In literature, indices of overall walking ability that are based on ground reaction forces have been proposed because of their ease of administration with patients. In this study, we analyzed the correlation between the indices of dynamic loading and propulsion ability of 40 chronic hemiparetic post-stroke patients with equinus foot deviation and a set of clinical assessments of ankle joint deviations and walking ability. Ankle passive and active range of motion and triceps surae spasticity were considered, along with walking speed (...) and three complementary scales of walking ability focusing respectively on the need for assistance on functional mobility, including balance and transfers, and the limitation in social participation. The correlation between the ground reaction force-based indices and both clinical and functional variables was carried out using the non-parametric Spearman correlation coefficient. Both indices were correlated to 8 of the 10 investigated variables, thus supporting their use. In particular, the dynamic propulsive ability was correlated with all functional scales, and has the advantage of being a continuous variable. Among clinical assessments, limited ankle ROM affected walking ability the most, while spasticity did not. Since the acquisition of ground reaction forces does not require any patient prepping, the derived indices can be used during the rehabilitation period to quickly detect small improvements that, over time, might lead to the broad changes detectable by clinical scales, as well as to immediately highlight the lack of these improvements, thus suggesting adjustments to the ongoing rehabilitation approach. (shrink)

Baker claims to provide an example of mathematical explanation of an empirical phenomenon which leads to ontological commitment to mathematical objects. This is meant to show that the positing of mathematical entities is necessary for satisfactory scientific explanations and thus that the application of mathematics to science can be used, at least in some cases, to support mathematical realism. In this paper I show that the example of explanation Baker considers can actually be given without postulating mathematical objects and thus (...) cannot be used by the mathematical realist. I also show that, despite this, mathematics keeps playing an important methodological role in the explanation and does not reduce to a merely computational or descriptive framework. (shrink)

ABSTRACT A belief is correct if and only if the believed proposition is true. Some philosophers argued that from this standard of correctness it is possible to derive the statement of a norm, a claim about what a subject ought to do. Many formulations of the standard in terms of an ‘ought’-claim have been suggested, but all resulted affected by some problem. My aim in this article is to suggest a new formulation of the standard in ‘ought’-terms based on an (...) analysis of the relations occurring between the notions of correctness and ‘ought’. My suggested formulation is that, for any subject S and proposition p, according to the standard of correctness, given that S believes that p, it ought to be that p. (shrink)

Nel 1881, per i tipi dell’editore Brigola di Milano, vedeva la luce Macchiette parigine, un compendio di profili biografici che lo scrittore siciliano Emanuele Navarro della Miraglia (1838-1919) dedicava a eminenti personalità della cultura letteraria e artistica francese di metà Ottocento.Francesista, a lungo residente a Parigi (1864-1872), in contatto a Milano con gli ambienti della scapigliatura lombarda (1872-1882) e da ultimo professore di Lingua e letteratura francese presso l’Istituto superiore di magistero femminile di Roma (1883-1913), Navarro della Miraglia includeva fra (...) le sue “macchiette” anche due ritratti d’artisti dedicati rispettivamente a Gustave Courbet e a Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux.Questo contributo si propone di definire il contesto e le ricadute di una lettura non allineata alla tempestiva e più “ortodossa” discussione della lezione di Courbet promossa da Diego Martelli presso i macchiaioli toscani, a beneficio di una geografia culturale diversamente articolata fra le aperture cosmopolite del naturalismo meridionale e le frange più avanzate della scapigliatura lombarda. Allo stesso modo il resoconto dell’atelier di Carpeaux è riconsiderato alla luce del coevo dibattito sulla scultura monumentale e delle ricerche in corso a Milano su un modellato più mosso e nervoso. (shrink)

