Philosophers have rightly condemned lookism—that is, discrimination in favor of attractive people or against unattractive people—in education, the justice system, the workplace and elsewhere. Surprisingly, however, the almost universal preference for attractive romantic and sexual partners has rarely received serious ethical scrutiny. On its face, it’s unclear whether this is a form of discrimination we should reject or tolerate. I consider arguments for both views. On the one hand, a strong case can be made that preferring attractive partners is bad. (...) The idea is that choosing partners based on looks seems essentially similar to other objectionable forms of discrimination. (In particular, the preference for attractive partners is arguably both unfair and harmful to a significant degree.) One can try to resist this conclusion in several ways. I consider three possible replies. The first has to do with the possibility of controlling our partner preferences. The second pertains to attractiveness and “good genes”. The last attempts to link certain aspects of attractiveness to a prospective partner’s personality and values. I argue that the first two replies fail conclusively, while the third only amounts to a limited defense of a particular kind of attractiveness preference. So the idea that we should often avoid preferring attractive partners is compelling. (shrink)

We prove that the determinacy of all Lipschitz games, the determinacy of all Wadge games, and the semi-linear ordering principle for Lipschitz maps are all equivalent.

We defend a noetic account of intramathematical explanation. On this view, a piece of mathematics is explanatory just in case it produces understanding of an appropriate type. We motivate the view by presenting some appealing features of noeticism. We then discuss and criticize the most prominent extant version of noeticism, due to Inglis and Mejía Ramos, which identifies explanatory understanding with the possession of well-organized cognitive schemas. Finally, we present a novel noetic account. On our view, explanatory understanding arises from (...) meeting specific explanatory objectives. We defend a cluster-concept account of explanatory objectives and identify four important subfamilies within the relevant network of resemblance relations. The resulting view is objectivist (in the sense that it takes explanatory success to be a matter of observer-independent fact), broader in scope than why-question-based accounts, compatible with empirical findings on experts’ explanatory judgments, and capable of generalizing (with appropriate provisos) to scientific explanation as a whole. It thus fulfills Friedman’s half-century-old demand for a general and objectivist theory which accounts for the link between explanation and understanding. (shrink)

In 2011, van Dijck and Fias described a positional SNARC effect: the SPoARC. To-be-remembered items presented centrally on a screen seemed to acquire a left-to-right spatial dimension. If confirmed, this spatialization could be crucial for immediate memory theories. However, given the intricate links between visual and spatial dimensions, this effect could be due to the visual presentation, which could have probed the left-to-right direction of reading/writing. To allow a generalization of this effect, we adapted van Dijck and Fias's task using (...) an auditory version of Sternberg's paradigm. Lists of five consonants were auditorily presented at a rate of 3 s/item. A SPoARC effect was observed. The consequences are discussed first from an immediate memory perspective, putting forward the view that order could be coded through spatialization, and then in terms of similarities between SPoARC and SNARC. (shrink)

This paper is an example of how contextual information interacts with the interpretation of noun phrases (NPs) in discourse. When we encounter an NP escorted by the definite article or a proper name, the expectation is triggered that the speaker is referring to some referent x that the hearer can normally identify. Strawson and Russell have agreed that a referent must be associated with a definite description so that the assertion containing it can be said to be true. In the (...) case where a description does not refer to anything, the assertion is considered by Russell to be false, while Strawson says that the issue of truth or falsity does not arise. In this paper, we examine a case in which contextual information interacts with the interpretation of NPs in discourse and the hearer is not expected to identify a referent when hearing a proper name. In this case, the issue of truth or falsity does not arise, because the hearer does not identify the referent. In fact, s/he does not intend for the discourse to about a referent at all. These situations are primarily represented by sentences uttered during the course of a grammar lecture, in which the lecturer is explaining a rule of language and does not focus on external reality. The hearers are aware of this focus and do not process the NP (in general a proper name) to identify a specific referent. This discourse is of three types, which will be discussed at the end of this paper. -/- Keywords: reference; pragmeme; presupposition; fictional discourse; exemplification acts. (shrink)

