The origin of the relationship between landscape and atmosphere in the literary text must be sought first and foremost in the prototypical Stimmung that characterizes a given culture and from which, the specific interaction between man and the environment in a certain space, arises. In this sense, each literature will be a mirror of the specific contractive or expansive tendencies that characterize this interaction. Taking this into consideration, this article proposes a reading of the relationship between the Russian culture and (...) the urban landscape, mentioning the possible identification of a real ‘Russian urban text’, in which the novel My by Y. Zamyatin can also be included as an example. (shrink)

When firm misconduct comes to light, CEOs are often faced with difficult decisions regarding whether and how to respond to stakeholder demands as they attempt to restore their firms’ legitimacy. Prior research largely assumes that such decisions are motivated by CEOs’ calculated attempts to manage stakeholder impressions. Yet, there are likely other motives, particularly those of a morally-relevant nature, that might also be influencing CEOs’ decisions. To address this limitation, we advance moral cleansing as an alternative explanation for how and (...) why CEOs lead their firms to respond to stakeholder demands following the firm’s misconduct and, in turn, whether they can successfully restore their firm’s legitimacy. In the context of firm misconduct, moral cleansing motives reflect CEOs’ desire to restore their threatened moral self-image resulting from the misconduct. We theorize that a CEO’s moral cleansing motives increase the likelihood that their firm will engage in a series of reparative responses that can restore the firm’s legitimacy (i.e., discovery, explanation, penance, and rehabilitation). In addition, we explicate the unique implications of CEOs’ moral cleansing in a post-misconduct context by theorizing how such motives may simultaneously improve one form of their firms’ legitimacy while hindering another. Specifically, we theorize that CEOs’ moral cleansing motives increase (decreases) the authenticity (strategic cognition) of their firm responses, which strengthens (weakens) the effectiveness of those responses on the firms’ ability to restore its moral (pragmatic) legitimacy with stakeholders. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of this work. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to analyse the contemporary ‘futility discourse’ from a constructivist perspective. I will argue that bioethics discourse typically disregards the con text from which controversies emerge and the processes that inform and constrain such discourse. Constructivists have argued that scientific knowledge is expressive of the dominant paradigm within which a scientific community is working. I will outline an analysis of ‘medical futility’ as a construction of biomedical and bioethical communities (and their respective paradigms). I will (...) trace the emergence and utilization of futility in the literature. My analysis of the context (i.e. the historical circumstances, the particular actors involved) within which the futility discourse emerged suggests that medical futility was constructed, in part, as a means of enhancing physician domination of a context wherein medical authority was threatened. The actors in this debate express widely divergent frameworks of ‘the good’, arguing from distinctive representations of moral agency. At times, this controversy has been argued from incommensurate moral horizons wherein the discussants debate incomparable problems. This discussion is related to a study of the ‘practice’ of futility in the clinical context. Further studies on the construction of bioethical problems are a necessary condition for supporting the truth claims of bioethical arguments. (shrink)

BackgroundFollowing the SARS pandemic, jurisdictions around the world began developing ethical resource allocation frameworks for future pandemics—one such framework was developed by Thompson and colleagues. While this framework offers a solid backbone upon which decision-makers can rest assured that their work is driven by rigorous ethical processes and principles, it fails to take into account the nuanced experiences and interests of children and youth (i.e., young people) in a pandemic context. The current COVID-19 pandemic offers an opportunity to re-examine this (...) framework from young people’s perspectives, informed by advances in childhood ethics and children’s rights.Main bodyIn this paper, we revisit the Thompson et al. framework and propose adaptations to the ethical processes and values outlined therein. This work is informed by expertise in clinical ethics and literature related to impacts of COVID-19 and other pandemics on the health and well-being of children around the world, though with particular attention to Canada. During the processes of drafting this work, stakeholders were consulted—aligned with the approach used by Thompson and colleagues—to validate the interpretations provided. We also propose a new principle, namely practicability, to indicate the complex balance between what is possible and what is convenient that is required in ethically sound decisions in the context of services affecting young people. We outline and discuss the strengths and limitations of our work and indicate next steps for scholars in the areas of childhood studies and child health.ConclusionEfforts to ensure frameworks are truly child-inclusive should be the status-quo, so pandemic impacts and policy implications can be considered in advance of emergency preparedness contexts. (shrink)

