A collection of articles originally presented at two conferences, the first at Ventura Hall, Stanford, in April 1998; and the second at the University of Bologna in September 1999.

We present an OWL 2 ontology, called SaintGall, representing the Saint Gall plan, one of the most ancient documents arrived intact to us. The Saint Gall plan describes the ideal model of a Benedictine monastic complex that inspired the design of many European monasteries. The structural, functional, and architectural specification of an ideal Benedectine monastery is modeled by the SaintGall ontology, which allows one to analyse and model the Monastery architectural type. This work started with the purpose of relating Catania’s (...) San Nicolò l’Arena Benedectine Monastery with the abstract notion of Benedectine monastery, in the ambit of an ontological model based on the renovation works carried out by the architect Giancarlo De Carlo and developed by the same authors. The SaintGall ontology opens a research path aiming at comparing different monastic architectures that can be useful in any intervention of refurbishment or design for a monastery. (shrink)

Previous studies consistently showed age-related differences in temporal judgment and temporal memory. Importantly, emotional valence plays a crucial role in older adults’ information processing. In this study, we examined the effects of emotions at the intersection between time and memory, analysing age-related differences in a temporal source memory task. Twenty-five younger adults (age range 18–35), 25 old adults (age range 65–74), and 25 old–old adults (age range 75–84) saw a series of emotional pictures in three sessions separated by a one-day (...) rest period. In the fourth session, participants were asked to indicate in which session (1, 2, or 3) they saw each picture. Results showed that old–old adults tended to collocate negative pictures distant in time, while positive stimuli were remembered as more recent than real, compared to neutral pictures. To a lower extent, people over 65 showed the same pattern of results. In contrast, emotional valence did not affect younger adults’ temporal positioning of stimuli. Current findings fit well with the Socio-Emotional Selectivity Theory’s assumptions and extended the literature on the positivity effect to temporal source memory. (shrink)

The arising of smart cities has shown the limitations of the traditional attempts to understand and characterize cities. The smart city marks a relevant step in the evolution of urban systems which is expected to have disruptive impacts in the near future. Indeed, the ‘smartness’ qualification of cities points to relevant changes in the possibilities these complex systems offer mainly due to changes in the information which is made available. This chapter studies the notion of city from an ontological viewpoint, (...) and provides the first elements of a general framework aimed to characterize and unify how to understand the city and its evolution. It starts from historical considerations to isolate the factors that drove the changes from ancient to modern cities, and the complexity that characterizes the nature of cities. Our analysis departs from the traditional views and leads to distinguish three ontological components in the city: the modified physical place, the distributed agentivity, and the knowledge present in the system. The analysis of these components and their interactions, we argue, provides a coherent reading of the city across its evolution steps, and may be used to establish the maturity of today’s smart cities. (shrink)

In this study, we sought to assess the predictors of outcome in patients with disorders of consciousness (DOC) after severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) during neurorehabilitation stay. In total, 96 patients with DOC (vegetative state, minimally conscious state, or emergence from minimally conscious state) were enrolled (69 males; mean age 43.6 ± 20.8 years) and the improvement of the degree of disability, as assessed by the Disability Rating Scale, was considered the main outcome measure. To define the best predictor, a (...) series of demographical and clinical factors were modeled using a twofold approach: (1) logistic regression to evaluate a possible causal effect among variables; and (2) machine learning algorithms (ML), to define the best predictive model. Univariate analysis demonstrated that disability in DOC patients statistically decreased at the discharge with respect to admission. Genitourinary was the most frequent medical complication (MC) emerging during the neurorehabilitation period. The logistic model revealed that the total amount of MCs is a risk factor for lack of functional improvement. ML discloses that the most important prognostic factors are the respiratory and hepatic complications together with the presence of the upper gastrointestinal comorbidities. Our study provides new evidence on the most adverse short-term factors predicting a functional recovery in DOC patients after severe TBI. The occurrence of medical complications during neurorehabilitation stay should be considered to avoid poor outcomes. (shrink)

