Gender inequalities are still persistent despite the growing policy efforts to combat them. Sexism, which is an evaluative tendency leading to different treatment of people based on their sex and to denigration or enhancement of certain dispositions as gendered attributes, plays a significant role in strengthening these social inequalities. As it happens with many other attitudes, sexism is mainly transmitted by influencing parental styles and socialization practices. This study focused on the association between parents' hostile and benevolent sexism toward women (...) and their socialization values, that are the values parents would like their children to endorse. We took both parents' and children's sex into account in the analyses. One-hundred-sixty-five Italian parental couples with young adult children participated in the study. Parents, both the mother and the father, individually filled in a self-report questionnaire composed of the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory and the Portrait Values Questionnaire. Findings showed that mothers' benevolent sexism was positively related to their desire to transmit conservation values to their sons and daughters. This result was also found for fathers, but with a moderation effect of children's sex. Indeed, the positive relationship between fathers' benevolent sexism and conservation was stronger in the case of sons than of daughters. Moreover, fathers' benevolent sexism was positively associated with self-transcendence values. Finally, fathers' hostile sexism was positively associated with conservation and negatively with self-transcendence. Limitations of the study, future research developments, and practical implications of the results are discussed. (shrink)

In the last decades, Systems Biology (including cancer research) has been driven by technology, statistical modelling and bioinformatics. In this paper we try to bring biological and philosophical thinking back. We thus aim at making diferent traditions of thought compatible: (a) causality in epidemiology and in philosophical theorizing—notably, the “sufcient-component-cause framework” and the “mark transmission” approach; (b) new acquisitions about disease pathogenesis, e.g. the “branched model” in cancer, and the role of biomarkers in this process; (c) the burgeoning of omics (...) research, with a large number of “signals” and of associations that need to be interpreted. In the paper we summarize frst the current views on carcinogenesis, and then explore the relevance of current philosophical interpretations of “cancer causes”. We try to ofer a unifying framework to incorporate biomarkers and omic data into causal models, referring to a position called “evidential pluralism”. According to this view, causal reasoning is based on both “evidence of diference-making” (e.g. associations) and on “evidence of underlying biological mechanisms”. We conceptualize the way scientists detect and trace signals in terms of information transmission, which is a generalization of the mark transmission theory developed by philosopher Wesley Salmon. Our approach is capable of helping us conceptualize how heterogeneous factors such as micro and macro-biological and psycho-social—are causally linked. This is important not only to understand cancer etiology, but also to design public health policies that target the right causal factors at the macro-level. (shrink)

Epistemic diversity is the ability or possibility of producing diverse and rich epistemic apparati to make sense of the world around us. In this paper we discuss whether, and to what extent, different conceptions of knowledge—notably as ‘justified true belief’ and as ‘distributed and embodied cognition’—hinder or foster epistemic diversity. We then link this discussion to the widespread move in science and philosophy towards monolingual disciplinary environments. We argue that English, despite all appearance, is no Lingua Franca, and we give (...) reasons why epistemic diversity is also deeply hindered is monolingual contexts. Finally, we sketch a proposal for multilingual academia where epistemic diversity is thereby fostered. (shrink)