The thesis of this article is that engagement and suffering are essential aspects of responsible caregiving. The sense of medical responsibility engendered by engaged caregiving is referred to herein as clinical phronesis, i.e. practical wisdom in health care, or, simply, practical health care wisdom. The idea of clinical phronesis calls to mind a relational or communicative sense of medical responsibility which can best be understood as a kind of virtue ethics, yet one that is informed by the exigencies of moral (...) discourse and dialogue, as well as by the technical rigors of formal reasoning. The ideal of clinical phronesis is not (necessarily) contrary to the more common understandings of medical responsibility as either beneficence or patient autonomy — except, of course, when these notions are taken in their disengaged form (reflecting the malaise of modern medicine). Clinical phronesis, which gives rise to a deeper, broader, and richer, yet also to a more complex, sense than these other notions connote, holds the promise both of expanding, correcting, and perhaps completing what it currently means to be a fully responsible health care provider. In engaged caregiving, providers appropriately suffer with the patient, that is, they suffer the exigencies of the patient's affliction (though not his or her actual loss) by consenting to its inescapability. In disengaged caregiving — that ruse Katz has described as the silent world of doctor and patient — provides may deny or refuse any given connection with the patient, especially the inevitability of the patient's affliction and suffering (and, by parody of reasoning, the inevitability of their own. When, however, responsibility is construed qualitatively as an evaluative feature of medical rationality, rather than quantitatively as a form of calculative reasoning only, responsibility can be viewed more broadly as not only a matter of science and will, but of language and communication as well — in particular, as the task of responsibly narrating and interpreting the patient's story of illness. In summary, the question is not whether phronesis can save the life of medical ethics — only responsible humans can do that! Instead, the question should be whether phronesis, as an ethical requirement of health care delivery, can prevent the death of medical ethics. (shrink)

Until now, the mass spread of fake news and its negative consequences have implied mainly textual content towards a loss of citizens' trust in institutions. Recently, a new type of machine learning framework has arisen, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) – a class of deep neural network models capable of creating multimedia content (photos, videos, audio) that simulate accurate content with extreme precision. While there are several areas of worthwhile application of GANs – e.g., in the field of audio-visual production, human-computer (...) interactions, satire, and artistic creativity – their deceptive uses, at least as currently foreseeable, are just as numerous and worrying. The main concern is linked to the so-called “deepfakes”, fake images or videos that simulate real events with extreme precision. When trained on a human face, GANs can make the face assume hyper-realistic movements, expressions and (verbal and non-verbal) communication abilities. This technology poses an urgent threat to the governance of democratic processes concerning the production of public opinions and political discourses, with significant potential for reality-altering and disinformation. After a short introduction of their current technical state-of-the-art, in this paper we want to enquire the GANs` socio-technical system alongside different and intertwined philosophical accounts. Firstly, we will argue about the conditions that make perceived a GANs-generated content as trustworthy, arguing also about the general effects GANs might have on the perceived trustworthiness of individuals. Thereafter, we will discuss about the inadequacy to approach GANs only as perception-altering technology. Against this backdrop, we will propose a theoretical turn that considers the human-machine relationships of trustworthiness as elements of a broader hybrid socio-technical systems. This turn come up with political repercussions that we will discuss in the last part of the paper. (shrink)

