Der Beziehung zwischen Religion, sozialen Strukturen und politischen Institutionen kam in menschlichen Gesellschaften seit jeher eine fundamentale Rolle zu. Die hier versammelten Aufsätze erkunden mögliche Wege, wie die philosophischen Konzeptualisierungen von Gott, Göttern und dem Göttlichen in der antiken Welt mit traditionellen religiösen Praktiken und Institutionen interagieren, ebenso wie mit nicht-philosophischen Ansichten des Göttlichen. Dabei wird ein Bogen von der „Rationalisierung“ des Göttlichen durch die frühen griechischen Philosophen bis hin zur Konzeption der Toleranz gespannt, die sich bei Augustinus finden lässt. (...) Untersucht werden Schriften von Platon, der als Erster in der Geschichte die Worte ‚Theologie‘ und ‚Atheismus‘ prägte, und Aristoteles mit seinem intellektuell geprägten Blick auf Gott. Der Band ist besonders wertvoll für Interessenten der Geistesgeschichte, politischen Theorie, Religionsgeschichte und der klassischen Antike. Mit Beiträgen von Sylvana V. Chrysakopoulou | Francesca Eustacchi | Silvia Gastaldi | Giovanni Giorgini | Christoph Horn | Elena Irrera | Jakub Jinek | Manuel Knoll | Maria Liatsi | Francisco L. Lisi | Alberto Maffi | Maurizio Migliori | Josef Moural | Nurdane Şimşek | Bernat Torres | Denis Walter. (shrink)

This essay frames systemic patterns of mental abuse against women of color and Indigenous women on Turtle Island (North America) in terms of larger design-of-distribution strategies in settler colonial societies, as these societies use various forms of social power to distribute, reproduce, and automate social inequalities (including public health precarities and mortality disadvantages) that skew socio-economic gain continuously toward white settler populations and their descendants. It departs from traditional studies in gender-based violence research that frame mental abuses such as gaslighting--commonly (...) understood as mental manipulation through lying or deceit--stochastically, as chance-driven interpersonal phenomena. Building on structural analyses of knowledge in political epistemology (Dotson 2012, Berenstain 2016), political theory (Davis and Ernst 2017), and Indigenous social theory (Tuck and Yang 2012), I develop the notion of cultural gaslighting to refer to the social and historical infrastructural support mechanisms that disproportionately produce abusive mental ambients in settler colonial cultures in order to further the ends of cultural genocide and dispossession. I conclude by proposing a social epidemiological account of gaslighting that a) highlights the public health harms of abusive ambients for minority populations, b) illuminates the hidden rules of social structure in settler colonial societies, and c) amplifies the corresponding need for structural reparations. (shrink)

The question whether AI systems have agency is gaining increasing importance in discussions of responsibility for AI behavior. This paper argues that an approach to artificial agency needs to be teleological, and consider the role of human goals in particular if it is to adequately address the issue of responsibility. I will defend the view that while AI systems can be viewed as autonomous in the sense of identifying or pursuing goals, they rely on human goals and other values incorporated (...) into their design, and are, as such, dependent on human agents. As a consequence, AI systems cannot be held morally responsible, and responsibility attributions should take into account normative and social aspects involved in the design and deployment of the said AI. My argument falls in line with approaches critical of attributing moral agency to artificial agents, but draws from the philosophy of action, highlighting further philosophical underpinnings of current debates on artificial agency. (shrink)

Systemic epistemic failings in institutions are often explained through settler epistemologies and settler colonial frameworks that both obscure and reproduce the conditions necessary for those failings to endure. What is never questioned in the standard picture of institutional epistemic injustice is the implicit origin myth of an ‘institutional big bang’ that spawned many modern social institutions out of presumably noble orienting goals for a well-functioning society in democratic nation-states. We are concerned with the functional outcomes of institutions in settler colonial (...) societies, and how these outcomes consistently undermine whitewashed narratives of any inherent institutional design allegedly aimed at promoting testimonial justice in settler colonial societies. Institutions are built to target and maintain a status quo, especially (but not only) when they are charged with securing part of the social order or fabric of settler colonial societies. We will illustrate this concern through a discussion of various functional outcomes of the U.S. institution of asylum using Shannon Speed’s (2019. Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settler-Capitalist State. The University of North Carolina Press) analysis of the violence Indigenous women migrants from Latin America experience within the complex administrative web of U.S. migration and asylum systems. (shrink)