Massive amounts of data are collected and stored on a routine basis in virtually all domains of human activities. Such data are potentially useful to biomedicine. Yet, access to data for research purposes is hindered by the fact that different kinds of individual-patient data reside in disparate, unlinked silos. We propose that data cooperatives can promote much needed data aggregation and consequently accelerate research and its clinical translation. Data cooperatives enable direct control over personal data, as well as more democratic (...) governance of data pools. This model can realize a specific kind of data economy whereby citizens and communities are empowered to steer data use according to their motivations, preferences, and concerns. Policy makers can promote this model by recognizing citizens’ rights to access and to obtain a copy of their own data, and by funding distributed data infrastructures piloting new data aggregation models. (shrink)

Kalisch et al. argue that appraisal and reappraisal are key mechanisms promoting resilience; however, experimental findings seem to contradict this simplistic view. We argue that a deeper look at affective neuroscience may provide complementary and stronger evidence on how emotional reactivity and emotion regulation may affect resilience.

Abstract -/- In this paper, I shall deal with quasi-(proper) names, that is expressions like ‘Mum’, ‘Dad’, ‘Grandpa’, ‘Grandma’ in English or ‘Papà’, ‘Mamma’, ‘Nonna’, ‘Nonno’ in Italian. I shall use examples both from English and Italian. Quasi-names are directly referential like proper names, even if they apparently exhibit some conceptual materials, which, however, are not active and are inert. They can be used as vocatives or as arguments of verbs. I called terms like ‘Mum’, ‘Dad’ ‘quasi-names’ because they have (...) certain characteristics of names (but they could also be called ‘indexical names’). They confer significance to an individual. Quasi-names are indexical, although the word ‘I’ does not appear in the proposition expressed. (shrink)

In this paper, I distinguish between linguistic and non-linguistic presuppositions. I also propose that we should be interested in conversational presuppositions, which could also be called speaker-meant presuppositions or speaker's presuppositions. I also distinguish between potential and actual presuppositions. I propose that, in some cases, presuppositions can be conversationally implicated and cancellation is possible. I specify what the hard cases are and I try to explain them through ontological considerations. I try to reduce the hard cases through (a) the notion (...) that all actual presuppositions are speaker-meant; (b) the distinction between ontological and linguistic presuppositions; and (c) the uncontroversial notion that even ontological presuppositions are susceptible to semantic under-determination that has to be tackled though pragmatic intrusion. Pragmatic intrusion for presuppositional cases, however, cannot really amount to completing or expanding or in any case computing an explicature in an ordinary sense, as explicatures have to do with truth-conditions and aim to create propositionally complete forms that are truth-evaluable, unlike propositional fragments or schemata that are usually expressed in sentences (; , 2012). They are processes similar to explicatures, but since presuppositions are only pre-conditions for an utterance's being true or false (; Macagno; 2016; ; ), we cannot say that these processes are completely like those of explicatures. Nevertheless, they are pragmatically-motivated, even if hard to cancel. (See on lack of cancellability or on entrenched meanings.) This more or less brings my approach in line with contextualism (even if I accept semantic invariantism, along the lines of or (Invariantism is also shared by , in a form that is compatible with her contextualism.)). (shrink)

By recent work on some conjectures of Pillay, each definably compact group G in a saturated o-minimal expansion of an ordered field has a normal "infinitesimal subgroup" G00 such that the quotient G/G00, equipped with the "logic topology", is a compact (real) Lie group. Our first result is that the functor G → G/G00 sends exact sequences of definably compact groups into exact sequences of Lie groups. We then study the connections between the Lie group G/G00 and the o-minimal spectrum (...) G̃ of G. We prove that G/G00 is a topological quotient of G̃. We thus obtain a natural homomorphism ψ* from the cohomology of G/G00 to the (Čech-)cohomology of G̃. We show that if G00 satisfies a suitable contractibility conjecture then $\widetilde{G^{00}}$ is acyclic in Čech cohomology and ψ* is an isomorphism. Finally we prove the conjecture in some special cases. (shrink)