Current research in molecular epidemiology uses biomarkers to model the different disease phases from environmental exposure, to early clinical changes, to development of disease. The hope is to get a better understanding of the causal impact of a number of pollutants and chemicals on several diseases, including cancer and allergies. In a recent paper Russo and Williamson address the question of what evidential elements enter the conceptualisation and modelling stages of this type of biomarkers research. Recent research in causality (...) has examined Ned Hall’s distinction between two concepts of causality: production and dependence. In another recent paper, Illari examined the relatively under-explored production approach to causality, arguing that at least one job of an account of causal production is to illuminate our inferential practices concerning causal linking. Illari argued that an informational account solves existing problems with traditional accounts. This paper follows up this previous work by investigating the nature of the causal links established in biomarkers research. We argue that traditional accounts of productive causality are unable to provide a sensible account of the nature of the causal link in biomarkers research, while an informational account is very promising. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is gaining momentum in the business world, but several issues continue to challenge managers in charge of sustainability. Supply chain management is one area in which CSR-related activities could potentially drive the process of sustainability within firms. This case presents the way that illycaffè, an Italian coffee producer, has approached CSR. Since 1991, the company has focused on developing a new relationship with Brazilian coffee producers based on networking translated into knowledge transfer—Brazilian producers became responsible for (...) their operations all along the supply line—and innovation translated into quality—one supplier talks about how illycaffè persuaded him he was capable of producing a Ferrari among coffees instead of a Fiat. These two factors not only drive the supplier relationship, but also serve as the drivers of illycaffè’s sustainability strategy. Lessons for managers relate to benefits for the business, for society and for stakeholders, and questions arise about how to replicate illycaffè’s success and create value through values. (shrink)

Presenting real life cases from clinical practice, this book claims that children can be conceived of as moral equals without ignoring the fact that they still are children and in need of strong family relationships. Drawing upon recent advances in childhood studies and its key feature, the ‘agentic child’, it uncovers the ideology of adultism which has seeped into much what has been written about childhood ethics. However, this book also critically examines those positions that do accord moral equality to (...) children but on grounds not strong enough to support their claim. It lays the groundwork for a theory of moral equality by assessing the concepts of parenthood, family, best interest, paternalism, and, above all, autonomy and trust which are so important in envisioning what we owe the child. It does not only show how children – like adults – should be considered moral agents from infancy but also how ethical theories addressing adults can significantly profit from recognizing this. The analysis takes into account contributions from European as well as American scholars and makes use of a wide range of ethical, psychological, cultural, and social-scientific research. (shrink)

For four decades, research on the role and responsibilities of business in society has centered on the business case for corporate social responsibility (CSR) and an increasing number of studies on the corporate social performance (CSP)—corporate financial performance (CFP) link emerged leading to controversial results. Heeding the call for a deeper understanding of the mechanisms linking certain CSR efforts to certain performance outcomes, this study provides a stakeholder-based organizing framework rooted in an extensive review of existing literature on the link (...) between CSP and CFP. In so doing, we aim at guiding research and practice toward less simplistic understandings of the CSP–CFP connection, thus advancing the debate over the consequences of voluntary integrating CSR into business operations and into relationships with stakeholders. By disentangling specific drivers and outcomes of the CSP–CFP link, we underline the importance of setting clear boundaries and specifying levels of analysis to generate comparable results. (shrink)

Based on the findings about the importance of social support network in the success of treatment and long term recovery, this article will provide an insight of the successful elements in addiction individual and group counseling interaction through which addicts manage to overcome the denial of addiction, to accept the recovery program, to go through the stages of recovery, and to identify appropriate research methods for understanding the phenomenon of interaction in recovery from addictions. This exploratory study will attempt to (...) identify an innovative perspective of the aspects pertaining to the recovery from addiction which are susceptible to be disclosed primarily by using methods inspired by the analysis of interactions. The method used in research is qualitative focus group with addictions counsellors and people in recovery, working in a counseling center. Using the application of ELAN software to annotate and transcribe interactions from the video and audio recordings, it will situate the research on addiction and recovery from addiction in the larger field of investigations on communication processes in human interactions in various cultural, social and professional contexts. (shrink)

Situated between pure practical reason and mere technical-practical skillfulness, prudence risks falling into the margins for Kant. This book seeks to discover a systematic place for prudence in his works and to reconfigure it as the empirical form of practical judgment, showing that prudence is essential to Kant s notion of happiness as well as for the fulfillment of moral imperatives.".