In the wake of continued structural asymmetries between women of color and white feminisms, this essay revisits intersectional tensions in Catharine MacKinnon’s Toward a Feminist Theory of the State while exploring productive spaces of coalition. To explore such spaces, we reframe Toward a Feminist Theory of the State in terms of its epistemological project and highlight possible synchronicities with liberational features in women-of-color feminisms. This is done, in part, through an analysis of the philosophical role “method” plays in MacKinnon’s argument, (...) and by reframing her critique of juridical neutrality and objectivity as epistemic harms. In the second section, we sketch out a provisional coalitional theory of liberation that builds on MacKinnon’s feminist epistemological insights and aligns them with decolonizing projects in women-of-color feminisms, suggesting new directions and conceptual revisions that are on the way to coalition. (shrink)

In this paper I tackle Gadamer’s and Dewey’s conceptions of art, showing a possible dialogue between American Pragmatism and Gadamerian Hermeneutics. Despite the obvious differences, it is possible to show fundamental commonalities between the two philosophies when it comes to the role of art. They share the double goal of critiquing the aestheticism of modern age, the conception of art as a mere “art for art’s sake,” and of recomposing the continuity between aesthetic experience and everyday life. I argue that (...) this common goal entails a reassessment of the relation between the work of art and the public, a reassessment that has fundamental consequences for the role of art in our societies. The present comparison will also help shed new light on Gadamer’s conception, often accused of being a merely conversative theory. For both Gadamer and Dewey art does not consist in a product of the elites that is given to the spectators: rather, the spectators cooperate with the author in the creation and development of the work of art itself. (shrink)

There is a growing trend across North America of women being criminalized for their pregnancy outcomes. Rather than being a series of aberrations resulting from institutional failures, we argue that this trend is part of a colonial strategy of administrative violence aimed at women of color and Native women across Turtle Island. We consider a range of medical and legal practices constituting gender-based administrative violence, and we argue that they are the result of non-accidental and systematic production of population-level harms (...) that cannot be disentangled from the goals of ongoing settler occupation and dispossession of Indigenous lands. While white feminist narratives of gender-based administrative violence in Latin America function to distance the places where such violence occurs from the ‘liberal democratic’ settler nation-states of the U.S. and Canada, we hold that administrative forms of reproductive violence against Latin American women are structurally connected to efforts in the U.S. and Canada to criminalize women of color and Indigenous women for their reproductive outcomes. The purpose of these systemically produced harms is to sustain cultures of gender-based violence in support of settler colonial configurations of power. (shrink)

The importance of emotions is supported by many authors of the ethics of care in contrast to the rationalistic paradigm of justice. However, the reference to the emotions remains generic. By focusing on three paradigmatic typologies (care out of love, care work, and care of the distant other), I propose to investigate this aspect further, and distinguish between the different emotions that motivate care (such as love, compassion, and generosity). I will try, first, to offer a reflection on which emotions (...) are likely to motivate ethical action within an ethics of care; second, to survey different potential obstacles to these emotions and propose how they might be overcome to more successfully achieve good care and ethical action. (shrink)

This paper examines the relationship between corporate social responsibility and financial performance for Islamic banks in the Gulf Cooperation Council region over the period 2000–2014 by generating CSR-related data through disclosure analysis of the annual reports of the sampled banks. The findings of this study indicate that there is a significant positive relationship between CSR disclosure and the financial performance of Islamic banks in the GCC countries. The results also show a positive relationship between CSR disclosure and the future financial (...) performance of GCC Islamic banks, potentially indicating that current CSR activities carried out by Islamic banks in the GCC could have a long-term impact on their financial performance. Furthermore, despite demonstrating a significant positive relationship between the composite measure of the CSR disclosure index and financial performance, the findings show no statistically significant relationship between the individual dimensions of the CSR disclosure index and the current financial performance measure except for ‘mission and vision’ and ‘products and services’. Similarly, the empirical results detect a positive significant association only between ‘mission and vision’ dimension and future financial performance of the examined banks. (shrink)

