In this paper I explore the prospects of a Neo-Aristotelian position—according to which the difference between the human species and non-human animals is a difference in ‘form’—in the context of the question of how the human form of life is related to the idea of education. Two interpretations of this idea have been suggested by contemporary Neo-Aristotelian philosophy that offer contrasting accounts of the role played by education. According to the first, the idea of a formal difference goes with a (...) notion of potentiality, according to which the distinctiveness of the human is mainly a product of education, and hence a matter of second nature. According to the second, the idea of the human is the idea of a formally distinctive kind of first nature that explains the very possibility of education. I maintain that both interpretations do justice to an important aspect of human life yet fail fully to grasp the significance of the notion of ‘form’ that they employ. I argue that to embrace the insight that the difference of the human is a difference in ‘form’, we must think of the human as a form of life whose very concept contains the concept of education. The concept of education, I argue, is a logical concept, contained in the concept of life that it describes. (shrink)

Our aim in this paper is to employ conceptual negotiation to inform a method of rethinking defective food concepts, that is concepts that fail to suitably represent a certain food-related domain or that offer representations that run counter to the interests of their users. We begin by sorting out four dimensions of a food concept: the data upon which it rests and the methodology by which those data are gathered; the ontology that sustains it; the social acts that serve to (...) negotiate and establish the concept; and the aims and values that it fosters. We then discuss the conditions that make a food concept defective, pointing out four types of defects—fragility, polarization, incoherence, and schizophrenia—which we illustrate by means of two specific examples: local food and healthy food. (shrink)

Name any valued human trait—intelligence, wit, charm, grace, strength—and you will find an inexhaustible variety and complexity in its expression among individuals. Yet we insist that such diversity does not provide grounds for differential treatment at the most basic level. Whatever merit, blame, praise, love, or hate we receive as beings with a particular past and a particular constitution, we are always and everywhere due equal respect merely as persons. -/- But why? Most who attempt to answer this question appeal (...) to the idea that all human beings possess an intrinsic dignity and worth—grounded in our capacities, for example, to reason, reflect, or love—that raises us up in the order of nature. Andrea Sangiovanni rejects this predominant view and offers a radical alternative. -/- To understand our commitment to basic equality, Humanity without Dignity argues that we must begin with a consideration not of equality but of inequality. Rather than search for a chimerical value-bestowing capacity possessed to an equal extent by each one of us, we ought to ask: Why and when is it wrong to treat others as inferior? Sangiovanni comes to the conclusion that our commitment to moral equality is best explained by a rejection of cruelty rather than a celebration of rational capacity. He traces the impact of this fundamental shift for our understanding of human rights and the norms of anti-discrimination that underlie it. (shrink)

"How can human beings, who are liable to error, possess knowledge, since the grounds on which we believe do not rule out that we are wrong? Andrea Kern argues that we can disarm this skeptical doubt by conceiving knowledge as an act of a rational capacity. In this book, she develops a metaphysics of the mind as existing through knowledge of itself."--Provided by publisher.

Social science inquiries of American agriculture have long recognized the inextricability of farm households and farm businesses. Efforts to train and support farmers, however, often privilege business realm indicators over social issues. Such framings implicitly position households as disconnected from farm stress or farm success. This article argues that systematically tracing the pathways between farm households and farm operations represents a potentially powerful inroad towards identifying effective support interventions. We argue childcare arrangements are an underrecognized challenge through which farm household (...) dynamics directly influence agricultural production. We draw on interviews and focus group data with farmers in the Northeastern United States to understand how farmer–parents access and negotiate childcare. Farmer–parents value raising children on farms, but express reluctance to expect current or future labor from them. Years with young children thus represent an especially vulnerable phase during a farm’s trajectory. We identify and analyze social, economic, and cognitive pathways through which childcare impacts farm operations. Social pathways include relationship tensions and gendered on-farm divisions of labor; economic pathways include farm layout and structure; cognitive pathways include how farmers think about and plan for their operations. Explicitly acknowledging such issues can better equip farmer–parents to anticipate and plan for conflicting demands on their time. (shrink)

Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 14, Issue 1, Page 6-13, January 2022.