Riassunto: Applicando il metodo fenomenologico e ricostruendo alcune tematiche della ricerca neuroscientifica, verranno nel testo discriminate le strutture trascendentali dell’esperienza, attraverso le quali il mondo circostante acquisisce significato, e le computazioni inconsce indagate nel dominio psico-fisiologico. L’emozionalità umana coinvolge meccanismi neurali-istintivi che precedono l’attività cosciente, ed essi possono essere esclusivamente investigati ricorrendo a metodi causali-quantitativi. La motivazione, che può essere descritta attraverso il metodo fenomenologico, esprime una forma di causalità più complessa, che ci consente di riflettere sulla nostra emozionalità all’interno (...) del flusso temporale della coscienza. La distinzione tra emozione e sentimento offre un importante indizio per comprendere la dimensione causale della prima rispetto alle caratteristiche motivazionali della seconda: in questo modo, potremo meglio approfondire il ruolo del sentimento in fenomenologia, coinvolgendo esso processi temporali-costitutivi. Parole chiave: Fenomenologia; Neuroscienza; Causalità; Emozione; Motivazione. -/- Emotional Experience between Causality and Motivation: Phenomenology and Neuroscience on the Human Capacity for Reflection: Applying the phenomenological method and drawing on neuroscientific research, I discriminate between the transcendental structures of experience, through which the surrounding world acquires meaning, and unconscious computations made in the psycho-physiological domain. Human emotionality involves neuronal-instinctive mechanisms that precede subjective conscious activity, and these can only be investigated using causal-quantitative methods. Motivation, which can be described using the phenomenological method, speaks to a more complex causality, that allows us to reflect on our emotionality within the temporal flux of consciousness. The distinction between emotion and feeling offers an important clue to understanding the causal dimension of the former and the motivational characteristics of the latter: in this way, we can better understand the role that feeling, which involves constitutive-temporal processes, plays in phenomenology. Keywords: Phenomenology; Neuroscience; Causality; Emotion; Motivation. (shrink)

What is knowledge? What should knowledge be like? Call an epistemological project that sets out to answer the first question ‘descriptive’ and a project that sets out to answer the second question ‘normative’. If the answers to these two questions don’t coincide—if what knowledge should be like differs from what knowledge is like—there is room for a third project we call ‘revisionary’. A revisionary project starts by arguing that what knowledge should be differs from what knowledge is. It then proposes (...) that we revise our account of knowledge accordingly. Our aim in this paper was to develop a methodology for revisionary projects in epistemology. Put roughly, the thought is that we start by looking at the various things that we expect knowledge to do for us. Once we have a list of the various things we expect knowledge to do for us we have a ‘job description’; a list of tasks we need done, and that we expect knowledge to perform. With the job description in hand, we can ask what knowledge would hav.. (shrink)

This paper will critically assess Popper’s evolutionary philosophy. There exists a rich literature on the topic with which we have many reservations. We believe that Popper’s evolutionary philosophy should be assessed in light of the intriguing theoretical insights offered, during the last 10 years or so, by the philosophy of biology, evolutionary biology and molecular biology. We will argue that, when analysed in this manner, Popper’s ideas concerning the nature of selection, Lamarckism and the theoretical limits of neo-Darwinism can be (...) appreciated in their full biological and philosophical value. (shrink)

Prologue : narratocracy and the contours of political life -- From nomos to nomad : Kant, Deleuze, and Rancière on sensation -- The piazza, the edicola, and the noise of the utterance -- Machiavelli's theory of sensation and Florence's vita festiva -- The viewing subject : Caravaggio, Bacon, and the ring -- "You're eating too fast!" slow food's ethos of convivium -- Epilogue : "the photographs tell it all" : on an ethics of appearance.

In _The Poetics of Political Thinking_ Davide Panagia focuses on the role that aesthetic sensibilities play in theorists’ evaluations of political arguments. Examining works by thinkers from Thomas Hobbes to Jacques Rancière, Panagia shows how each one invokes aesthetic concepts and devices, such as metaphor, mimesis, imagination, beauty, and the sublime. He argues that it is important to recognize and acknowledge these poetic forms of representation because they provide evaluative standards that theorists use in appraising the value of ideas—ideas (...) about justice, politics, and democratic life. An investigation into the intertwined histories of aesthetic and political accounts of representation—such as Panagia presents here—sheds light on how modes of poetic thinking delimit the questions of unity and diversity that continue to animate contemporary political theory. Panagia not only illuminates the structure of much contemporary political theory but also shows why understanding the poetics of political thinking is vital to contemporary society. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s critique of negation and his privileging of paradox as the source of political thought, Panagia suggests that a non-teleological concept of difference might generate insight into pressing questions about foreignness and citizenship. Turning to the liberal/poststructural debate that dominates contemporary political theory, he compares John Rawls’s concept of justice to Rancière’s ideas about political disagreement in order to demonstrate how, despite their differences, both thinkers comprehend aesthetic and moral reasoning as part and parcel of political writing. Considering the writings of William Hazlitt and Jürgen Habermas, he describes how the essay has become the exemplary genre of what is considered rational political argument. _The Poetics of Political Thinking_ is a compelling reappraisal of the role of representation within political thought. (shrink)