Approaching mental health on a global scale with particular reference to low- and mid-income countries raises issues concerning the disregard of the local context and values and the imposition of values characteristic of the Global North. Seeking a philosophical viewpoint to surmount these problems, the present paper argues for a value-laden framework for psychiatry with the specific incorporation of value pluralism, particularly in relation to the Global South context, while also emphasizing personal values such as the choice of treatment. In (...) sketching out this framework, the paper aims to overcome the clash between universalism and relativism about psychiatric categories by focusing on how overlaps between cultures can contribute to ontology-building. A case study analyzing ethnopsychiatric research in the context of South India will illustrate the proposed view, while also pointing out avenues for further research on the causal efficacy of local shared beliefs about mental disorder. If approaches across different traditions and theoretical frames are shown to work in treating similar ailments, causal connections appear to cut across the different ontologies. Ethnopsychiatry would play a central role in such research, namely in disclosing the variables and mechanisms at work within the local approaches. (shrink)

This is the first English translation of Ibn Sīnā's (Avicenna) Commentary on Chapters 6-10 of Aristotle's Metaphysics Λ. It is significant as it is one of only a small number of surviving commentaries by Ibn Sīnā and offers crucial insights into not only his attitudes towards his predecessors, but also his own philosophical positions — especially with regard to the human intellect's connections to God and the cosmos — and his attempt to develop a distinctive mode of commentary.

AfterTranscritique: On Kant and Marx, Karatani Kōjin’s new bookThe Structure of World Historypresents another engagement with Marxian theory from a ‘heterodox’ standpoint. In this book, rather than viewingThe Structure of World Historyfrom the aspect of mode of production in the conventional ‘Marxist’ sense, Karatani shifts perspective to the modes of exchange. To this end, Karatani appropriates what he sees as Marx’s emphasis on ‘exchange’. In the present essay, by looking at the textual evidence, I critically evaluate whether this appropriation of (...) Marx’s theory is justified. I furthermore contend that Karatani’s reading of the concepts of value, money, capital, and surplus-value from the standpoint of ‘exchange’ arises from a grave misconstrual of Marx’s critical intent. Accordingly, Karatani neglects the critique of exploitation and the systematic production of poverty that informs the basic assumptions of Marx’s analysis of the capitalist mode of production. (shrink)

This paper takes a critical stance on Tallis’s separation of causation and agency. While his critique of the causal theory of action and the assumptions about causation underlying different versions of determinism, including the one based on neuroscience is right, his rejection of causation (of all sorts) has implausible consequences. Denying the link between action and causation amounts to overlooking the role action plays in causal inference and in the origin of causal concepts. I suggest that a weaker version of (...) Tallis’ claim, compatible with causation understood as agency, would work better. (shrink)

This paper investigates the concept of behavioral autonomy in Artificial Life by drawing a parallel to the use of teleological notions in the study of biological life. Contrary to one of the leading assumptions in Artificial Life research, I argue that there is a significant difference in how autonomous behavior is understood in artificial and biological life forms: the former is underlain by human goals in a way that the latter is not. While behavioral traits can be explained in relation (...) to evolutionary history in biological organisms, in synthetic life forms behavior depends on a design driven by a research agenda, further shaped by broader human goals. This point will be illustrated with a case study on a synthetic life form. Consequently, the putative epistemic benefit of reaching a better understanding of behavioral autonomy in biological organisms by synthesizing artificial life forms is subject to doubt: the autonomy observed in such artificial organisms may be a mere projection of human agency. Further questions arise in relation to the need to spell out the relevant human aims when addressing potential social or ethical implications of synthesizing artificial life forms. (shrink)

