The practice of joint fantasizing concerns interacting participants’ collective construction of imaginary realities with internal consistency and coherence. Based on a corpus of conversations held by an informal Italian prayer community of elderly Catholic women, this contribution aims to show that joint fantasizing is not necessarily a humorous activity and is embedded in the participants’ social and personal background. The analysis also indicates that through joint fantasizing the participants conceptualize themselves as victims and idealized opponents of the unfair present and (...) past societies. Framing joint fantasizing as a cross-contextual activity of social criticism allows us to understand that the participants use this interactional practice as an activity endowed with moral suffering and responsibility. This rhetorical seriousness contrasts with other studies in which joint fantasies are generally connected with playful, jocular and laughable practices. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe discursive analysis of criminal organizations’ family dynamics and ideological devices may provide important insights into the inner functioning of these groups. In this article, we describe and analyze a specific set of discursive strategies and the thematic narratives emerging from a TV interview with Giuseppe Riina, a member of Cosa Nostra and the son of one of the most important mafia bosses. Our analyses demonstrate the existence of recurring ideological devices such as reductionism, amoralism, familism, verticalism, normalism, victimism and (...) religious relativism. The results are discussed in light of previous research that examines how discursive strategies and narratives may represent powerful tools for understanding criminal organizations. Family-related discourses, in particular, reveal meanings, values and ideas that contribute to constructing criminal organizations’ internal structure, as well as their relationship with the external world. (shrink)

We find a short way to construct a formula which axiomatizes a given finite frame of the modal logicK, in the sense that for each finite frameA, we construct a formula A which holds in those and only those frames in which every formula true inA holds.To obtain this result we find, for each finite model and each natural numbern, a formula which holds in those and only those models in which every formula true in , and involving the firstn (...) propositional letters, holds. (shrink)

This volume brings together a number of previously unpublished essays that will advance the reader's philosophical understanding of specific aspects of causation, agency and moral responsibility. These are deeply intertwined notions, and a large proportion of the volume is taken up by papers that shed light on their mutual connections or defend certain claims concerning them. The volume investigates several important questions, including: Can causation be perceived? If it can, can it be perceived in any way other than visually? Can (...) the interventionist theory developed by James Woodward offer an adequate account of causation? Is a causal relation a necessary condition for moral responsibility? Can there be a responsibility difference without a causal difference? Are causal ascriptions based on the more primitive language game of blame ascriptions? What can be learnt from the analogy between causal interference and unbreakable processes, on one side, and motivational interferences and "unbreakable" resolutions, on the other side? How can humans be routinely considered responsible for non-deliberated omissions? Should the connection between moral responsibility and the epistemic conditions usually required for moral responsibility to be obtained be weakened? What is the connection between awareness of one's doing and intentional action? These essays constitute a valid contribution towards the discovery of reasonable answers to such deep questions as the metaphysics of causal relations, the epistemology of causal explanations, the interventionist theory of causation, and the relationship among causality and moral responsibility, willpower, agency and intentional action. (shrink)

Although philosophers have been concerned with truth since at least the age of Plato, the last thirty years have witnessed a veritable explosion of the philosophical debate on this topic. The touchpaper which lit the fuse for this was undoubtedly the Deflationist Renaissance (half a century after the seminal work of F.P. Ramsey) due, in the Seventies, both to the Quinean disquotational interpretation of the Tarskian truth definitions and to the development of the prosentential theory of truth by D. Grover, (...) J. Kamp and N. Belnap, and, from the second half of the Eighties onwards, to the forceful defences of deflationary conceptions provided by H. Field and P. Horwich. The philosophical struggle on deflationism has been thought-provoking: by arguing on the merits and shortcomings of such a conception, philosophers have come to broaden and deepen the discussion on truth beyond the boundaries of deflationism. The varieties of problems tackled by the essays in this book highlight how the land of Truth is still far from having been totally explored, and how, in this intellectual endeavour, real progresses can be achieved. (shrink)

We establish a simple condition, based on the willingness to bet on events, under which two biseparable preferences have cardinally equivalent utilities.