This re-examination of the cogito is prompted by a substantive question which has not previously been identified: the distinguishability of the I or self. Consequently, its force has not been addre...

The paper suggests that Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s arguments against sympathy after the French Revolution, Walter Benjamin’s claims against empathy following the traumatic shock of Modernity and the First World War, and Hannah Arendt’s critical take on compassion. after the Holocaust are similar responses to singular historical crises. Reconsidering Arendt’s On Revolution (1963) and its evocation of Hermann Melville’s novella Billy Budd (1891), I show first that the novella bears the traces of an essay by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Appeal to (...) Law” (1809). Then, drawing on Walter Benjamin’s writings on trauma in Illuminations (1968, edited by Arendt), I discuss the political importance Arendt attaches to the proper way of telling a story, at a time when “the communicability of experience is decreasing” (Benjamin, Illuminations, 86). Through the analysis of Benjamin’s “The Storyteller” and Arendt’s “heartless” report on the Eichmann trial (1963), I equally show that, according to Arendt, testimonies must be narrated, or rather performed, in a dispassionate, dry, and compact manner so that they can be historically and politically relevant. (shrink)

In recent works, Časlav Brukner and Jacques Pienaar have raised interesting objections to the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics. We answer these objections in detail and show that, far from questioning the viability of the interpretation, they sharpen and clarify it.

Perceptions of a firm’s stance on corporate social responsibility (CSR) are influenced by its corporate marketing efforts including branding, reputation building, and communications. The current research examines CSR from the consumer’s perspective, focusing on antecedents and consequences of perceived CSR. The findings strongly support the fact that particular cues, namely perceived financial performance and perceived quality of ethics statements, influence perceived CSR which in turn impacts perceptions of corporate reputation, consumer trust, and loyalty. Both consumer trust and loyalty were also (...) found to reduce the perceived risk that consumers experience in buying and using products. From these significant findings, we draw several conclusions and implications, including the importance of enhancing firm focus toward its ethical commitment and long-term reputation. (shrink)

Causal Dispositionalism provides an account of causation based on an ontology of causal powers, properties with causal essence. According to the account, causation can be analysed in terms of the interaction of powers and its subsequent production of their effect. Recently, Baltimore, J. A. has raised a challenge against two competing approaches, the compositional view and the mutual manifestation view, to explain what makes powers interactive – the interaction gap. In this paper, we raise the challenge of explaining what makes (...) powers productive – the production gap. While Baltimore’s verdict is tentatively favouring, we find both approaches wanting. Our conclusion is that Causal Dispositionalists should take Baltimore’s and our critique seriously. Powers cannot cause their effects just by bearing the name “causal”. To deserve their names, more metaphysical details are needed. (shrink)

Modeling law search and retrieval as prediction problems has recently emerged as a predominant approach in law intelligence. Focusing on the law article retrieval task, we present a deep learning framework named LamBERTa, which is designed for civil-law codes, and specifically trained on the Italian civil code. To our knowledge, this is the first study proposing an advanced approach to law article prediction for the Italian legal system based on a BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) learning framework, which has (...) recently attracted increased attention among deep learning approaches, showing outstanding effectiveness in several natural language processing and learning tasks. We define LamBERTa models by fine-tuning an Italian pre-trained BERT on the Italian civil code or its portions, for law article retrieval as a classification task. One key aspect of our LamBERTa framework is that we conceived it to address an extreme classification scenario, which is characterized by a high number of classes, the few-shot learning problem, and the lack of test query benchmarks for Italian legal prediction tasks. To solve such issues, we define different methods for the unsupervised labeling of the law articles, which can in principle be applied to any law article code system. We provide insights into the explainability and interpretability of our LamBERTa models, and we present an extensive experimental analysis over query sets of different type, for single-label as well as multi-label evaluation tasks. Empirical evidence has shown the effectiveness of LamBERTa, and also its superiority against widely used deep-learning text classifiers and a few-shot learner conceived for an attribute-aware prediction task. (shrink)

Cognitive science thrives on the diversity of its (sub‐)disciplines, and topiCS is the ideal journal for bringing the diversity to bear. In this welcome address as its incoming Executive Editor, I outline my view of the journal and my vision for how to sustain its inviting and integrative power.