This essay discusses the ethical challenges and dilemmas in allocating scarce medical resources during the COVID-19 pandemic, using the German legislative process as a starting point. It is guided by the right to non-discrimination of people with disability and generally contrasts utilitarian and rights-based principles of allocation. Three approaches that were suggested in the German discussion, are presented, the lottery principle, the first come first served principle and the probability to survive principle. Arguments in favour and against each principle are (...) discussed. The focus is on the utilitarian probability to survive principle, which was adopted in German legislation in 2022, and its discriminatory potential against people with disability. The essay suggests ways to mitigate the concerns of discrimination related to the probability to survive principle. It concludes that resolving the triage dilemma requires a balanced approach between utilitarian and rights-based concerns, which promotes both maximising the number of patients surviving and the right not to be discriminated against and be treated equally. It calls for a further debate on how many ethical values such as equity, fairness and non-discrimination we are willing to sacrifice for a higher number of survivors and when we are willing to sacrifice survivors to secure ethical values. (shrink)

Bioethics is a field in which innovation is required to help prevent and respond to zoonotic diseases with the potential to cause epidemics and pandemics. Some of the developments necessary to fight pandemics, such as COVID-19 vaccines, require public debate on the benefits and risks of individual choice versus responsibility to society. While these debates are necessary, a more fundamental ethical innovation to rebalance human, animal, and environmental interests is also needed. One Health (OH) can be characterized as a strategy (...) that recognizes and promotes the synergy between human, animal, and environmental health. Yet, despite the recognition that these entities are interdependent, there is a pronounced inequality in the power relations between human, non-human animal, and the environmental interests which threatens the well-being of all. Until OH can ensure the moral status of animals and the environment and thereby the equal consideration of these interests, it will struggle to protect non-human interests and, as a result, human health. To create a sustainable health system requires a renewed concept of justice that is ecocentric in nature and an application of OH that is flexible and responsive to different ethical interests (e.g., person-centred care and physician responsibilities). Ultimately, to save themselves, humans must now think beyond themselves. Bioethics must assume a key role in supporting the developments required to create and maintain relationships able to sustain environmental and human health. (shrink)

This note introduces a framework incorporating multiple sources of evidence into the response to COVID-19 to overcome the neglect of social and psychological causes of illness. By using the example of psychological research on loneliness and its effects on physical and mental health with particular focus on aging and disability, I seek to open further inquiry into how relevant psychological and social aspects of health can be addressed at policy level.

This is the first English translation of Ibn Sīnā's (Avicenna) Commentary on Chapters 6-10 of Aristotle's Metaphysics Λ. It is significant as it is one of only a small number of surviving commentaries by Ibn Sīnā and offers crucial insights into not only his attitudes towards his predecessors, but also his own philosophical positions — especially with regard to the human intellect's connections to God and the cosmos — and his attempt to develop a distinctive mode of commentary.

This article examines Konstantin N. Leontiev’s critique of the religious preaching of Lev N. Tolstoy. We analyze the philosopher’s main articles devoted to the great writer, noting that, despite Le...

This article provides a conceptual account of causal understanding by connecting current psychological research on time and causality with philosophical debates on the causal asymmetry. I argue that causal relations are viewed as asymmetric because they are understood in temporal terms. I investigate evidence from causal learning and reasoning in both children and adults: causal perception, the temporal priority principle, and the use of temporal cues for causal inference. While this account does not suffice for correct inferences of causal structure, (...) I show it to serve as a preliminary understanding of causal concepts as asymmetric, that later incorporates other types of evidence. This approach supplies causal models with an asymmetric concept of causation that underlies hypotheses about causal structure, as I will illustrate from the framework of the knowledge-based causal induction model. I further argue for an integrating perspective, showing how the understanding of causes as preceding their effects underlies both psychological models and philosophical debates over time and the causal asymmetry, particularly regarding problem cases such as simultaneous causation or backwards causation, and the conceptual connection between causation and action. (shrink)

My paper aims to highlight the presence of a social conception of art in Gadamer’s thought by analysing his reading of Hegel’s aesthetics. In an initial section I reconstruct the core of Gadamer’s reading of Hegel’s aesthetics as a paradigm to reassess art against the limits of aestheticism. I subsequently focus on the analysis Gadamer provides of the fundamental topic of the “past-character of art”, by stressing how this is reassessed as a “presence of the past”. On this basis, I (...) show how Gadamer’s reading of Hegel helps him focus on the role of contemporary art forms. If in modernity art lost its self-evident character, this does not prevent it from establishing a sense of community. Contemporary art is a search for a communal and social element. Gadamer’s characterization of contemporary art as a work-in-progress and intrinsically linked to the audience’s participation lays the basis for rethinking Gadamer’s aesthetics in a performative direction. (shrink)