Frank Michelman’s recent book Constitutional Essentials. On the Constitutional Theory of Political Liberalism is discussed from a specific angle, related to how Rawls’s ‘deflection procedure’ – called by Michelman ‘justification by constitution’ – is affected by two recent innovations in the paradigm of political liberalism: first, the extension of reasonable pluralism to a family of liberal political conceptions of justice that coexist in a liberal-democratic society; second, the idea of legitimation based on the criterion of reciprocity, aimed at supplementing the (...) liberal principle of legitimacy. In the attempt to probe Michelman’s assessment of the impact of these two innovations, three critical points are mentioned, for each of them, that suggest a somewhat more sceptical attitude than Michelman’s about the capacity of ‘justification by constitution’ to remain substantially unaltered, once these innovations are in place. (shrink)

We prove that the theory IΔ0, extended by a weak version of the Δ0-Pigeonhole Principle, proves that every integer is the sum of four squares (Lagrange's theorem). Since the required weak version is derivable from the theory IΔ0 + ∀x (xlog(x) exists), our results give a positive answer to a question of Macintyre (1986). In the rest of the paper we consider the number-theoretical consequences of a new combinatorial principle, the ‘Δ0-Equipartition Principle’ (Δ0EQ). In particular we give a new proof, (...) which can be formalized in IΔ0 + Δ0EQ, of the fact that every prime of the form 4n + 1 is the sum of two squares. (shrink)

It is often assumed that habits and aesthetic experiences are fundamentally and irreconcilably opposed. Typically, aesthetic experiences are considered to necessitate non-habitual behavior and to provoke unexpected mental states and extraordinary affective sensations. This article challenges this assumption. Moving beyond potential structural analogies between habitual behavior and aesthetic experience, I focus on two key aspects. Firstly, I argue that the experience of beauty and aesthetic experiences in general actually depend on certain habits, specifically those engaged in aesthetic agency and appreciation, (...) which I term «aesthetic habits». Secondly, I propose that habits have an aesthetic origin, as they virtuously evolve and adapt to their environment. This transformative capacity, along with their ability to resonate with specific situational demands, embodies an improvisational quality that should be encouraged, reflecting the inherently unpredictable and uncontrollable nature of aesthetic experience. (shrink)

Some patients tolerate a given drug well, without adverse reactions. For others, though, an identical dose of the same medication can have toxic effects. Moreover, while a drug can be effective at relieving symptoms for some patients, it may fail to do the same for others suffering with the same disease. With such variability in treatment responses, tailoring medical interventions to individual patients has long been an aspiration of medicine. Until recently, however, medicine lacked a clear understanding of the biological (...) reasons for human variation in drug response. Attempting to adjust treatment to the individual patient, physicians have relied primarily on direct observation, trial-and-error, and, ultimately... (shrink)

Ce livre se veut une lecture d'ensemble des reflexions que Wittgenstein a consacrees aux questions esthetiques concernant la musique. Il s'attache notamment a explorer les fonctions de l' entendre comme un outil conceptuel susceptible de nous aider a analyser nos manieres de comprendre cet art et a mieux definir ses proprietes expressives et son pouvoir emotionnel. Plus generalement, l'approfondissement de ces thematiques a pour objectif la definition d'une strategie pour re-penser l'acte performatif et l'experience auditive.

