Salzburg 27. & 28. September 2018.

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)

This article explores the significance of Hegel’s aesthetic lectures for Dewey’s approach to the arts. Although over the last two decades some brilliant studies have been published on the “permanent deposit” of Hegel in Dewey’s mature thought, the aesthetic dimension of Dewey’s engagement with Hegel’s heritage has not yet been investigated. This inquiry will be developed on a theoretical level as well as on the basis of a recent discovery: in Dewey’s Correspondence traces have been found of a lecture on (...) Hegel’s Aesthetics delivered in 1891 within a summer school run by a scholar close to the so-called St. Louis Hegelians. Dewey’s deep and long-standing acquaintance with Hegel’s Aesthetics supports the claim that in his mature book, Art as Experience, he originally appropriated some Hegelian insights. First, Dewey shared Hegel’s strong anti-dualistic and anti-autonomistic conception of the arts, resisting post-Kantian sirens that favored instead an interpretation of art as a separate realm from ordinary reality. Second, they basically converged on an idea of the arts as inherently social activities as well as crucial contributions to the shaping of cultures and civilizations, based on the proximity of the arts to the sensitive nature of man. Third, this article argues that an original re-consideration of Hegel’s thesis of the so-called “end of art” played a crucial role in the formulation of Dewey’s criticism of the arts and of the role of aesthetic experience in contemporary society. The author suggests that we read Dewey’s criticism of the removal of fine art “from the scope of the common or community life” in light of Hegel’s insight that the experience of the arts as something with which believers or citizens can immediately identify belongs to an irretrievable past. (shrink)

This book attempts to open up a path towards a phenomenological theory of values. By drawing on everyday experience, and dissociating the notion of value from that of tradition, it shows how emotional sensibility can be integrated to practical reason. This project was prompted by the persuasion that the fragility of democracy, and the current public irrelevance of the ideal principles which support it, largely depend on the inability of modern philosophy to overcome the well-entrenched skepticism about the power of (...) practical reason. The book begins with a phenomenology of cynical consciousness, continues with a survey of still influential theories of value rooted in 20th century philosophy, and finally offers an outline of a bottom-up axiology that revives the anti-skeptical legacy of phenomenology, without ignoring the standards set by contemporary metaethics. (shrink)

Nonostante la pervasività della nozione di servizio e le recenti proposte per una Scienza dei Servizi unificata, esistono ancora parecchie inconsistenze tra le varie definizioni di servizio in uso nelle diverse discipline (e spesso anche all'interno della stessa disciplina). In particolare, a dispetto del fatto che l'obiettivo generale di questa scienza dovrebbe essere di permettere a persone e calcolatori di interagire agevolmente con i servizi nella vita di tutti i giorni, molti approcci alla modellazione dei servizi in informatica (specialmente quelli (...) centrati sui servizi web) sembrano focalizzarsi principalmente sugli aspetti connessi al flusso dati, per cui i servizi sono considerati come scatole nere che trasformano un ingresso in un’uscita, e che interoperano tra loro secondo modalità predefinite. Questo modello a scatola nera ha sicuramente i suoi vantaggi ma, stando a quanto dicono Petrie e Bussler, sembra funzionare bene sono all'interno di contesti omogenei, i cosiddetti parchi di servizi, dove l'interoperabilità è tecnicamente possibile solo perché i contenuti e le modalità di erogazione di ogni servizio sono predefiniti e condivisi da tutti i soggetti coinvolti. (shrink)

Conference paper Convegno della Società Italiana di Studi Kantiani "Leggi e regole. Universi ordinati nella filosofia di Kant" Università di Pavia 19-20 Dicembre 2019 -/- .