This essay considers episodes in which phenomena like war and civil strife affected, changed, and revealed the identity of the polis. Even if framed by an understanding of the Peloponnesian War and the imperialistic logic and destiny of Athens, Thucydides' History still provides us with narratives that illuminate the particular history of “minor” poleis, each with its specific events, turning points, and dynamics. Through analysis of Thucydides' historical material, this essay focuses on Plataea, Corcyra, and Mytilene and discusses the notion (...) of the polis in relation to space and in the context of time, thereby testing Aristotle's question—too soon dismissed—about the separation of a community from the space of its city. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to address the complex relationships within the geography of virtues. Based on the recent prototypical theories of concepts as idealized cognitive models arising from abstraction, the article argues that the relations between virtues are asymmetrical, with a prototypical virtue characterizing the whole category and specific virtues being character traits or skills derived from the prototypical virtue. It also argues that the most promising candidates for the role of prototypical virtue are phronesis (practical wisdom) and (...) the virtue of care, for their ability to represent and elicit any virtuous behavior when the situation calls for them. It therefore confronts the two options, which embody competing perspectives. In the concluding section, it proposes two possible directions for further research to settle in favor of one of the candidates. The article can be taken as an illustration of the potential of prototype theory for analyzing ethical concepts. (shrink)

‘Crowded places’ have recently been problematized as objects of terrorist attacks. Following this redefinition of terrorism, crowds have been reactivated at the heart of a security continuum of counter-terrorism, emergency planning and policing. How does the crowd referent recalibrate security governance, and with what political effects? This article argues that several subtle reconfigurations take place. First, counter-terrorism governance derives the knowledge of crowds from ‘generic events’ as unexpected, unpredictable and potentially catastrophic. This move activates 19th-century knowledge about crowds as pathological, (...) while the spatial referent of ‘crowded places’ reconfigures workplaces as crowded places and workers as crowds. Second, new guidance for emergency planning and policing deploys a more rational approach to crowds, put forward in recent psychosocial approaches. These modes of knowledge derive ‘generic crowds’ from normal social relations rather than extraordinary events. Generic events and generic crowds effectively depoliticize crowds, as they exclude a more radical generic politics, in which crowds are not derivable, but negate determination. (shrink)

Over the last decades, various predictors have proven relevant for job performance [e.g., general mental ability, broad personality traits, such as the Big Five]. However, prediction of job performance is far from perfect, and further potentially relevant predictors need to be investigated. Narrower personality traits, such as individuals' character strengths, have emerged as meaningfully related to different aspects of job performance. However, it is still unclear whether character strengths can explain additional variance in job performance over and above already known (...) powerful predictors. Consequently, the present study aimed at examining the incremental validity of character strengths as predictors of job performance beyond GMA and/or the Big Five traits and identifying the most important predictors of job performance out of the 24 character strengths, GMA, and the Big Five. Job performance was operationalized with multidimensional measures of both productive and counterproductive work behavior. A sample of 169 employees from different occupations completed web-based self-assessments on character strengths, GMA, and the Big Five. Additionally, the employees' supervisors provided web-based ratings of their job performance. Results showed that character strengths incrementally predicted job performance beyond GMA, the Big Five, or GMA plus the Big Five; explained variance increased up to 54.8, 43.1, and 38.4%, respectively, depending on the dimension of job performance. Exploratory relative weight analyses revealed that for each of the dimensions of job performance, at least one character strength explained a numerically higher amount of variance than GMA and the Big Five, except for individual task proactivity, where GMA exhibited the numerically highest amount of explained variance. The present study shows that character strengths are relevant predictors of job performance in addition to GMA and other conceptualizations of personality. This also highlights the role of socio-emotional skills, such as character strengths, for the understanding of performance outcomes above and beyond cognitive ability. (shrink)