The discussion about the uses of the concept “musical object” highlights the difficulties of the project – put forward by Pierre Schaeffer (1966) – of basing its definition on the idea of “objet sonore”. Moreover, the proposal to assimilate the functions of the “objet sonore” to those fulfilled by a “musical work” turns out to be no less problematic. A new definition is proposed: a musical object is a social object resulting from the inscription of perceived sound(s), or of the (...) acoustic event(s)/object(s), in a reference system recognized as “musical” by a group of (minimally) two people. (shrink)

The article examines some of the consequences of the migration of musical works in cyberspace, particularly with regard to their ways of being and the ways in which we listen to them. Streaming is interpreted as the last stage in the expansion of a phenomenon that arose with the advent of phonography, namely, the ubiquity and availability of the works. A new development consists in the production of musical units in modular terms: works can consist of independent parts, which can (...) be replaced or constituted, in an order that depends on the user, taking inspiration from the model of the playlist. The diffusion of works on the web has also facilitated the development of the remix practice, changing listening standards and generating new conceptual conflicts concerning the identity of the works. The web weakens the distinction between the medium of communication and the medium of recording. It also favors the formation of new cognitive dispositions and generates more flexible and interactive ways of listening, generally different from those implicated in the era of the disc. (shrink)

For patients with multiple sclerosis, deficits in gait significantly reduce the quality of life. Using the concept of muscle synergies, this study investigated the modular organization of motor control during level and inclined walking in MS patients compared with healthy participants to identify the potential demand-specific adjustments in motor control in MSP. We hypothesized a widening of the time-dependent activation patterns in MSP to increase the overlap of temporally-adjacent muscle synergies, especially during inclined walking, as a strategy to increase the (...) robustness of motor control, thus compensating pathology-related deficits. We analyzed temporal gait parameters and muscle synergies from myoelectric signals of 13 ipsilateral leg muscles using non-negative matrix factorization. Compared with HP, MSP demonstrated a widening in the time-dependent coefficients, as well as altered relative muscle contribution, in certain synergies during level and inclined walking. Moreover, inclined walking revealed a demand-specific adjustment in the modular organization in MSP, resulting in an extra synergy compared with HP. This further increased the overlap of temporally-adjacent muscle synergies to provide sufficient robustness in motor control to accomplish the more demanding motor task while coping with pathology-related motor deficits during walking. (shrink)

In this commentary, we discuss an important pattern of results in the literature on the neural basis of expertise: decrease of cerebral activation at the beginning of acquisition of expertise and functional cerebral reorganization as a consequence of years of practice. We show how these two results can be integrated with the neural reuse framework.

Models of normal open induction are those normal discretely ordered rings whose nonnegative part satisfy Peano's axioms for open formulas in the language of ordered semirings. (Where normal means integrally closed in its fraction field.) In 1964 Shepherdson gave a recursive nonstandard model of open induction. His model is not normal and does not have any infinite prime elements. In this paper we present a recursive nonstandard model of normal open induction with an unbounded set of infinite prime elements.

Que contribuição a filosofia de Fichte pode dar à ontologia? Fichte posicionou-se claramente contra a ontologia enquanto descrição dos entes, isto é, contra a ontologia descritiva. A doutrina da ciência desenvolve pois uma ontologia prescritiva que pode ser entendida como um tipo de “ontologia performativa”.

Evaluativists hold that psychiatric disorders have a factual and evaluative dimension and recognize that psychiatric patients have an active role in shaping their symptoms, influencing the development of their disorders, and the outcome of psychiatric therapy. This is reflected in person-centered approaches that explicitly consider the role of values in psychiatric conceptualization, classification, and decision-making. In this respect, in light of the recent partnership between Fulford’s value-based practice (VBP), and Stanghellini’s phenomenological-hermeneutic-dynamical (P.H.D) psychotherapy method, this paper presents a comparative analysis (...) of two person-centered approaches to psychiatric care currently discussed within the literature. I claim that while these approaches share some core ideas, they also present important divergences concerning their axiological underpinnings, which could potentially compromise their partnership. In particular, by exploring their theoretical, practical, and ethical dimensions, I show that these models have different conceptions of what values are, which, in turn, affect their understanding of how values relate to the person and how clinicians can identify them. Finally, I argue that although Fulford’s and Stanghellini’s approaches are prima facie compatible and complementary, developing a “combined analytic-plus-phenomenological form of values-based practice” should address fundamental conceptual issues if it is to become a consistent and coherent method for psychiatric care. (shrink)