Tematyka prepozytury szpitalnej w Zebrzydowicach jest ściśle związana z osobą Mikołaja Zebrzydowskiego, który w 1599 roku ufundował w rodowej siedzibie szpital dla 12 weteranów wojskowych, przede wszystkim dla tych, którzy należeli do bractwa żołnierskiego świętego Michała Archanioła założonego przez wojewodę w 1596 roku. W jego zamierzeniu przebywający tam chorzy mieli otrzymać odpowiednią opiekę zarówno dla ciała, jak i dla duszy, dlatego też zarząd przytułku oraz troskę o potrzeby pacjentów zostały powierzone miejscowemu proboszczowi, który był zarazem prepozytem tegoż szpitala. Z czasem (...) okazało się, iż takie rozwiązanie nie zadowalało fundatora i ostatecznie zdecydował on o przekazaniu tego dzieła braciom bonifratrom, których sprowadził do Zebrzydowic z Krakowa w 1611 roku. W niniejszym artykule został ukazany jeden z etapów procesu poszukiwania lepszego sposobu na zarządzanie równocześnie fundacją i parafią, który Zebrzydowski spróbował wcielić w życie już w 1601 roku. Niepublikowany dotąd dokument biskupa Bernarda Maciejowskiego z 3 sierpnia 1601 roku, oblatowany w aktach czynności biskupa krakowskiego (edycja wraz z tłumaczeniem w aneksie), wprowadzał rozwiązanie dążące do utrzymania prepozytury kosztem miejscowej parafii, zaś osobą łączącą obie jednostki administracyjne miał być od tej pory prepozyt, a nie proboszcz. Dokument ten stanowi zarazem ciekawy przykład współpracy biskupa ze szlachtą w sprawach kościelnych, co było niezwykle istotne w ówczesnym systemie zależności pomiędzy kolatorami miejscowego kościoła a biskupem ordynariuszem, odpowiedzialnym za całość życia kościelnego na terytorium zarządzanej przez siebie diecezji. (shrink)

A laughter that will bury you: the morality of plant-based meat irony When plant-based meats enter the foodscape, they face the challenge of how to communicate their nature and function to consumers: one strategy for navigating the tension between portraying conventional meat as something to be replaced and affirming their unique meaty tastiness is through ironic claims and performances. This paper seeks to analyse the moral stance of irony in plant-based meat advertisements, specifically when this irony involves the death of (...) animals. Firstly, it presents an argument showing that, from the standpoint of veganism, ironising about animals’ death can be a moral wrong. Secondly, by relying on an interpretation of irony that leverages its potential for subverting and criticising hegemonic viewpoints, it is shown that this kind of irony can serve as a form of resistance aimed at dismantling the pervasive indifference towards the killing of animals for producing meat. (shrink)

Motivation crucially influences the willingness to play online games. Game motivation can affect players’ flow experience and player’s companionship with their game roles or avatars. However, the relationship among game motivation, flow experience, and companionship is unclear; therefore, designing online games that improving the playing experience is difficult. This study chose online pet games as study samples, and this study used a game motivation scale, flow experience scale, and the Companionship Scale of Artificial Pets to identify the relationship among game (...) motivation, flow experience, and companionship. According to 216 valid questionnaire responses, this study demonstrated that game motivation for online pet game players was primarily immersion and achievement, compared with achievement motivation, immersion motivation had a greater influence on flow experience and the development of player companionship with online pets, and players with immersion and achievement motivation had a substantially enhanced flow experience and companionship with their online pets. (shrink)

My contribution deals directly with the problem of Kant’s apparent commitment to pan- aestheticism, which is in particular attached to the task of explaining the possibility of the free play of the faculties. The aim is to provide an overview of the ways in which this problem can be confronted and eventually solved. In this regard, one way to deal with this problem consists in revisiting the assumption that the free play of the faculties is to be understood as simply (...) occurring without presupposing any concept. By contrast, one can fully endorse Kant’s commitment to pan- aestheticism and hence focus on how Kant’s account explains the fact that one does not actually experience everything as beautiful. Both of these alternatives, I firmly reject. By remarking upon the merely reflecting status of judgments of taste, I explain why Kant’s account of taste does not lend itself to pan-aestheticism. (shrink)