The International Conference "Tra rito e mito: il Carnevale nella cultura europea" was held online on the 16th and 17th of November 2020. We present twenty-two contributions coming from various fields of the Humanities and written in Italian, French, and German. This proceedings’ foreword traces back the thread that links these essays one with another, i.e., carnivalesque imagery between ritual and mythological dimensions. Moreover, this introduction provides a key to an interpretation of Carnival as a founding instance, both regenerative (...) and conservative, of the European identity. Recovering this instance today, in the midst of a pandemic, responds to the problem of its partial loss in contemporary society, in the hope to rebuild a “free and familiar contact among people”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Prima parte – Descrizione del sermonarioNel 1494 Johann Meder, francescano osservante, affronta il compito di predicare la Quaresima a Basilea. Davanti all'interrogativo su come conquistare l'attenzione degli ascoltatori, vincendone la distrazione senza diventare un "adulterator verbi Dei," concepisce un ciclo profondamente innovativo, dato alle stampe l'anno successivo. Nella stessa città un altro ciclo di predicazione sui generis vede la luce in concomitanza alle prediche di Meder: in quei giorni (...) infatti viene pubblicato a Basilea il Narrenschiff di Sebastian Brant, testo di immediato successo, rapidamente tradotto e diffuso in tutta Europa. Lo studio dei due testi mostra precisi contatti e convergenze di interessi tra il predicatore francescano e Brant, tra pulpito e tipografia. Se il Narrenschiff si caratterizza fin da subito per le sue xilografie, che annoverano tra gli autori il giovane Dürer, è proprio il comune interesse per l'uso delle immagini a caratterizzare il rapporto tra Brant e Meder. Basti qui anticipare che le prediche di Meder vengono stampate con un corredo di xilografie, opera di uno dei migliori illustratori del tempo influenzati da Dürer, che rendono questa edizione un unicum nel panorama dei sermonari alla fine del Quattrocento.L'intreccio di questi fatti accresce l'interesse di una ricerca che indaghi come si comporta un predicatore osservante nella Basilea di Brant e Dürer. Pur essendo state già notate alcune particolarità del sermonario di Meder, questo testo ha ricevuto finora un'attenzione solo cursoria. Questo articolo si propone di mettere in luce quattro elementi: nella prima parte l'architettura generale del quaresimale, in maniera particolare il suo impianto teatrale; nella seconda parte la sincronia tra predicazione e Narrenschiff, il rapporto tra Meder e Brant e le caratteristiche dell'edizione del Quadragesimale novum come sermonario illustrato.1. Basilea 1494: il Narrenschiff e un ciclo di prediche quaresimaliIl volto di Basilea lungo il XV secolo è segnato da tre avvenimenti determinanti: il concilio, l'università, la stampa. Li evochiamo rapidamente per la loro incidenza sull'identità e lo spessore culturale della città. Il concilio pose per diversi anni Basilea al centro della cristianità, permettendole di assumere un ruolo e una notorietà europea. Uno dei frutti del nuovo profilo assunto dalla città fu la nascita dell'università, la quale, dopo una prima breve esperienza , venne rifondata su più solide basi nel 1460, contribuendo a creare le condizioni favorevoli per il precoce impianto della stampa e il suo rapido sviluppo, che rese Basilea presto uno dei centri di eccellenza, soprattutto per i libri illustrati.Dentro a queste coordinate si colloca Brant, nato a Strasburgo nel 1457 e giunto come studente nel 1475 a Basilea, dove si licenzia in diritto nel 1484 e diviene doctor utiusque iuris nel 1489. All'università Brant ricopre la cattedra sia di diritto che di poesia, affiancando all'insegnamento il lavoro presso diversi editori, fino al 1501, quando torna a Strasburgo, dove morirà nel 1521. Se nel 1494 Brant è ormai un esperto protagonista nella vita di Basilea, Meder vi si è inserito da poco, dall'anno precedente. È un uomo intorno ai sessant'anni e un predicatore esperto, con un curriculum ormai ventennale in diversi conventi francescani lungo la valle del Reno, tra Magonza e Basilea, dove risiederà fino al 1502.Nei giorni di Carnevale del febbraio del 1494, alla vigilia della Quaresima, viene pubblicato il Narrenschiff. Come è noto si tratta di una satira morale che, capitolo dopo capitolo, passa in rassegna le follie del mondo, soprattutto cittadino. È una critica alla follia non ancora capace di quell'ironia che sarà di Erasmo, ma che, pur condannando tutto e tutti, crede possibile l'azione educatrice della sapienza e dunque il 'rinsavimento' dei folli. Se si chiede chi siano i folli, la risposta di Brant è tutti, e la prima follia è non volerselo sentire dire. Proprio per questo Brant ha costruito uno spiegel nel quale ognuno possa vedere la propria follia, perché l'inizio della sapienza è il riconoscimento della stoltezza e della.. (shrink)