A level of adequacy of a given model with physical world represents an important element of physics. In an “ideal” model each element in the model would correspond exactly to one element in the physical world. In such a model each element would have a direct epistemological correlation with exactly one element of the physical world. Such a model would become a perfect picture of the physical world. The possibility of misinterpretation, in a sense that one searches for physical existence (...) of purely theoretically predicted elements of the model, would be excluded. In order to develop such a model we apply bijective function of set theory. Bijective function applied on time research shows model of space–time has no direct epistemological correlation in physical reality. Time is duration of changes which run in space. Duration does not run in time, duration is time. (shrink)

Trinity, freedom and dialogue not only represent three themes of Nicholas Cusanus' thought, but provide a possible hermeneutic key to reading his work and understanding his philosophy. Through a historico-philological and theoretico-speculative investigation, an attempt is made to investigate Cusanus' complex reflection on the One and his reflections on the concept of man and religion. If Cusanus has collated Platonic and Neoplatonic reflection, in particular from Plato, Proclus and Dionysius, he managed at the same time to direct their teachings towards (...) the Trinity. In his last works he reformulates his theory of the First Principle by endeavouring to thematize and give greater emphasise to the freedom of the One. But if freedom denote divine acting, it cannot but imprint also the being of his image, that is to say of man, whose mind is defined as viva imago Dei. Only by starting out from these presuppositions can the dialogical perspective be understood that he elaborated as response to the burning issue then current in his day of encounter, namely the meeting and clashing among the different cultures and religions. At the bloody conquest of Constantinople at the hands of the Turkish army (1453), just at the moment when all Europe was crying out for a recourse to arms and a crusade, the German philosopher and cardinal laid aside the merely denigratory and condemnatory designs against Islam in an attempt to make Christians realise that by putting faith in the one God there existed scope for possible mutual understanding and communion, that was essential for embarking on the way towards peace. (shrink)

The structural scarcity of healthcare resources has deeply challenged their fair distribution, prompting the need for allocation criteria. Long under the spotlight of the bioethical debate with an extraordinary peak during the recent COVID-19 pandemic, micro-allocation of healthcare has been extensively discussed in the literature with regard to issues of substantive and formal justice. This paper addresses a relatively underdiscussed question within the field of formal justice: who should define micro-allocation criteria in healthcare? To explore this issue, we first establish (...) formal requirements that must be met for allocation criteria to be considered fair and legitimate. Then, we introduce three possible answers to the research question: the attending physician, the team of physicians, and the team of experts. We discuss and then reject all of them, arguing that the task of defining allocation criteria should be assigned to a political representative, supported by a cross-disciplinary team of experts. This proposal is based on the need to take democracy seriously as a tool for making substantive allocative decisions in light of the inevitable disagreement on such matters within a community. To support this claim, we present two key arguments—the democracy argument and the consistency argument. We also pre-emptively respond to two significant critiques: the too-specificity of the decision critique and the catastrophic outcomes critique. In conclusion, we argue that our proposal offers the fairest and most legitimate decision-making process for healthcare micro-allocation. (shrink)

Since 2010, the European Journal of Anaesthesiology has required the reporting of five items concerning ethical approval in articles describing human research: ethics committee’s name and address, chairperson’s name, study’s protocol number and approval date. We aimed to assess whether this requirement has helped to identify and to contact the referenced ethics committees. In this cross-sectional study, we analysed articles requiring ethical approval, according to the Swiss federal law for human research and published in the European Journal of Anaesthesiology in (...) 2011. Ethics committees were searched through our institutional Internet access based on information provided in the articles. The last search was performed in November 2015. Numbers of items reported, of ethics committees identified, and of those that confirmed having provided ethical approval are reported. Of 76 articles requiring ethical approval, 74 declared it. Ethics committees’ names and addresses were mentioned in 63/74, protocol numbers in 51/74, approval dates in 48/74, and chairpersons’ names in 45/74. We could identify 44/74 committees; 36/74 answered our inquiry and 24/74 confirmed their role. Thirty-four of 74 articles reported all five items; in 25/34, we were able to identify an ethics committee, 18/34 answered our inquiry, and 15/34 confirmed their role. Forty of 74 articles reported ≤4 items; in 19/40, we were able to identify an ethics committee, 18/40 answered our inquiry, and 9/40 confirmed their role. Reporting five items significantly increased identification of ethics committees and their confirmation of ethical approval. Twelve of 74 ethics committees were unable to confirm their role in approving the study. Even when details concerning ethical approval were reported in these studies of human research, we were unable to identify almost half of the ethics committees concerned. The reporting of five items, compared with reporting ≤4, was associated with facilitated identification of ethics committees, and increased the likelihood that they would be able to confirm the study’s approval. Future research should identify which information facilitates identification of, and contact with, ethics committees. (shrink)