During most of Copernicus's life he was an inhabitant of political settings rather than scientific settings. His settings from 1492 to 1500 offered him a large amount of information about astrology. Most of Copernicus's known significant contacts at the Jagiellonian University had expertise in astrology, in some cases at national level. Information was available to Copernicus about the inaccuracies and the difficulties of astrological practice as well as about a notably successful astrologer-patron relationship. The experience of astrological practice that was (...) available to Copernicus in Bologna ranged from the benign to the potentially dangerous, and his departure from Bologna was contemporary with the threat of military reprisals against the town which appeared to show the incorrect outcome of the relevant prediction in Domenico Maria di Novara's prognostication for 1500. After this date Copernicus no longer participated in roles in which prognostication was a duty, he generally inhabited locations that were less potentially dangerous than Bologna was in 1500, and while at some later points he was keen to interest astrologers in his astronomical work, astrology is completely absent from his own explanations of the reasons for his astronomical work. (shrink)

Considerable historiographical controversy surrounds the question of why and how Copernicus decided to overturn the prevailing Earth-centered representation of the heavens. This essay summarizes some key elements of an explanation first laid out in The Copernican Question: Prognostication, Skepticism, and Celestial Order (2011) and subsequently expanded with further evidence in Copernicus and the Astrologers (2016). Copernicus’s defining problem situation is to be found in his involvement in a culture of astrological prognostication during his student days in Bologna (1496–1500). Just before (...) Copernicus’s arrival in the fall of 1496, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s attack on the foundations of astrology appeared from a prominent Bologna publisher. This publisher also produced several of the prognostications authored by Domenico Maria di Novara, in whose house Copernicus lodged. Among Pico’s many charges was a claim that astrologers do not agree on the order of the planets. Although the word “astrology” appears only once in Copernicus’s extant writings, it is certain that he was aware of Pico’s account of the astrologers’ disagreements on the matter of planetary order. The Copernican Question sets forth an inference about how and why Copernicus turned to heliocentrism that claims to be not only plausible but also the likeliest to correspond to what actually happened. (shrink)

La discussione generale sulla filosofia della scienza contemporanea è complicata dal numero e dall’eterogeneità delle scienze, mentre lo studio di temi specifici porta inevitabilmente a dissertazioni specialistiche che mancano nel dare ragione della trama di senso sottostante. Questo Piccolo trattato di epistemologia intende occupare uno spazio vuoto, proponendo alcuni temi chiave per la comprensione dei meccanismi alla base della conoscenza scientifica: i rapporti tra filosofia e scienze, siano esse naturali o umane; la complessa relazione tra fatti e valori; la distinzione (...) tra scoperta e giustificazione; la necessità di un discorso etico sulla ricerca, che chiami in causa categorie come fiducia, empatia, altruismo ed egoismo. Con un approccio chiaro e rigoroso, il volume intende rivolgersi a quell’ampia fascia di pubblico interessata alle tematiche centrali dell’epistemologia, della filosofia e delle scienze. (shrink)

In the ongoing pandemic, death statistics influence people’s feelings and government policy. But when does COVID-19 qualify as the cause of death? As philosophers of medicine interested in conceptual clarification, we address the question by analyzing the World Health Organization’s rules for the certification of death. We show that for COVID-19, WHO rules take into account both facts and values.