Philosophers of science have given up on the quest for a silver bullet to put an end to all pseudoscience, as such a neat formal criterion to separate good science from its contenders has proven elusive. In the literature on critical thinking and in some philosophical quarters, however, this search for silver bullets lives on in the taxonomies of fallacies. The attractive idea is to have a handy list of abstract definitions or argumentation schemes, on the basis of which one (...) can identify bad or invalid types of reasoning, abstracting away from the specific content and dialectical context. Such shortcuts for debunking arguments are tempting, but alas, the promise is hardly if ever fulfilled. Different strands of research on the pragmatics of argumentation, probabilistic reasoning and ecological rationality have shown that almost every known type of fallacy is a close neighbor to sound inferences or acceptable moves in a debate. Nonetheless, the kernel idea of a fallacy as an erroneous type of argument is still retained by most authors. We outline a destructive dilemma we refer to as the Fallacy Fork: on the one hand, if fallacies are construed as demonstrably invalid form of reasoning, then they have very limited applicability in real life. On the other hand, if our definitions of fallacies are sophisticated enough to capture real-life complexities, they can no longer be held up as an effective tool for discriminating good and bad forms of reasoning. As we bring our schematic “fallacies” in touch with reality, we seem to lose grip on normative questions. Even approaches that do not rely on argumentation schemes to identify fallacies fail to escape the Fallacy Fork, and run up against their own version of it. (shrink)

Riassunto: In una prospettiva naturalistica, lo studio della religione presenta subito un punto problematico: se essa è così diffusa, tanto da apparire un tratto inscritto nella natura umana, ciò significa che la religione comporta dei vantaggi adattivi o, quantomeno, significa che essa non comporta svantaggi tali da ostacolare la sopravvivenza di chi la pratica. Nel primo caso, si tratta di individuare la possibile funzione della religione, ovvero una qualche utilità che ne giustificherebbe il suo permanere nella storia umana. Alla luce (...) di un modello antropologico che vede l’identità soggettiva segnata da una fragilità ontologica, in questo articolo offriremo una particolare versione della tesi che assegna alla religione, quale byproduct, una funzione positiva, ipotizzando quella che potrebbe essere una sua utilità nella difesa dell’unità dell’autocoscienza. Sarà dunque sulla religione quale insieme di tecniche difensive del self che concentreremo la nostra indagine. Parole chiave : Ernesto De Martino; Naturalismo darwiniano; Meccanismi di difesa; Identità soggettiva; Religione Religion as a Defensive Technique for Subjective Identity: From a naturalistic perspective, the study of religion immediately leads to a problematic point: if religion is so widespread, to the extent that it seems to be a trait inscribed in human nature, then it should have adaptive advantages or, at the very least, it should not have disadvantages that would stand in the way of the survival of those who practice religion. In the former case, we need to understand the function of religion, viz. a utility it confers that may justify its persistence across human history. Against the backdrop of an anthropological model that considers subjectivity identity to be characterized by ontological fragility, this article will offer a special version of the claim that religion, viewed as a byproduct, has a positive function: we will make the hypothesis that it contributes to the defense of the unity of self-consciousness. Thus our focus will be on religion construed as a repertoire of strategies designed to protect the self. Keywords: Ernesto De Martino; Darwinian Naturalism; Defense Mechanisms; Subjective Identity; Religion. (shrink)

The Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) represents a set of life-long disorders. In particular, subjects with ASD can display momentary behaviors of acute agitation and aggressiveness called crisis behaviors. These events are problematic for the subject and care providers but little is known about their occurrence, namely, possible relations among intensity, frequency, and duration. A group of ASD subjects (n=33) has been observed for 12 months reporting data on each crisis ( n = 1137 crises). Statistical analysis did not find significant (...) results, while the relation between crisis duration and frequency showed a good fit to a “power law” curve, suggesting the application of Self-Organized Criticality (SOC) model. The SOC is used to describe natural phenomena as earthquakes, bank failures of rivers, mass extinctions, and other systems where a type of “catastrophic events” is necessary to maintain a critical equilibrium. In a sense, subjects at risk of crisis behavior seem to fit the same model as seismic zones at risk of earthquakes. The employment of the same strategies, as those successfully developed for known SOC systems, could lead to important insights for ASD management. Moreover, the SOC model offers possible interpretations of crisis behavior dynamics suggesting that they are unpredictable and, in a sense, necessary. (shrink)

SAGGI DI VITTORIO MARCHIS, UMBERTO BOTTAZZINI, FABIO TOSCANO, MASSIMO NEGROTTI, GIUSEPPE O. LONGO, STEFANO A. E. LEONI, ALBERTO CASADEI, SILVANO TAGLIAGAMBE.