Some very recent “states of the field” of the history of political thought are rich in valuable information and raise many considerations. As often happens, though, rather than dwelling on what is shared, perhaps it could be more fruitful to reason in dialogue with the authors on how their reflection surprises or perplexes. In order to avoid unconscious ideological trends, the main issues to debate seem to be the idea of a role for the history of political thinking, the global (...) perspective, the meaning of context, the relationship between the history of political thought and political theory and, mainly, the concept of scholar’s interest. (shrink)

Consider an election in which each of the n voters casts a vote consisting of a strict preference ranking of the three candidates A, B, and C. In the limit as n→∞, which scoring rule maximizes, under the assumption of Impartial Anonymous Culture (uniform probability distribution over profiles), the probability that the Condorcet candidate wins the election, given that a Condorcet candidate exists? We produce an analytic solution, which is not the Borda Count. Our result agrees with recent numerical results (...) from two independent studies, and contradicts a published result of Van Newenhizen (Economic Theory 2, 69–83. (1992)). (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Klio Jahrgang: 99 Heft: 1 Seiten: 226-237.

In the debate about Michael Oakeshott’s philosophy there is very little agreement on the theoretical and historical meaning of his skepticism. Starting from the assumption that skepticism is not a fixed theory but a tradition of ideas, this article draws on both published texts and archival materials to contend that Oakeshott developed his thought by confronting himself with, and even merging, different strands of skepticism: the ancient, the modern, as represented by Hobbes and Montaigne, and the idealist, as conceived by (...) F. H. Bradley. The article firstly shows Oakeshott’s awareness of ancient skepticism, even though its impact on his thought is contested and controversial. With regard to modern skepticism, it looks at how Oakeshott defines Hobbes’s skepticism in his “Introduction to Leviathan.” It also examines the relevance of Montaigne to Oakeshott’s image of conversation, his idea of human agency and conception of politics. Finally, the article illustrates the influence of Bradley’s skepticism on Oakeshott’s conception of philosophy and reveals the consistency between Oakeshott’s skepticism and idealism. What emerges is a complex picture, in which Oakeshott’s skepticism is a constellation of elements taken from a variety of sources. (shrink)

The endogenous opioid system has received attention and extensive research for its effects on reward, pleasure, and pain. However, relative to other neurochemicals, such as oxytocin, vasopressin and dopamine, the function of opioids in regulating human attachment, sociosexuality, and other aspects of human sociality has not received much consideration. For example, nonapeptides have been extensively studied in animals and humans for their possible roles in mother-offspring attachment, romantic attachment, fatherhood, and social cognition. Likewise, others have proposed models wherein oxytocin and (...) vasopressin are moderators of the relationship between steroid hormones and human social behaviors. Recently, opioids have generated renewed interest in relation to social pain, and importantly, the brain opioid hypothesis of social attachment, which suggests that endogenous opioids are a key implementer in primate and human bonding, has received some support. Here we focus on romantic bonds by proposing that endogenous opioids are an important mechanism mediating reproductive trade-offs through their inhibitory effects on testosterone production. (shrink)

Theologia est scientia universalissima, et amplius quam metaphysica… theologia est quodammodo latior omni scientia1*Ci proponiamo di accostare la questione relativa all’indagine strutturale della teologia, della sua natura e del suo statuto2, con l’intento di precisarla da una prospettiva gnoseologica. La scelta di questo punto di vista è stata operata sotto la spinta di una antica suggestione attinta da Paul Vignaux, il quale riconosceva in Duns Scoto, prima ancora che in Ockham, un tornante decisivo nell’ambito dei rapporti tra gnoseologia e teologia:Duns (...) Scot […] avait transposé une question classique depuis l’invasion aristotélicienne: «la théologie est-elle une science?» en cette autre, plus... (shrink)