Nonostante la pervasività della nozione di servizio e le recenti proposte per una Scienza dei Servizi unificata, esistono ancora parecchie inconsistenze tra le varie definizioni di servizio in uso nelle diverse discipline (e spesso anche all'interno della stessa disciplina). In particolare, a dispetto del fatto che l'obiettivo generale di questa scienza dovrebbe essere di permettere a persone e calcolatori di interagire agevolmente con i servizi nella vita di tutti i giorni, molti approcci alla modellazione dei servizi in informatica (specialmente quelli (...) centrati sui servizi web) sembrano focalizzarsi principalmente sugli aspetti connessi al flusso dati, per cui i servizi sono considerati come scatole nere che trasformano un ingresso in un’uscita, e che interoperano tra loro secondo modalità predefinite. Questo modello a scatola nera ha sicuramente i suoi vantaggi ma, stando a quanto dicono Petrie e Bussler, sembra funzionare bene sono all'interno di contesti omogenei, i cosiddetti parchi di servizi, dove l'interoperabilità è tecnicamente possibile solo perché i contenuti e le modalità di erogazione di ogni servizio sono predefiniti e condivisi da tutti i soggetti coinvolti. (shrink)

In this paper I provide an ecological, Schelerian-based description of the aesthetic experience that, without being exhaustive, may account for its complexity, perspective character and stratifications. Aesthetic enjoyment, aesthetic object and the creative process of the artistic type are all specific and necessary moments of an experience – an aesthetic experience – shared by different experiential “individuals”, who also contribute to its formation process. The content of this experience grows and develops in conformity with its own laws, like a living (...) being so to speak, able, as such, to turn its own gaze to the others’ gaze at the same time as they turn to it. In other words, I will deal with the dynamics of the artist’s interactions with the spectator, of those of the spectator with the artist and of those of both with the work of art, which, created by the artist, or rather, “brought to light” by the artist, becomes an object– a quasi-sujet in Dufrennian terms – unique to the spectator. In this context, I will try to rehabilitate the axiological virtues of beauty, not in the sense of a metaphysics of beauty, but in a sense nearer to our experiences of “seeing something in a new light”. (shrink)

Nowadays and worldwide, the attention is focused on coronavirus disease, and its consequences on mental health are yet to be fully understood. It is important to capture differences in anxiety levels among populations, groups, and the gender-related variation. Therefore, the present study had two main purposes: to characterize the levels of state anxiety and trait anxiety by examining gender-related, sleep-related, and physical activity-related variations in a nonrepresentative sample of the Portuguese population during the first weeks of lockdown; and to explore (...) the possible relationship between trait anxiety and state anxiety and the possible role of gender as a moderator. This cross-sectional study comprised 1,332 Portuguese adults recruited online during COVID-19 outbreak measures. Participants answered to sociodemographic data and the Portuguese version of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory. Gender differences were found in both state anxiety and trait anxiety with females presenting higher values. People reporting doing more physical activity than usual during COVID-19 lockdown presented lower levels of state anxiety. People reporting more satisfaction with the quality of sleep presented lower levels of both state anxiety and trait anxiety. Variation associated with the physical activity level was significantly different among groups in both state anxiety and trait anxiety. When analyzing in more detail separating the levels of physical activity, participants performing moderate and high physical activity showed lower values of state and trait anxiety compared to participants with low physical activity. Participants performing high physical activity also showed lower values of state anxiety compared to participants performing moderate physical activity. Higher levels of trait anxiety were related to higher levels of state anxiety, but this association was not moderated by gender. Interventions aiming to support people psychologically during this outbreak should consider anxiety as well as gender and possible behavioral changes in sleep and physical activity, for example. Health professionals should not only consider the anxiety related to the situation we are living but also address trait anxiety to help overcome COVID-19 psychological consequences. (shrink)

Many Public Administrations structure their services around the notion of users’ need. However, there is a gap between private, subjectively perceived needs (self-attributed) and needs that are attributed by PA to citizens (heteroattributed). Because of the gap, citizens’ needs are often only partially satisfied by PAs services. This gap is in part due to the fact that the meaning of the word “need” is ambiguous and full of antinomic nuances. The purpose of this paper is to formulate a definition of (...) “need” suitable for citizens’ needs management with respect to PA’s services offering, and to provide an accurate ontological analysis of the notion of “need” and the network of concepts that relate to it. (shrink)