Recent work in the metaphysics of gender mostly focuses on trying to solve the exclusion problem - roughly, the problem of giving a metaphysical account of gender that doesn’t exclude anyone from their appropriate gender category. It is acknowledged that no completely satisfactory answer to the exclusion problem has yet been given in the literature; typically such theories fail to account for the diverse experiences and characteristics of trans people. One response is to adopt an anti-realism about gender properties, such (...) as Heather Logue’s gender fictionalism. I rebut the move to an anti-realism, showing that it relies on assuming a representationalism about gender vocabulary that we need not hold. I put forward a non-representationalist theory of gender properties that analyses gender vocabulary in terms of its inferential profile, rather than its representational features. This theory constitutes a deflationary realism about gender properties; it solves the inclusion problem, and guarantees the first-person epistemic authority of an individual regarding their own gender identity. (shrink)

It has frequently been observed that the Prometheus Vinctus shows certain Sophoclean characteristics of rhythm. In order to vary the rhythm of his iambics and to avoid monotony, Sophocles often knits consecutive trimeters closely together by placing at the end of one line some word which looks forward to the next line, and so precludes the reader from stopping for the natural pause after the sixth foot. Sometimes he uses in this way subordinating words which introduce a dependent clause in (...) the next line ; sometimes proclitics or quasi-proclitics. (shrink)

E. Jayne Whitea, Catherine Matsuob and Fiona WestbrookcaUniversity of Canterbury; bFukuoka University; cAuckland University of Technology (AUT)This collective writing piece takes its points of depa...

Scholarly papers by Gėlėgzhamt︠s︡yn Luvsant︠s︡ėrėn on Mādhyamika, Buddhist philosophy, Mongolian philosophy and Buddhist studies in Mongolia.

Context: The idea for this article sprang from a desire to revive a conversation with the late Ernst von Glasersfeld on the heuristic function - and epistemological status - of forms of ideations that resist linguistic or empirical scrutiny. A close look into the uses of humor seemed a thread worth pursuing, albeit tenuous, to further explore some of the controversies surrounding the evocative power of the imaginal and other oblique forms of knowing characteristic of creative individuals. Problem: People generally (...) respond to humor, i.e., they are inclined to smile at things they find funny. People like to crack jokes, make puns, and, starting at age two, human infants engage in pretense or fantasy play. Research on creativity, on the other hand, has mostly scorned the trickster within. Cognitivists in particular are quick to relegate wit, whimsy, and even playfulness to the ranks of artful or poetic frivolities. Method: We use the emblems of the craftsman, the trickster, and the poet to highlight some of the oblique ways of knowing by which creative thinkers bring forth new insights. Each epitomizes dimensions intrinsic to the art of “possibilizing.” Taken together, they help us better understand what it means to be playful beyond curious, rigorous beyond reasonable, and why this should matter, even to constructivists! Results: The musings characteristic of creative individuals speak to intelligent beings’ ability to use glitches intentionally or serendipitously as a means to open up possibilities; to hold on to a thought before spelling it out; and to resist treating words or images as conventional and arbitrary signs regardless of their evocative power. To fall into nominalism, Bachelard insisted, is a poet’s nightmare! Implications: Psyche is image, said Jung, and when we feel alive we rely on the imaginal to guide our reason. Note that image is not here to be understood as a picture in the head or a photographic snapshot of the world. The imaginal does not represent, it brings forth what we understand beyond words. It does not lock us into a single mode. Instead, it is a call to be mindful, in Ellen Langer’s sense: in the present, mentally alert, and on the outlook for our psyche’s own surprising wisdom (sagacity. Constructivist content: Debates on the heuristic function and epistemological status of oblique ways of knowing have long occupied constructivist scholars. I can only guess whether my uses of Jung’s imaginal or Bachelard’s anti-nominalism would have amused or exasperated Ernst! I do know that, on occasion, Ernst the connoisseur, bricoleur, and translator allowed the rationalist-within to include the poet’s power to evoke as a legitimate form of rationality. He himself has written about oblique knowing as legit! (shrink)