Phenomenology has been defined by Husserl as “theory of the essences of pure phenomena,” yet the ontological status of essences in Husserlian phenomenology is far from a settled issue. The late Husserlian emphasis on genetic constitution and the historicity of the lifeworld is not immediately reconcilablewith the ‘unchangeable’ nature that is prima facie attributed to essences. However, the problem of the nature of ideality cannot be dropped from phenomenological accounts without jeopardizing the phenomenological enterprise as such. Through an immanent analysis (...) of Husserl’s meditation on essences a positive account of their ontological status is provided. Essences are interpreted as ontological thresholds, primordially rooted in our motivated confrontation with sensuous transcendence. Essences appear as emergent ontological features, which are not reducible to their particular realizations and which exhibit a fundamental continuity between consciousness and being. They manifest themselves as prospectively a priori (a precondition for further experiences), but retrospectively a posteriori (they are founded in experience). Finally, essences manifest the ‘co-essential’ nature of consciousness and sensuous transcendence: they are the way in which we are motivated and constitutively bound to articulate being, which in turn is apt to be thus articulated. (shrink)

The intellectual trajectories of social scientists Robert N. Bellah and Clifford Geertz are compared as a case study in the production of successful interdisciplinary work. Geertz and Bellah started from a similar position, in terms of scholarly habits, network centrality, and symbolic capital. However, while Geertz became an interdisciplinary star and left his mark in disciplines as diverse as history, sociology, and cultural studies, Bellah’s interdisciplinary appeal was more limited, while his ability to speak to the general public as a (...) public intellectual was unmatched by Geertz. We thus review Bellah’s and Geertz’s parallel careers using a multidimensional analytical model intended to complete current field-based and performative-pragmatist models of intellectual success, arguing that interdisciplinary success can be accounted for by a combination of local ecological factors, images of intellectual work, and texts showing a high degree of cross-disciplinary fluency. (shrink)

The study here is a qualitative research based on multiple case studies of banking service providers to analyze the role of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the definition of the corporate identity of these kinds of organizations. The results show that, although companies increasingly integrate CSR into their business strategies, there are some aspects of its management such as its communication or the measurement of its results that detract from its success. These results have important implications for those managers pursuing (...) an effective management of CSR policies and strategies in their organizations, especially as the information comes from 6 of the biggest and most important banking institutions in a European country, with a declared assets (loans) volume which represents 62.75% of the total assets in the national banking industry, and thus largely representing the possible heterogeneity of the market in terms of company size, location, legal status, and management styles. (shrink)

We are living in the era of street art. Since Nick Riggle’s pivotal work on the definition of street art, several philosophers have addressed issues in the philosophy of street art. The goal of this paper is to summarize the literature. I consider the following matters, which have been at the core of philosophical discussions on street art: demarcation, value, illegality, and the ethical foundation of intellectual property (IP) protection. In answering the question ‘What is street art?,’ philosophers have generally (...) resisted skeptical approaches by developing a wide range of real and essentialist definitions of street art (Section 2). When considering street art’s value, I distinguish between aesthetic and non-aesthetic centered accounts. If the former focus on the aesthetic side of our experience of street art, the latter generally place emphasis on its activist nature and political significance (Section 3). In discussing the relationship between street art and illegality, I canvas different takes on the issue. If for some scholars illegality is either a necessary or sufficient condition for street art, philosophers tend to agree that it is neither, while not denying its relevance at the level of identity and authenticity (Section 4). Finally, I consider matters of IP protection of street art. On the one hand, copyright optimists defend the view that current IP legislations may very well have a positive impact on the promotion and preservation of street art. Pessimists, on the other hand, argue that an extension of copyright privileges to works of street art is likely to jeopardize the counter-cultural and rebellious nature of this urban art kind (Section 5). (shrink)

In this paper I examine and elaborate on Asha Bhandary’s conception of autonomy, and take up the question of what education for autonomy, thus understood, might require. I argue that educating for autonomy requires educators to impart, to students, an interlocking set of dialogical or relational skills that center responsiveness to the perspectives of others, and that these skills significantly overlap with the skills required for basic education in care.