In this conceptual article, we argue that defining corporate social responsibility and corporate social irresponsibility as opposite constructs produces a lack of clarity between responsible and irresponsible acts. Furthermore, we contend that the treatment of the CSR and CSI concepts as opposites de-emphasizes the value of CSI as a stand-alone construct. Thus, we reorient the CSI discussion to include multiple aspects that current conceptualizations have not adequately accommodated. We provide an in-depth exploration of how researchers define CSI and both identify (...) and analyze three important gray zones between CSR and CSI: the role of harm and benefit, the role of the actor and intentionality, and the role of rectification. We offer these gray zones as factors contributing to the present lack of conceptual clarity of the term CSI, as a concept in its own right, leading to difficulties that researchers and managers experience in categorizing CSI acts as distinct from CSR. (shrink)

Os mitos antigos não estão mortos. A partir desta afirmação fundamentada nas obras de autores como Warburg, Jean Seznec, Erwin Panofsky e Fritz Saxl, este trabalho pretende apontar os caminhos históricos que legitimaram a sobrevivência do mito das sibilas no mundo cristão, em sua estreita relação com a astrologia. O paganismo não renasceu após o medievo, mas esteve sempre presente no cristianismo, não só como símbolos, mas como efetiva influência essencial sobre os homens e as suas vidas. Alguns momentos históricos (...) em particular são privilegiados neste caminho, desde os padres apologistas do cristianismo primitivo até o nascimento da ciência moderna. Sibilas e astrologia, como testemunhos “de fora” são presença constante seja na teologia cristã, seja na literatura e na música, ou nas representações plásticas do mundo cristão, que aqui privilegiamos. A sua sobrevivência ou pós-vida é ora afirmada também pela legitimação de grandes nomes da patrística e da escolástica, e ainda por meio da influência de Albumasar, teólogo muçulmano nascido no século VIII e que faz o elo entre sibilas, astrologia e a Virgem Maria. O que fazem as sibilas nos tetos das igrejas católicas? É esta a pergunta que o presente trabalho pretende, em grande medida, responder. (shrink)

This work proposes an analysis of the cognitive and motivational components of hope, its basic properties, and the affective dispositions and behaviors it is likely to induce. In our view current treatments of hope do not fully account for its specificity, by making hope overlap with positive expectation or some specification of positive expectation. In contrast, we attempt to highlight the distinctive features of hope, pointing to its differences from positive expectation, as well as from a sense of successful agency, (...) optimism, trust, and faith. Fear and anxiety are also addressed, and the latter is analyzed as a state of mind implying both fear and hope. Finally, the relationship between hope and motivation is explored, and “active” hope is compared with “passive” hope. Some concluding remarks summarize the results of our analysis, and stress the role of hope in fostering the individual’s well-being. (shrink)

Alongside the renowned male pioneers of medical cytogenetics, many women participated in investigations at the laboratory bench and the bedside, both in Europe and the Americas. These women were committed to this new biological and clinical practice—cytogenetics, the origins of contemporary genetic diagnosis—and contributed to the creation of new biological concepts and settings centered on the study of chromosome imaging. This paper will review the contributions made by a group of woman scientists from a wide geographical distribution, situating their names (...) and research agendas within the history of a field dating back to early plant and insect cytogenetics. Rather than an exhaustive compendium of women geneticists, this essay presents a kind of historical reconstruction that can be achieved by placing women at center stage in their geographies and networks of circulating cytogenetic knowledge and practices thereby relating a history of genetic images though the work carried out by women, retrieving their agency and constructing an inclusive history of an influential contemporary biomedical practice as it gained increasing influence in the laboratory and the clinic. (shrink)

The article by Gustavsson et al 1 addresses the important question how to handle new medications with focus on drug candidates that reduce Aβ or tau in the brain, for individuals with Alzheimer’s disease, where the need for a disease-modifying drug is enormous. There are several ethical issues to deal with. The challenges and ethical implications associated with whom should be eligible for treatment are thoroughly discussed in the article. Should treatment only be available to those with mild symptoms and/or (...) to those with no symptoms but with risk for AD? Where do we draw the line between who will be eligible for treatment and who will not? Who will be responsible for the prioritisation? There are many ethical problems with both population screening and screening of those with high risk well discussed in the article. Indeed, the first immunotherapy drug Aducanumab was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in …. (shrink)

