Here's the interview granted by Martha Nussbaum to Fabrizia Abbate about the role of preference in social dynamics. How important are aesthetic preferences in the development of moral attitudes and choices ?

The purpose of the article is to offer a phenomenological description of VR images and their experience. In the first section, I briefly present the peculiar features of these kinds of images; in the second section, I compare VR images with phantasms, especially in the light of the idea of “presentification” (Vergegenwärtigung), and then I discuss the reality or unreality of VR image-objects; the third section elaborates an analysis of VR images according to the notions of image object (Bildobjekt), and (...) discusses the issue of “presence” both of the representing image and the user; finally, in the last section, I focus on the correlated experience of the subject, which I describe as a switching between image consciousness and perceptual apprehension. (shrink)

Literature has and always will be a “reflection” of human acts and behaviours. This movement of intentional self- reflection of human identities is the main element of narrative imagination. We would like to focus on a special peculiarity of this literary reflection, which is the transfer of Space and Time from reality to the literary world. The result of the transfer is that Space and Time become an autonomus narrative structure able to reveal something new about literary genres and especially (...) about human nature and society. We will compare Michail Bachtin’s analysis on the “chronotope” with Pierre Bourdieu’s studies on the “literary field”. (shrink)

Alain, 1920: Système des beaux-arts, Paris, Gallimard, 1920. Burdea, G.C., Coiffet P., 1993: Virtual Reality Technology, Hoboken, New Jersey, John Wiley & Sons Inc., 2003. Dufrenne M., 1953: Phenomenology of aesthetic experience, by E. Casey, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1973. Dufrenne M., 1963: Le poétique, Paris, P.U.F., 1963. Dufrenne M., 1966: Jalons, Nijhoff, La Haye, 1963. Dufrenne M., 1967: Esthétique et Philosophie, vol. I, Paris, Klincksieck, 1967. Dufrenne M., 1976a: Esthétique et Philosophi e, vol. II, Paris, Klincksieck, 1967. Dufrenne M., (...) 1981a: L'inventaire des a priori: recherche de l'originaire, Paris, Bourgois, 1981. Dufrenne M., 1981b: Esthétique et Philosophie, vol. III, Klincksieck, Paris. 1981. Dufrenne M., 1987: L'oeil et l'oreille, Montreal, L'HEXAGONE, 1987. Franzini E., 1982: Natura e Poesia, Su un inventario degli a priori di Mikel Dufrenne, in Fenomenologia e scienze dell'uomo, Padova, CLESP editrice, pp. 67-90. Sartre J.P., 1940: The psychology of imagination, New York, Philosophical library, 1948. (shrink)

For more than 25 years, research misconduct is defined as fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism —although other research misbehaviors have been also added in codes of cond...

Objectives: To review the performance of research ethics committees in Spain in assessing multicentre clinical trial drug protocols, and to evaluate if they would comply with the requirements of the new EU Directive to be implemented by May 2004.Design and setting: Prospective study of applications of MCT submitted to RECs.Main measurements: Protocol related features and evaluation process dynamics.Results: 187 applications to be performed in 114 centres, were reviewed by 62 RECs. RECs had a median number of 14 members, of which (...) three were lay members. All applications were approved except four which were however approved by the other RECs involved. The median times from submission to approval and from submission to reception at the sponsor’s offices were 48 and 62 days, respectively. In 55% of all applications approved, 41 RECs raised 307 queries, 40% of these were protocol related issues, and 38% related to the patients’ information sheets. RECs charging an evaluation fee in advance and applications with no queries raised were statistically significantly associated with shorter evaluation times. However, there is a gap of at least 1.5 weeks between the date of the meeting and the reception of the approval letter in the sponsor’s office.Conclusions: Evaluating MCT protocols by RECs is a time consuming process. Needing 1.5 weeks for communicating the decision taken by RECs to the sponsor suggests serious administrative shortcomings within most RECs. By significantly reducing the time for communication of their decisions, the majority of RECs would comply with the Directive requirement of a maximum 60 day period for the assessment of MCT. (shrink)