Objective: To assess the psychological distress of healthcare providers working in the field of obstetrics during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic and to identify factors associated with psychological distress at the individual, interpersonal, and organizational level.Design: Cross-sectional survey study.Setting: Four University hospitals in Italy.Participants: HCPs working in obstetrics, including gynecologists, residents in gynecology and obstetrics, and midwives.Methods: The 104-item survey Impatto PSIcologico COVID-19 in Ostetricia was created by a multidisciplinary expert panel and administered to HCPs in obstetrics in May 2020 (...) via a web-based platform.Main Outcome Measures: Psychological distress assessed by the General Health Questionnaire-12 included in the IPSICO survey.Results: The response rate to the IPSICO survey was 88.2%, and that for GHQ-12 was 84.4%. Just over half of the GHQ-12 respondents reported a clinically significant level of psychological distress. Psychological distress was associated with either individual, interpersonal, and organizational factors in dealing with the pandemic.Conclusions: Results confirm the need for monitoring and assessing the psychological distress for HCPs in obstetrics. Interventions at the individual, interpersonal, and organizational level may relieve the psychological distress during the COVID-19 pandemic and foster resilience skills in facing emotional distress. (shrink)

Complex systems can be characterized by classes of equivalency of their elements defined according to system specific rules. We propose a generalized preferential attachment model to describe the class size distribution. The model postulates preferential growth of the existing classes and the steady influx of new classes. According to the model, the distribution changes from a pure exponential form for zero influx of new classes to a power law with an exponential cut-off form when the influx of new classes is (...) substantial. Predictions of the model are tested through the analysis of a unique industrial database, which covers both elementary units (products) and classes (markets, firms) in a given industry (pharmaceuticals), covering the entire size distribution. The model's predictions are in good agreement with the data. The paper sheds light on the emergence of the exponent tau approximately 2 observed as a universal feature of many biological, social and economic problems. (shrink)

This study evaluated the effectiveness of a 3-week intervention in which a co-located cooperation enforcing interface, called StoryTable, was used to facilitate collaboration and positive social interaction for six children, aged 8–10 years, with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD). The intervention focused on exposing pairs of children to an enforced collaboration paradigm while they narrated a story. Pre- and post-intervention tasks included a “low technology” version of the storytelling device and a non storytelling play situation using a free construction game. The (...) outcome measure was a structured observation scale of social interaction. Results demonstrated progress in three areas of social behaviors. First, the participants were more likely to initiate positive social interaction with peers after the intervention. Second, the level of shared play of the children increased from the pre-test to the post-test and they all increased the level of collaboration following the intervention. Third, the children with ASD demonstrated lower frequencies of autistic behaviors while using the StoryTable in comparison to the free construction game activity. The implications of these findings are discussed in terms of the effectiveness of this intervention for higher functioning children with ASD. (shrink)

This anthology contains selected papers from the 'Science as Culture' conference held at Lake Como, and Pavia University Italy, 15-19 September 1999. The conference, attended by about 220 individuals from thirty countries, was a joint venture of the International History, Philosophy and Science Teaching Group (its fifth conference) and the History of Physics and Physics Teaching Division of the European Physical Society (its eighth conference). The magnificient Villa Olmo, on the lakeshore, provided a memorable location for the presentors of the (...) 160 papers and the audience that discussed them. The conference was part of local celebrations of the bicentenary of Alessandro Volta's creation of the battery in 1799. Volta was born in Como in 1745, and for forty years from 1778 he was professor of experimental physics at Pavia University. The conference was fortunate to have had the generous financial support of the Italian government's Volta Bicentenary Fund, Lombardy region, Pavia University, Italian Research Council, and Kluwer Academic Publishers. The papers included here, have or will be, published in the journal Science & Education, the inaugural volume (1992) of which was a landmark in the history of science education publication, because it was the first journal in the field devoted to contributions from historical, philosophical and sociological scholarship. Clearly these 'foundational' disciplines inform numerous theoretical, curricular and pedagogical debates in science education. Contemporary Concerns The reseach promoted by the International and European Groups, and by the journal, is central to science education programmes in most areas of the world. (shrink)