This paper presents an overview of my work in philosophy from my first book on Friedrich Schiller and the political sublime to my most recent project on listening to traumatic forms of violence. Starting with a reflection on the autobiographical character of philosophy, I propose to take up the question of an aesthetic dimension of philosophical critique, where aesthetics is understood as an always already embodied perspective on the world, on truth, and on philosophical activity, as well as an always (...) already political realm, where the distribution of sense pre-determines our approach and articulation of experience. Departing from aesthetics understood and deployed as critique, the paper moves on to ask about the specific frameworks of sense or grammars that determine in advance the conditions of audibility in the realms of memory-building and history-making—particularly in those contexts where historical, political, and institutional forms of violence produce silencing and erasure. Putting in dialogue the latter with decolonial studies, I interpret “traumatic violence” as a colonizing form of violence, understanding that one of its central aspects is that it is not only an assault on life but on the conditions of production of sense that make life legible as such. In this context, my project on grammars of listening seeks to carefully unpack these complex intersections while also explaining why I believe that a radical form of listening is an essential subversive/imaginative strategy against traumatic/colonial violence. (shrink)

In the 1980s, new reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilisation and embryo transfer became commercially available in the United States, and somatic cell nuclear transfer—the cloning process by which Dolly the Sheep would be conceived in 1996—was in its experimental phase. While anxieties concerning these new technologies escalated in the popular sensorium, Laurie Anderson explored the phenomenon of cloning in a short musical film called What You Mean We? (1986) in which Anderson consults a design team to clone herself (...) in order to manage her demanding workload. The videographic image of the clone is Anderson herself, performing in drag, and her clone’s body is partially created through the use of a pitch shifter which changes Anderson’s voice to that of the cloned—but ostensibly male—version of herself. In this article, I investigate Anderson’s technological consideration of the body, which extends beyond her own corporeality, to interrogate the biological and affective capacities of clones. I consider how Anderson addresses the convergence of reproductive technologies, the market and the creation of subjects within this market as participating in a shift in how voices are heard, governed and reproduced in the latter half of the twentieth century. (shrink)

This paper explores Kant’s ambivalent views on music. It aims to show, on the one hand, how these ambivalences are in line with the modern philosophical reflection on this art; on the other hand, to show their place within Kantian aesthetics, a place that justifies Kant’s hesitations as whether to classify music as beautiful or agreeable, art or mere enjoyment, free or dependent beauty, culture or nature.

First published in 1997, this volume addressed the growing preoccupation of scientists at the time had in environmental phenomena, such as global warming, ozone layer depletion, acid rains, fresh water and ocean pollution, desertification, deforestation and the loss of bio-diversity. The crucial and pressing nature of these issues spawned says the author a new wave of research in environmental economics. The volume provides broad surveys of the developments in the economics of the environment and reports on the developing set of (...) environmental problems, analytical tools and economic policies. The importance of the developing approach was that environmental problems are no longer isolated from all other economic dimensions. Throughout the volume they are analysed in an open, generally non-competitive economy with transnational or global externalities. The first part deals with the relationship between the environment, economic growth and technological innovation. The second part analyses the optimal design of environmental taxation, while the third part considers the international dimension of environmental policy. (shrink)

The scientist Richard Lovell Edgeworth, educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and Oxford, was a Member of the Lunar Society of Birmingham, where he exchanged ideas with other scientists, including James Watt, and was known for his significant mechanical inventions. However, Edgeworth's real interest was education: in this 1788 two-volume work, written with his daughter, the poet Maria Edgeworth, he draws on his own experience of raising twenty children, from which the work derives its authority and innovative character. The work (...) was very influential, and led to his Essays on Professional Education. The two volumes discuss the theories of philosophers and educationalists, while in general arguing for the importance and formative character of early childhood experiences. Volume 1 deals with different areas of childhood education, including play, learning, and obedience and good behaviour. (shrink)