This paper discusses methodological similarities between Collingwood's approach to causation and contemporary manipulability-based views. Firstly, I argue that on both approaches there is a preoccupation with the origin of causal concepts which further connects to the aim of establishing the priority of a certain concept/sense of causation as more fundamental. The significant difference lies in Collingwood's focus on the logical and historical priority (Collingwood's sense I) while in more recent theories the focus has been on psychology (i.e., on different philosophical (...) concepts of causation tested in psychological setting-- Woodward, Waskan, Gijsbers & de Bruin). Secondly, I argue that on both Collingwood's views and contemporary approaches (especially Menzies & Price, Price, but also Woodward) there is an important connection between causation and the agent's perspective. This can be subsumed under what Collingwood identifies as the main presupposition underlying causal thought: the relation between the agent's perceived situation and the agent's desired situation/ goal. More broadly, the recent views on causation under discussion share Collingwood's aim of elucidating the problem of causation through investigating causal knowledge and thus can be integrated with his wider project of addressing metaphysical issues through the means of epistemology. (shrink)

N'y aurait-il de pas de différence notable entre les philosophies analytique et continentale? La première serait la bonne philosophie, la seconde une philosophie non rigoureuse, de comptoir. Ce jugement est l'apanage des philosophes analytiques, qui considèrent leurs confères de formation continentale, à l'instar de Jacques Derrida, comme des " astrologues ", des non-philosophes. L'auteur approfondit ici le débat, en identifiant de façon rigoureuse les différences importantes qui divisent les deux philosophies.

E. Rae Harcum argues that Christians do not have to give up their religious faith to keep the contributions of science. He confronts the relation between the human body and its non-material parts—the mind and spirit—and provides a way of looking at these metaphysical issues.

This paper concentrates on the method-critique of feminist philosophers and demonstrates that their claim that science is essentially male-biased is unfounded, and itself grounded in their own political agenda. The feminist agenda has shown itself to be detrimental not only to liberty and free speech, but to women.

BY OVEREMPHASIZING MATERIALISTIC VALUES, we have perverted the culture and set modern Western civilization on a self-destructive course. Some critics have said that the economy, science, and technology are the only healthy aspects of our society. We have what I have called a saber-toothed tiger civilization. In the evolutionary process, the saber-toothed tiger developed great tusks as effective weapons in combat, but perished because they obstructed its eating. We have developed a culture that is highly successful in advancing science and (...) technology and producing wealth and power, but in doing so we have undermined and subjectivized the sectors of the culture that underwrite our identity, the meaning of our existence, and the norms and values by which we live our lives, organize our society, and run our institutions, including even science and the economy. But unlike the saber-toothed tiger, we can discover our error and correct our course. (shrink)

Is it possible to say anything on the well-worn theme of human freedom or unfreedom which has not been ahready better said by someone else before us? It may be doubted; yet it is always worth while to see whether we cannot at least set what is perhaps already familiar to us in a fresh light and so come to a clearer comprehension of our own meaning. This, at any rate, is all that will be attempted in these pages; I (...) have spoken in an earlier essay of the “practical situation” in which we find ourselves whenever we have to make a decision as involving indetermination , and my purpose is simply to make it plainer to myself, and so incidentally perhaps to a reader, what I mean by such an expression. I shall start, then, by adopting what we may perhaps agree to call a phenomenological attitude to the subject; that is, I will try to describe the facts in a way which anyone who recalls occasions when he has been driven to take a decision will recognize as faithful to his experience, without imparting into the description any element of explanatory speculative hypothesis. The description is meant to be one which will be admitted to be true to the “appearances,” independently of any theory about the “freedom of the will”—to describe correctly that which it is the object of all such theories to explain. (shrink)