What is the relation of risk to negativity? Is it possible to think a notion of the negative that doesn't exclude the other via inclusion? These two questions are at the heart of Massimo Donà's discussion of immunity. Drawing on Roberto Esposito's genealogy of immunity in community, Donà shows how immunity depends upon a paradox of separation that brings the common and the immune closer together. After sketching the relation of immunity to the notion of polemos, Donà argues that (...) the immune subject, by including the other, negates itself so that the other becomes the true self. The essay closes with a series of reflections on how to think negation and immunity together through pregnancy; a negation that affirms a nonsubstitutive or alternative way of being. (shrink)

This book examines the philosophy of al-Ghazali, analysing his conception of God within Islamic theology. Seeking to contribute to the greater understanding of Muslim thought, it analyses his 'orthodox' theory, based on the notion that the spiritual struggle and philosophical enquiry are informed by the possession of firm science. Exploring a wide range of Arab texts and Arab primary literature, this book therefore examines a crucial period of Medieval Islamic history, whilst emphasizing the multifarious and by no means monolithic components (...) of the Muslim outlook. In seeking to understand Islamic religion as a creative and progressive heritage, it also demonstrates the moderate and equilibrate character of mainstream Islam, and ultimately argues that al-Ghazali's thought is the best expression of Islamic intellectuality and spirituality. Taking a theoretical approach, this book will be useful to students and scholars of Islamic philosophy, theology and history. (shrink)

Identification is a primary need of societies. It is even more central in law enforcement. In the history of crime, a dialectics takes place between felonious attempts at concealing, disguising, or forging identities and societal efforts at unmasking the impostures. Semiotics offers specialistic skills at studying the signs of societal detection and identification, including those of forensics and criminology. In human history, no sign more than the face is attached a value of personal identity. Yet, modern forensics realizes that the (...) face can mislead and, inspired by eastern models, adopts fingerprinting. In the digital era, however, fingerprinting first goes digital, then it is increasingly replaced by facial recognition. The face is back in digital AI forensics, together with a tangle of sociocultural biases. Semiotics can play a key role in studying their surreptitious influence. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to give, using the Kripke semantics for intuitionism, a representation of finitely generated free Heyting algebras. By means of the representation we determine in a constructive way some set of "special elements" of such algebras. Furthermore, we show that many algebraic properties which are satisfied by the free algebra on one generator are not satisfied by free algebras on more than one generator.

We are used to regarding actions and other events, such as Brutus’ stabbing of Caesar or the sinking of the Titanic, as occupying intervals of some underlying linearly ordered temporal dimension. This attitude is so natural and compelling that one is tempted to disregard the obvious difference between time periods and actual happenings in favor of the former: events become mere “intervals cum description”.1 On the other hand, in ordinary circumstances the point of talking about time is to talk about (...) what actually happens or might happen at some time or another. We talk about ‘now’ and ‘then’ in an effort to put some order in our description of what goes on. And since different events seem to overlap in so many different ways, a full account of their temporal relations seems to run afoul of a reductionist strategy. This raises two philosophical questions. The first is whether we can actually go beyond time, as it were, i.e., whether we can take events as bona fide entities and deal with them directly, just as we can deal with spatial entities such as physical bodies or masses without confining ourselves to their spatial representations. This is a controversial issue (though probably not as controversial as it used to be), and ties in with a number of unsettled problems concerning, e.g., the structure of causality or the definition of adequate identity and individuation criteria for events. 2 The second question is whether we can perhaps do without time, i.e., whether we can dispense with time points or intervals as an independent ontological category and focus only on actual or potential happenings, in opposition to the form of reductionism mentioned above—in short, whether we can account for the temporal dimension in terms of suitable relations among events. This is also a highly controversial issue, and relates to the classical dispute concerning relational vs. absolutist conceptions of (space and) time.3 It is this second question that we intend to focus on here.. (shrink)

that wilfrid sellars was a more subtle and sophisticated philosopher than his father, Roy Wood Sellars, is, I believe, a rather uncontroversial assessment, one which, with fatherly pride, Roy1 would most probably have endorsed. Even considering the radical shift in philosophical methods and attitude which took place in the United States in the decades of Wilfrid's philosophically formative years, Wilfrid's unrelenting philosophical acumen and imagination, his unflinching resolve to doggedly pursue a problem on a variety of fronts at once (arguably (...) the cause of his... (shrink)

