This is the first definitive monograph on the concept of obligations erga omnes---international obligations owed to the international community as a whole and binding irrespective of consent---an increasingly important concept in contemporary international law. Ragazzi adopts a pragmatic approach that identifies five common elements among the examples of obligations erga omnes given by the International Court. These five common elements are then discussed in the light of other candidates of obligations erga omnes which have emerged in State practice and (...) international literature. (shrink)

The present study was aimed at investigating whether and how the explicit representation of the decision outcome, framed in terms of lives saved or lost, could affect decision choices, emotional experience, and decision times in the course of a moral dilemma task. Decision outcomes were framed in a between-group design by means of smiling (POS group) or injured faces (NEG group) depicting, respectively, the lives saved or lost with each choice. A control condition with no frame and no outcome (NOF (...) group) was included. Results showed that behavioral choices were highly resistant to the framing manipulation in both dilemma types. However, an overall reduction in the number of utilitarian choices and in the decision times, associated with an increase in unpleasantness during decision-making, was found, suggesting a progressive increase in aversive emotional activation favoring the rejection of utilitarian resolutions. Interestingly, at the beginning of the task, the POS group showed a delay in decision times as compared with the NOF group, specifically for footbridge-type dilemmas. This result might be interpreted as an interference effect temporarily slowing decision-making during the resolution of dilemmas in which the internal representation is spontaneously focused on the personal cost of causing intentional harm to others. (shrink)

In the creation of maps, scientific knowledge related to mathematics and physics combines with knowledge specific to graphic or artistic disciplines. Since all maps are artifacts whose aesthetic qualities convey information that simultaneously engages the fields of ontology, epistemology, and politics, they are objects of undeniable interest for philosophical inquiry. This introduction to the 5th issue of the Journal for the Philosophy of Language, Mind, and the Arts reviews the latest literature and key topics surrounding the relationship between philosophy, cartography (...) and mapmaking. (shrink)

1. Preambolo In qualsiasi conversazione a tavola se provo a chiedere ai commensali se c’è una differenza tra moneta e denaro, dopo una prima perplessità e una certa sorpresa per la domanda, quasi tutti dicono sì, ma poi trovano difficile spiegare in che cosa si distinguano. Un dato però è certo: tutti pensano che una qualche diversità vi sia. Un secondo quesito potrebbe essere invece posto a chi come me ha intrapreso un’indagine per comprendere le caratteristiche e la natura di (...) tale differenz... (shrink)

The research on technologies and methodologies for (accurate, real-time, spontaneous, three-dimensional…) facial expression recognition is ongoing and has been fostered in the past decades by advances in classification algorithms like deep learning, which makes them part of the Artificial Intelligence literature. Still, despite its upcoming application to contexts such as human–computer interaction, product and service design, and marketing, only a few literature studies have investigated the willingness of end users to share their facial data with the purpose of detecting emotions. (...) This study investigates the level of awareness and interest of 373 potential consumers towards this technology in the car insurance sector, particularly in the contract drafting phase, with a focus on differentiating the respondents between generation Y and Z. Results show that younger people, individuals with higher levels of education, and social network users feel more confident about this innovative technology and are more likely to share their expressive facial data. (shrink)

Large-scale public datasets are vital for driving the progress of abstractive summarization, especially in law, where documents have highly specialized jargon. However, the available resources are English-centered, limiting research advancements in other languages. This paper introducesLAWSUIT, a collection of 14K Italian legal verdicts with expert-authored abstractive maxims drawn from the Constitutional Court of the Italian Republic.LAWSUITpresents an arduous task with lengthy source texts and evenly distributed salient content. We offer extensive experiments with sequence-to-sequence and segmentation-based approaches, revealing that the latter (...) achieve better results in full and few-shot settings. We openly releaseLAWSUITto foster the development and automation of real-world legal applications. (shrink)

What kind of entities are works of art from an ontological point of view? This question has become canonical in the framework of analytic philosophy. One way of answering the puzzle seemed to be conclusive. It is the hypothesis that all, or the majority of artworks can be identified with types embedded into tokens. To begin with, I will survey how the type-token distinction transitioned from semiotics to ontology. Secondly, I will consider how some contemporary art forms contributed to questioning (...) this approach to the ontology of artworks. Lastly, I will suggest how the nature of types and tokens should be reassessed in order to properly describe artworks in their historical and socially construed nature. (shrink)

The Description for this book, Machiavelli in Hell, will be forthcoming.