The reliability of previous findings on two crucial aspects of counterfactual thinking, namely the content of counterfactual modifications and their impact on future performance, has been questioned for the frequent use of tasks characterised by simple causal domains, that restrict participants’ possibility to consider a broad range of modifications. To overcome this limitation, we utilised a new experimental task featuring a complex causal domain to investigate such key aspects. The results indicated that participants tend to generate counterfactuals about elements outside (...) their control, especially when presented with a challenging version of the task (Study 1a) and, to a lesser extent, when they receive negative feedback on their performance (Study 1b). Moreover, despite occasional implementations of actions mentioned in controllable counterfactuals, being engaged in counterfactual thinking did not lead to subsequent performance improvements (Study 2). The implications of these findings for the debate on the function of counterfactual thinking are discussed. (shrink)

We live in an age when the dominant technologically utilitarian worldview is undergoing a transformation. To increase our awareness of this change, Turning Toward Technology introduces readers to the possibility of an alternative technological worldview by examining foundational concepts to Asian thought. The early Eastern philosophical treatment of technology was not ethical, but ontological, exhibiting sensitivity to how human existence was defined and determined in its relation to technology and to reality as a whole. Within the Eastern cultural orientation, technological (...) development was guided by a singular aesthetic sensibility to the useful, the good, the beautiful, the true, and the holy. Instead of controlling the shape of future technology by systems of rational management, George Teschner and Alessandro Tomasi recommend a view of technology that arises from questioning fundamental assumptions within Western culture about knowledge, reality, and human nature. Turning Toward Technology aims to stimulate awareness of an alternative technological paradigm, and thus a different mode of social action that can establish an optimistic future for global civilization. (shrink)

This volume covers a wide range of topics that fall under the 'philosophy of quantifiers', a philosophy that spans across multiple areas such as logic, metaphysics, epistemology, and even the history of philosophy. It discusses the import of quantifier variance in the model theory of mathematics. It advances an argument for the uniqueness of quantifier meaning in terms of Evert Beth's notion of implicit definition, and clarifies the oldest explicit formulation of quantifier variance: the one proposed by Rudolf Carnap. The (...) volume further examines what it means that a quantifier can have multiple meanings, and addresses how existential vagueness can induce vagueness in our modal notions. Finally, the book explores the role played by quantifiers with respect to various kinds of semantic paradoxes, the logicality issue, ontological commitment, and the behavior of quantifiers in intensional contexts. (shrink)

When Wittgenstein claims that "the expression of a change of aspect is the expression of a new perception and at the same time of the perception's being unchanged" (Wittgenstein 1953: 196), he expresses a paradox that Gombrich (Gombrich 1960) modifies in this way: (a 1) the observer x perceives a picture P under a new aspect; (b 1) if x perceives P under a new aspect then x's perception of P has changed; (c 1) but x's perception of P has (...) not actually changed. I argue that the Gombrich's version of the paradox has become the core of the problem of the pictorial representation. As I will explain, different approaches to depiction solve the paradox by denying one among (a 1)-(c 1). Gombrich rejects (c 1). Wollheim rejects (a 1). The so-called psychological theories of depiction also reject (a 1). Every theory of depiction should face what I call the Fictional Issue (FI) and the Representational Issue (RI). Attempting to solve FI and RI, I shall explore an alternative, Wittgensteinian solution, which implies to reject (b 1). To do this, we have to interpret the seeing-as as made of two kinds of perception: a simple perception and a representational perception. (shrink)

The present paper is an inventory and a description of the known manuscripts of the Nyāyamañjarī, meant as a tool for philological research on Bhaṭṭa Jayanta’s magnum opus. The inventory is gradually built through a systematic analysis of archival data found in catalogi catalogorum, bibliographies of catalogues, individual catalogues, unpublished lists, and editions of the Nyāyamañjarī. The list is followed by a concise description of each manuscript, including an external description, an outline of the contents, and historical information.