In a pair of recent papers, Allen Buchanan has outlined an ambitious account of the ethics of revolution and its implications for military intervention. Buchanan’s account is bold and yet sophisticated. It is bold in that it advances a number of theses that will no doubt strike the reader as highly controversial; it is sophisticated in that it rests on a nuanced account of how revolutions unfold and the constraints that political self-determination places on intervention. He argues that, despite the (...) importance of political self-determination, humanitarian intervention may be permissible without the consent of the rebelling population. Indeed, given certain structural features of revolutions, there are often reasons to disregard the consent of the population oppressed and intervene before the revolution starts. More controversially, he argues that military force may be employed to nullify the democratic constitutional choice of the newly liberated population and impose a particular form of democratic government, if this is necessary to guarantee the conditions for the future exercise of self-determination. In this paper, I further elaborate Buchanan’s account of political self-determination and argue that once correctly understood, it places tighter constraints on intervention than Buchanan allows. Thus, his bold conclusions should be resisted. (shrink)

This book shows how the current reform in investment regulation is part of a broader attempt to transform the international economic order. Countries in the North and South are currently rethinking how economic order should be constituted in order to advance their national interests and preferred economic orientation. While some countries in the North seek to create alternative institutional spaces in order to promote neoliberal policies more effectively, some countries in the South are increasingly skeptical of this version of economic (...) order and are experimenting with alternative versions of legal ordering that do not always sit well with mainstream versions promoted by the North. While we recognize that there are differences in approaches to the investment regimes proposed by countries in the South, we identify commonalities that could function as the founding pillars of an alternative economic order. (shrink)

The first part (“Is there a future?”), discusses the idea of the future in the context of Carl Schmitt’s vision for the spatial revolutions of modernity, and then the idea of Anthropocene, as a synonym for an environmental crisis endangering the very survival of humankind. From this point of view, the conquest of space and the colonization of Mars at the center of futuristic and technocratic visions appear to be an attempt to escape from human responsibilities on Earth. The second (...) part (“AI and other hyperobjects”) discusses the extent of intellectual hubris expressed in computation, AI (Garvin Minsky e Ray Kurzweil), and the philosophy of computing and information (Eric Fredkin), involved in the elaboration of new theoretical assessments on the ultimate nature of reality. Their vision is then contrasted and made to interact with that of philosopher Timothy Morton. He has taken the perspective of global warming and the possibility of ecological catastrophe seriously, avoiding all the futuristic enthusiasms and instead emphasizing the radical nature of the transformations that humans experience in the present. In this perspective, AI becomes one of the “hyperobjects,” like the Internet or climate change, in which humans are immersed. Morton’s hyperobjects delineate an uncanny view of the future; this uncanniness is not related to the supernatural but to the environment. The third section (“More-than-human-humanism”) further reflects on the “uncanniness” that human perceive in the encounters with the manifestations of hyperobjects. It also seeks to understand the human position in the face of the radical technological transformations induced by cybernetics and AI. This section discusses Anti-humanism, Transhumanism, and Posthumanism within the broader category of more-than-human thought, which seems to be a more appropriate term to clarify the possible misunderstandings induced by the word “posthuman” and “transhuman.” The central question is not to empower (Transhumanism) or disempower (Posthumanism) humans, but to see them in relation to what is not human, including other animals, the environment, and the machine. The analysis considers the works of Cary Wolfe, Jane Bennet, Bryant Levi, among others, and introduces ethical debates on cyborgs, robots, and Autonomous weapons systems (AWS). The fourth section (“Ethical Perspectives”) continues this inquiry, concentrating on the non-standard ethical theories of Luciano Floridi (Computer and Information Ethics) and David Gunkel (The question of the Machine). It examines the opportunity and feasibility of including in the discussion on the ethics of our time - characterized by the pervasiveness of AI - the notions of consciousness as theorized by Emmanuel Levinas’s Humanism of the Other and Paul Ricoeur’s Oneself as Another. Finally, the last section (“The time of the end?”) reflects on how the hyperobject, Anthropocene, re-establishes a sense of limits in human history and confirms the special responsibility of human beings, and supports the need for a more-than-human-humanism. The latter, in other words, means intertwining ourselves with a unique ecosystem which cannot be overlooked and which restores meaning to our relationship with the past, present, and future. The awareness of the current challenges of technology can and must express itself in different forms of resistance to the adverse effects of AI in our lives. The ethical approach based on the persisting role of human consciousness is essential, but it must be coupled with human decision-making and political action. (shrink)