We give recursion-theoretic characterizations of the counting class \(\textsf {\#P} \), the class of those functions which count the number of accepting computations of non-deterministic Turing machines working in polynomial time. Moreover, we characterize in a recursion-theoretic manner all the levels \(\{\textsf {\#P} _k\}_{k\in {\mathbb {N}}}\) of the counting hierarchy of functions \(\textsf {FCH} \), which result from allowing queries to functions of the previous level, and \(\textsf {FCH} \) itself as a whole. This is done in the style of (...) Bellantoni and Cook’s safe recursion, and it places \(\textsf {\#P} \) in the context of implicit computational complexity. Namely, it relates \(\textsf {\#P} \) with the implicit characterizations of \(\textsf {FPTIME} \) (Bellantoni and Cook, Comput Complex 2:97–110, 1992) and \(\textsf {FPSPACE} \) (Oitavem, Math Log Q 54(3):317–323, 2008), by exploiting the features of the tree-recursion scheme of \(\textsf {FPSPACE} \). (shrink)

Este trabalho, apresentado em forma de ensaio filosófico e pedagógico, propõe experimentar modos outros de escrever e interpretar os conceitos de Michel Foucault. Para desenvolver a analítica, parte-se de três conceitos basilares: saber, poder e subjetividade. A tese que se instaura é que a interpretação se dá na articulação entre movimentos recíprocos de interioridade e exterioridade do sujeito –constituído pelos discursos, pelos jogos de poder e pelas tecnologias de si – que, para significar o mundo, dá nomes e, assim, sentido (...) para a existência. Como resultado, o trabalho propõe pensar a hermenêutica foucaultiana como transgressora, não pelo seu caráter subversivo, mas pela possibilidade de funcionar como ferramenta teórica e metodológica. Interpretar é, nessa perspectiva, projetar o espaço-outro, o tempo-outro e a vida-outra, indagando o impacto da crise anti-intelectualista e negacionista. (shrink)

The paper investigates the distinctly Chinese intertwining of expertise and state & financial capital to enrich the current understanding of neoliberalism as a hegemonic governing rationale. Since the summer of 2015, China has been experiencing one of its most severe financial crises since the adoption of a ‘socialist market economy’ in 1978. However, globally circulating narratives have failed to look beyond a Western-centric corollary, rehashing a critique of the Chinese one-party system and its lack of a ‘genuine’ free market. By (...) exploring the specific genealogy of Chinese capitalism, and the distinctive Chinese financial-market structure, the article will show how the scientific authority of experts formulated amongst neoliberal thinkers never permeated the Chinese idea of knowledge. In the Chinese variety of financial capitalism, expertise is seen to lie not so much in the wisdom of individual experts as in their socio-political support, which legitimises their economic interventions. (shrink)

Before being considered as independent fields, business cycles and productivity growth had long been regarded as closely interrelated dynamics. Growth and cycles theories and models developed independently. On one side, the growth analysis developed analyzing the existence and stability of a long-run deterministic growth path. On the other side, business cycles theory focused on the understanding of detrended data movements considering growth as an exogenous trend, independent of the cycle. This dichotomy is still present in the modern literature. _Business Cycles (...) and Growth Theory_ examines the role of monetary and financial factors in growth cycles dynamics interaction. It offers new perspectives for modelling growth cycles dynamics underlining the possibility of building an 'incomplete business cycles theory', as well as highlighting the existence of a convergence between the last theoretical developments of both growth and business cycles literatures. A significant read, this book demonstrates that such a convergence can provide benchmarks for a new paradigm of models in which endogenous growth mechanism, because it offers a strong propagation for shocks, can be the core of a new business cycles dynamics. (shrink)

We argue against the claim that the employment of diagrams in Euclidean geometry gives rise to gaps in the proofs. First, we argue that it is a mistake to evaluate its merits through the lenses of Hilbert’s formal reconstruction. Second, we elucidate the abilities employed in diagram-based inferences in the Elements and show that diagrams are mathematically reputable tools. Finally, we complement our analysis with a review of recent experimental results purporting to show that, not only is the Euclidean diagram-based (...) practice strictly regimented, it is rooted in cognitive abilities that are universally shared. (shrink)

A reciprocal symmetry between art and culture, the reductionism and the impoverishment of the artistic practices are all consequences of the establishment of the new conceptualist paradigm in art since the 60s. Nespolo’s artistic production in that period exemplifies this features being thus conceivable as a variant of conceptualism since he adopts its new experimental rules mixing them with the traditional ones of the visual artistic paradigm.