Emotion judgments and five channels of physiological data were obtained from 60 participants listening to 60 music excerpts. Various machine learning (ML) methods were used to model the emotion judgments inclusive of neural networks, linear regression, and random forests. Input for models of perceived emotion consisted of audio features extracted from the music recordings. Input for models of felt emotion consisted of physiological features extracted from the physiological recordings. Models were trained and interpreted with consideration of the classic debate in (...) music emotion between cognitivists and emotivists. Our models supported a hybrid position wherein emotion judgments were influenced by a combination of perceived and felt emotions. In comparing the different ML approaches that were used for modeling, we conclude that neural networks were optimal, yielding models that were flexible as well as interpretable. Inspection of a committee machine, encompassing an ensemble of networks, revealed that arousal judgments were predominantly influenced by felt emotion, whereas valence judgments were predominantly influenced by perceived emotion. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the dynamic of social change in the domain of food consumption and seeks to understand the role played by social representations in the transformation of daily food practices. It rests on a model of change that hinges on the processes of cultivation and naturalization of new components of practices. Social representation theory is used to enhance the understanding of the ways that representations contribute to these processes of cultivation and naturalization. Using a visual and multimodal (...) framework for analyzing online environments, the research looked at 984 Instagram posts published by 34 actors who have an interest in promoting alternative proteins in the Canadian context. Results show an emergent subfield of food consumption defined by representations of alternative proteins actively and fluidly intertwined with those of their meat and dairy counterparts. This interplay emerges as being confrontational in the cultivation phase of the model for changing practices –where alternative proteins are presented as being better than meat and dairy – but becomes much more conciliatory during its naturalization phase, in which alternative proteins are presented as being as good as meat and dairy. (shrink)

The Region Connection Calculus (RCC) is a qualitative spatial reasoning formalism, developed in knowledge representation and geographical information systems. We argue that RCC can be viewed as a more fine-grained approach to the use of Euler diagrams to visualize categorical statements like ‘all A are B’. We present RCC using the syntax of first-order modal logic and a topological semantics. We compare the Gergonne relations (a well-known set of 5 jointly exhaustive and pairwise disjoint relations between two non-empty sets, visualized (...) using Euler-type diagrams) with RCC8 (a similar set of 8 relations for regions). (shrink)

A Deleuzian incursion into Kantian Criticism. About the Doctrine of the Faculties from the Perspective of their Interest. Deleuze describes the doctrine of the faculties as a complete system of permutations. These faculties are analyzed in part according to their own interest: speculative or practical. Each faculty has a superior form through which it is realized. Deleuze’s question is to what extent a faculty becomes able to achieve its own interest and bear the legislative burden for another. Reflective judgment generally (...) makes it possible to move from the faculty of knowledge to that of desire, from speculative to practical. These are also questions concerning the free agreement of our faculties with the contingency of Nature’s own accord with them. (shrink)

One way social scientists explain phenomena is by building structural models. These models are explanatory insofar as they manage to perform a recursive decomposition on an initial multivariate probability distribution, which can be interpreted as a mechanism. Explanations in social sciences share important aspects that have been highlighted in the mechanisms literature. Notably, spelling out the functioning the mechanism gives it explanatory power. Thus social scientists should choose the variables to include in the model on the basis of their function (...) in the mechanism. This paper examines the notion of ‘function’ within structural modelling. We argue that ‘functions’ ought to be understood as the theoretical underpinnings of the causes, namely as the role that causes play in the functioning of the mechanism. (shrink)

We argue that, given that the act of eating is rational and relational, it should also be an educational issue dealing with society and environment, politics and health, tastes and trends, as well as genetic and epigenetic factors. This hypothesis arises from a particular theory of the human act and an anthropological approach based on the philosophical speculations of MacIntyre and Aristotle. We argue that eating choices are “hybrids of freedom,” rationality, and unconscious and environmental elements. Finally, we suggest that (...) people have to change their habits in order to transform the human way of acting, since every human act can change the human essence and vice versa. (shrink)

Vertrauen kommt vor allem dann zum Vorschein, wenn es nicht mehr selbstverständlich ist. Claudia Welz untersucht die Bedeutung, Formen und Grenzen des Vertrauens in Versuchungssituationen.