Go to John Cantwell’s response to the original paper from here › Go to Grazia Ietto-Gillies’ original paper from here ›.

Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.

In the creation of maps, scientific knowledge related to mathematics and physics combines with knowledge specific to graphic or artistic disciplines. Since all maps are artifacts whose aesthetic qualities convey information that simultaneously engages the fields of ontology, epistemology, and politics, they are objects of undeniable interest for philosophical inquiry. Following what has been termed “the cartographic turn in social sciences”, The Art of Mapping Between Land and Mind delves into two intertwining issues. On one side, it examines how the (...) aesthetic properties of maps convey cognitive, cultural, and political meanings. On the other, it explores the role of visual arts in reflecting on cartographic thought, shaping both its methods and motivations. The volume is divided into four sections. Embracing the point of view of both the philosopher and the geographer, the first one sheds light on the relationship between epistemology and cartography (Kukla; Costantini; Tanney). The second addresses mapmaking as an art form (Tanca; Haugdal) or, conversely, considers maps from the perspective of their aesthetic properties (Török; Ogundiwin; Elhaik). The third focuses on the digital condition of today’s cartography (Tschochohei; Quaranta; Keller). Finally, the last section includes two contributions that represent attempts to guide cartography toward its future (Bosca; Ianniello). Opening this issue, a special essay by Elizabeth Povinelli offers a generous précis of her upcoming book. (shrink)

Analyzing and evaluating legal case reports are labor-intensive tasks for judges and lawyers, who usually base their decisions on report abstracts, legal principles, and commonsense reasoning. Thus, summarizing legal documents is time-consuming and requires excellent human expertise. Moreover, public legal corpora of specific languages are almost unavailable. This paper proposes a transfer learning approach with extractive and abstractive techniques to cope with the lack of labeled legal summarization datasets, namely a low-resource scenario. In particular, we conducted extensive multi- and cross-language (...) experiments. The proposed work outperforms the state-of-the-art results of extractive summarization on the Australian Legal Case Reports dataset and sets a new baseline for abstractive summarization. Finally, syntactic and semantic metrics assessments have been carried out to evaluate the accuracy and the factual consistency of the machine-generated legal summaries. (shrink)

The aim of the study was to explore the experiences of night nurses. An interpretative phenomenological study was undertaken, and 35 nurses working in Italian medical, surgical and intensive care units were purposely recruited. Data were gathered in 2010 by semi‐structured interviews, collecting nurses' narratives, memorable cases and metaphors, aimed at summarising the essence of work as a nurse during the night. The experience of night nursing is based on four interconnected themes: (i) working in a state of alert, (ii) (...) growing by expanding autonomy and responsibility, (iii) assuring sensitive surveillance and (iv) experiencing deep intimacy. Memorable episodes were polarised along (i) expected/unexpected events; (ii) positive/negative epilogues; and (iii) life/death issues. Many of the emergent metaphors described working during the night as being in the middle of a space where an apparent calm scene takes place, but unpredictable factors may suddenly change the order of events and the outcomes, creating chaos. Working during the night alerts nurses, who increase autonomy, expanding their role and assuming more responsibility with respect to that assumed during daily shifts. The nurses' clinical reasoning is based on data they carefully listen to, and on the meaning that nurses give time by time to different noises and silence. While in the past a sense of companionships was reported, a loneliness or a ‘neutral’ experience concerning the relationships with colleagues seems to prevail during night nursing. Working night shifts is a complex task, and specific training must be assured to students/novices. (shrink)