Ofereço uma interpretação da dedução da posse jurídica realizada por Kant no §6de sua Doutrina do Direito que demonstra sua completude e coerência com a introduçãoposterior dos conceitos de “vontade universal” e “posse comum originária” como fundamentosda posse jurídica, ainda que ausentes da referida dedução.

This work formalizes an informant-based structured argumentation approach in a multi-agent setting, where the knowledge base of an agent may include information provided by other agents, and each piece of knowledge comes attached with its informant. In that way, arguments are associated with the set of informants corresponding to the information they are built upon. Our approach proposes an informant-based notion of argument strength, where the strength of an argument is determined by the credibility of its informant agents. Moreover, we (...) consider that the strength of an argument is not absolute, but it is relative to the resolution of the conflicts the argument is involved in. In other words, the strength of an argument may vary from one context to another, as it will be determined by comparison to its attacking arguments (respectively, the arguments it attacks). Finally, we equip agents with the means to express reasons for or against the consideration of any piece of information provided by a given informant agent. Consequently, we allow agents to argue about the arguments’ strength through the construction of arguments that challenge (respectively, defeat) or are in favour of their informant agents. (shrink)

In terms of ethical implications, Boers, van Delden and Bredenoord have made an interesting step forward with their model of organoids as hybrids, which seeks to find a balance between subject-like value and object-like value. Their framework aims to introduce effective procedures not to exploit donors and to increase their engagement, but it does not seem to take sufficient account of how organoids are used and how donors and society as a whole may want to act about such uses. I (...) will concentrate my remarks on three points that I consider relevant. The first comment concerns the so-called mini-brains. The second one is related to the issue of consent and long-term ‘control’ over the organic material granted by donors. The last comment focuses on ‘genetic minorities’. (shrink)

Women use power in more prosocial ways than men and they also engage in more emotional labor. However, these two constructs have not been previously connected. We propose that gendered emotional labor practices and pressures result in gender differences in the prosocial use of power. We integrate the literature on emotional labor with research on the psychology of power to articulate three routes through which this happens. First, women may be more adept than men at the intrapersonal and interpersonal processes (...) entailed in emotional labor practices—a skill that they can apply at all hierarchical levels. Second, given women’s stronger internal motivation to perform emotional labor, they construe power in a more interdependent manner than men, which promotes a more prosocial use of power. As a result, female powerholders tend to behave in more prosocial ways. Third, when they have power, women encounter stronger external motivation to engage in emotional labor, which effectively constrains powerful women’s behaviors in a way that fosters a more prosocial use of power. We discuss how, by promoting prosocial behavior among powerholders, emotional labor can be beneficial for subordinates and organizations, while simultaneously creating costs for individual powerholders, which may reduce women’s likelihood of actually attaining and retaining power by making high-power roles less appealing, guiding women toward less prestigious and more precarious leadership roles, draining powerful women’s time and resources without equitable rewards, and making it difficult for women to legitimize their power in the eyes of subordinates. Thus, emotional labor practices can help explain the underrepresentation of women in top leadership positions. (shrink)

Recent discussions of self-realization have devolved into unscientific theories of self-help. However, this vague and often misused concept is connected to many important individual and social problems. As long as its meaning remains unclear, it can be abused for social, political, and commercial malpractices. To combat this issue, this book shares perspectives from scholars of various philosophical traditions. Each chapter takes new steps in asking what the meaning of self-realization is–both in terms of what it means to understand who or (...) what one is, and also in terms of how one can, or should, fulfilll oneself. The conceptual elucidations achieved from both theoretical and practical perspectives allow for a more mature awareness of how to deal with discourses on self-realization and, in any case, can help to demystify the subject. (shrink)