El concepto de liberalismo autoritario formulado por Hermann Heller en 1932 se ha convertido en objeto de discusión en el debate contemporáneo. De hecho, la crisis política y económica europea de los últimos 10 años parece actualizar perfectamente la idea de un retroceso democrático del orden económico liberal. En este artículo voy a analizar el nivel teórico y conceptual del liberalismo autoritario para luego centrarme en la influencia que esto tuvo sobre algunas formas de liberalismo contemporáneo (como el ordoliberalismo y (...) el neoliberalismo) practicadas tanto durante el proceso de integración como en las respuestas de las instituciones ante la crisis europea. (shrink)

This essay considers the tensions informing Nietzsche's reflection on intertwined issues of nature, art, sexuality, and the feminine. Through the figure of Dionysus, Nietzsche articulates a suggestive understanding of generation as the upsurge of nature in its transformative movement. The juxtaposition of Luce Irigaray's elaboration of the Dionysian calls for an interrogation of Nietzsche's work regarding (1) the sublimation of nature into art and of sexuality or sensuality into artistic drives, (2) the oblivion of sexual difference in the coupling of (...) Apollo and Dionysus, and (3) the disappearance of love from the scene of creativity and procreation and, concomitantly, the emphasis on suffering and dismemberment. (shrink)

A partir da conjectura de que a história e atuação de escritoras feministas negras é uma maneira de tensionar as relações sociais para resolver problemas oriundos da colonização, este estudo parte do pressuposto de que a inserção, teorização dos papéis e contribuições dessas autoras na educação corrobora para desconstrução de narrativas éticas e estéticas pautadas no viés eurocêntrico. Objetiva-se destacar a potencialidade do pensamento feminista negro, utilizando a categoria da interseccionalidade, para incluir possibilidades pedagógicas de fomento ao debate de raça/etnia, (...) classe e gênero, no âmbito educacional e combate ao racismo estrutural, sexismo e cultura patriarcal, advindos da colonialidade. Para tanto, parte-se de uma abordagem metodológica feminista, bibliográfica e qualitativa e se constitui em um diálogo ancorado em autoras estrangeiras e brasileiras, sobretudo negras e decoloniais no qual constata-se que o pensamento feminista negro pode colaborar para a construção de uma educação antirracista e antissexista para promover a decolonialidade do saber. (shrink)

(1) In Plato’s Phaedrus divine inspiration comes literally to mean “environmental inspiration.” Intimated thereby is the insufficiency of all reflection on the divine and the natural which would fail to interrogate these categories precisely in their convergence, indeed, in their being (at) one. (2) The theme of inspiration, in its divine or elemental character, necessarily raises further questions concerning the status of inspired utterance—that is, in this case, of philosophical discourse itself. (3) These themes finally point to the problem of (...) the provenance of speaking and writing, if not from a purely active and free subject. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Internationales Jahrbuch für philosophische Anthropologie Jahrgang: 5 Heft: 1 Seiten: 53-70.

In recent years the French philosopher Jacques Rancière has addressed the predicament of artists and curators who, in their eagerness to convey a critical message or engage their viewers in an emancipatory process, end up predetermining the outcomes of the experience, hence blocking its critical or emancipatory potential. In this essay I consider Rancière’s writing on this topic and draw out the parallels with the predicament of teachers and curriculum designers who have critical and emancipatory objectives. The risk of education (...) that strives for emancipation is that it can become so directive in steering students to the “right” outcomes that it does not leave these students any intellectual room. Rancière’s work is helpful in reminding us that teachers and curricula with explicitly critical, political, emancipatory objectives can defeat their own purposes and become stultifying if they do not leave the student room to use her or his own intelligence. (shrink)

"ÂAdventures in Lesbian Philosophy contains many illuminating discussions (of S/M sex, lesbian ethics, lesbian desire, bisexuality), and includes a useful bibliography of lesbian criticism." —Passion "This new collection edited by ...