En février 2024, le Parlement européen a voté l’autorisation partielle d’utilisation des NGT ( New Genomic Techniques ). À la différence des OGM, interdites, les NGT ne visent pas à injecter dans une plante les gènes d’une autre, mais à modifier le séquençage de son propre génome en imitant l’évolution génétique « spontanée » qui ne prend plus des milliers d’années, mais quelques minutes. Du coup, elles sont peu « traçables ». Les techniques d’hybridation ont, depuis les années 50, été (...) imposées aux agriculteurs du Nord puis du Sud au prétexte de meilleurs rendements pour nourrir le monde et, aujourd’hui, de la protection de l’environnement. En fait, les semences hybrides sont brevetées et constituent une rente exceptionnelle pour les industries chimiques et pharmaceutiques, tout en maintenant dans la dépendance de leur utilisation les paysans du monde entier astreints à l’industrialisation agricole, ce qui provoque de profondes inégalités. Il s’agit de briser le lien mortel qui soumet les États (qui leur accordent un soutien massif) aux entreprises privées qui s’approprient les brevets. (shrink)

- Biological and cognitive systems have the capa- bility of developing new goals during phylogenesis of species or during ontogenesis of single individuals. On the other hand, current artificial cognitive systems focus on how achieving a given fixed set of hard-wired goals. They search an optimal solution of a problem, given a set of goals and a set of optimiza- tion criteria. They look for “how” to achieve a given goal. Natural agents develop new goals in order to cope with (...) par- tially unknown and ever changing environment. They must find “what” they want to achieve and not only “how”. The development of new goals on the basis of the interaction with the environment is here defined the “what” problem. The de- velopment of a collection of goals permits to redefine the con- cept of Umwelt in what could be considered the teleological Umwelt of an agent. The objective of this paper is twofold: i) to outline the “what” problem and ii) to describe a robotic archi- tecture capable of addressing it. (shrink)

Christian Metz can rightfully be considered the founder of the semiology of cinema. This essay traces the supporting structures, and the problems connected to them, of this theoretical effort, starting first of all from the context that nourished it. The difficulties associated with both the construction of a general semiology and the use of its categories in cinema and artistic languages emerge.

Collecting is one of the most widespread cultural practices in the world; which, similar to art – already the subject of a long tradition of philosophical studies – has given rise to the most various creations over the centuries. This refers not only to the countless types of objects that have been the focus of collections but, above all, to the object that constitutes their most defining production: the collection itself, collectively understood as an unparalleled artifact. But from a metaphysical (...) point of view, what is a collection? Starting from the peculiar relationship between a collection and the objects that compose it, in this article we will investigate the essence that distinguishes a collection from any other type of set or gathering of objects. The answer to the question “what is a collection?” will thus culminate in the outline of a specific theory, the abstract artifactualism of collections. (shrink)

Socrates and the Socratic Dialogue provides the most complete study of the immediate literary reaction to Socrates, by his contemporaries and the first-generation Socratics, and of the writings from Aristotle to Proclus addressing Socrates and the literary work he inspired.

Predatory journals and conferences are an emerging problem in scientific literature as they have financial motives, without guaranteeing scientific quality and exposure. The main objective of the ASGLOS project is to investigate the predatory e‐email characteristics, management, and possible consequences and to analyse the extent of the current problem at each academic level. To collect the personal experiences of physicians’ mailboxes on predatory publishing, a Google Form® survey was designed and disseminated from September 2021 to April 2022. A total of (...) 978 responses were analysed from 58 countries around the world. A total of 64.8% of participants indicated the need for 3 or fewer emails to acquire a criticality view in distinguishing a real invitation from a spam, while 11.5% still have doubt regardless of how many emails they get. The AGLOS Study clearly highlights the problem of academic e‐mail spam by predatory journals and conferences. Our findings signify the importance of providing academic career‐oriented advice and organising training sessions to increase awareness of predatory publishing for those conducting scientific research. (shrink)