Clinical ethics committees (CECs) have been developing in many countries since the 1980s, more recently in the transitional countries in Eastern Europe. With their increasing profile they are now faced with a range of questions and challenges regarding their position within the health care organizations in which they are situated: Should CECs be independent bodies with a critical role towards institutional management, or should they be an integral part of the hospital organization? In this paper, we discuss the organizational context (...) in which CECs function in Europe focusing on five aspects. We conclude that in Europe clinical ethics committees need to maintain a critical independence while generating acceptance of the CEC and its potential benefit to both individuals and the organization. CECs, perhaps particularly in transitional countries, must counter the charge of “alibi ethics”. CECs must define their contribution to in-house quality management in their respective health care organization, clarifying how ethical reflection on various levels serves the hospital and patient care in general. This last challenge is made more difficult by lack of consensus about appropriate quality outcomes for CECs internationally. These are daunting challenges, but the fact that CECs continue to develop suggests that we should make the effort to overcome them. We believe there is a need for further research that specifically addresses some of the institutional challenges facing CECs. (shrink)

Street art and graffiti are on the rise and their problematic relationship with the law is becoming an increasingly pressing issue. This paper considers a series of high profile street art controversies involving famous street artists Banksy and Alice Pasquini as cases studies for illuminating such a relationship. First, by discussing the “Banksy’s Law” – a “law” protecting street artworks in the style of Banksy while condemning graffiti – and its perceived arbitrariness, I investigate what I call the structural differences (...) between aesthetic and legal judgments. While not denying some continuity in reasoning about the law and the arts, I argue that legal judgments possess a degree of formality that cannot be found in their aesthetic counterpart. Second, in expanding my discussion, I also maintain that aesthetic considerations should not function as overriding reasons in legal determinations. By being illegal, many street artworks and graffiti acquire subversive power. If deprived of the possibility of challenging the law because of their aesthetic value, these art forms would lose much of their political value. And, more generally, a world where artworks cannot challenge the law is a world where the arts are rather superficial forms of entertainment. (shrink)

Since there are independent reasons for associating the habitual reading of the imperfective, in Italian, to a logical form based on universal or generic quantification, the purpose of Part I is to see how this kind of semantical structure accounts for another important interpretation of the imperfective: the progressive reading. And since in some particular cases the imperfective can also have a marginal interpretation which can be assimilated to a perfective effect (it is the so-called “narrative” reading), a further problem (...) is how to provide a reasonable explanation for this phenomenon too. If one considers the co-occurrence of the imperfective with different event predicates (in particular, accomplishments and achievements) it is possible to show that, with some minimal assumptions, the theoretical framework under discussion correctly predicts the following facts, which represent a crucial, but puzzling, characteristic of the imperfective in Italian: (i) activities allow for the progressive reading of the imperfective, but not the “narrative” reading; (ii) with achievements we have the opposite situation; (iii) accomplishments are compatible with both these readings. From this point of view, the semantic properties of the progressive reading of the imperfective are quite distinct from those of the perifrasi progressiva, which is the specialized form used in Italian to express the progressive meaning. Part II, which addresses the issue of the intensional character of both forms of the progressive, is more problematic, in the sense that it takes into consideration a possible extension of the theoretical framework presented in Part I. First of all I discuss some examples which clearly show that the perifrasi progressiva calls for some sort of “branching” representation of time, for it crucially refers to future courses of events which are not realized in the real world. On the other hand, since similar examples can be found in the case of the progressive reading of the imperfective, the main problem is represented by the fact that the kind of logical form under discussion is not completely adequate to account for such intensional phenomena.. (shrink)

It is safe to say that the main line of criticism against the reading of Critical Philosophy as Transcendental Semantics is that Kant would be concerned about semantic problems only on Critique of Pure Reason so that such reading would not make sense beyond that work. In this paper, I describe Transcendental Semantics in short words and analyze at length Kant’s theory of concepts on Transcendental Analytic of Critique of Pure Reason in order to make a suggestion: every concept has (...) to attend the demands of Transcendental Semantics to be called a concept in critical sense.A principal linha da crítica contra a leitura da filosofia crítica como semântica transcendental afirma que Kant teria trabalhado sobre problemas semânticos apenas na Crítica da razão pura, assim sendo, não faria sentido ultrapassar esse limite com aquela intepretação. Neste artigo, descrevo a semântica transcendental em poucas palavras e analiso a teoria dos conceitos de Kant na Analítica transcendental da Crítica da razão pura para oferecer a seguinte observação: para atender as demandas da semântica transcendental todo conceito tem de ser chamado de conceito em sentido crítico. (shrink)