Research on the role of values in science and objectivity has typically approached trust through its epistemic aspects. Yet, recent work on public trust in science has emphasized the role of non-epistemic values in building and maintaining trust. This paper will use a concept of trust that adds concerns about justice to epistemic conditions to investigate this problem in relation to public health. I will argue that trust-conducive values, particularly justice, are relevant in deciding which value influences are legitimate in (...) scientific decision-making. Drawing on public health ethics, I will provide a consequentialist justification for employing trust-conducive values. While several concepts of justice have been explored in the context of public health, I will further draw on public health ethics, focusing on a view that brings together both distributive and procedural aspects. For illustration, I will use the case of cardiovascular disease prevention, particularly how concerns about justice apply when choosing between population-based and individual-based approaches. (shrink)

In the 1920s and 1930s, some of the most talented linguists of the Soviet Union, among whom one can highlight N. F. Jakovlev and E. D. Polivanov, were involved in the process of "language building". Their role in the success of this process is examined from the point of view of the phonological theory that they developed for creating scripts for the numerous peoples of the Soviet Union, Turkic and Caucasian above all. Jakovlev's phonology, that Polivanov termed "social phonology", was (...) very different from the one that N. Trubetskoj proposed some 10 years later. We will try to explain their ambitious script projects, which remain difficult to understand from the point of view of the modern phonology. (shrink)

ABSTRACTMeasurements of environmental toxicity from long-term exposure to oil contamination have delivered inaccurate and contradictory results regarding the potential harms for humans and ecosyste...

Normal development of the nervous system is achieved through an elaborate program of guided neuronal migration and axonal growth. In the last few years, a flood of research has dissected the molecular bases of these phenomena, and several cell‐surface and extracellular matrix molecules, which are implicated in neuronal and axonal targeting processes, have been recognized. Taking this knowledge a step further, a recent paper by Tom Curran's group(1) reports the molecular cloning of the gene deleted in the autosomal recessive mouse (...) mutation reeler, affecting cortical neuronal migration. This gene encodes reelin, a novel extracellular matrix protein. (shrink)

The article discusses the theoretical issues of designing a safe professional and educational environment. The environmental approach is substantiated as a methodology for this process. The environmental conditions that provide the teacher with safety and security in the implementation of professional activities are indicated. An attempt was made to determine the ratio of the structural components of the vocational and educational environment and the environmental conditions that ensure its safety. The stages and levels of designing a safe professional and educational (...) environment have been substantiated. (shrink)

Background: Cinematherapy and video treatments are artistic therapeutic techniques by which the individuals are exposed to their psycho-physical difficulties through the stories of the characters on the screen who are coping with the same issues that the patients are. Although these techniques are increasingly common within modern art therapies, there are neither comprehensive classifications of the different approaches nor agreement on their effectiveness. We performed a scoping review, describing different methodological approaches and outcome measures in cinematherapy and video treatments.Methodology: We (...) searched articles in PubMed, PsycINFO and Google Scholar. We included: articles in which subjects were treated for their difficulties with videos or films, articles written in English. Review articles and papers describing a research protocol without data collection were not included.Results: We analyzed 38 studies. Thirty-six reported a positive effect of the treatment. Seven studies used classical cinematherapy, adopting a qualitative approach to measure the therapy outcome. Thirty-one studies used different video treatments, 8 of which were defined as randomized controlled trials with specific objective therapy outcomes. Studies were mainly focused on behavioral and psychological difficulties in Autism Spectrum Disorders and Schizophrenia.Conclusion: Studies using video treatments more often rely upon structured experimental designs; on the contrary, those who used classical cinematherapy produced descriptive results. A more standardized methodological approach in terms of experimental design, procedure, and objective outcome measure is needed to provide evidence on the effectiveness of these techniques, promoting its application in the clinical field. (shrink)