The paper offers a survey of the debate on the introduction, in the Preamble of the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe, of references to God and Europe’s Christian tradition. It examines the question of European identity and values which motivates these proposals in relation to (1) the nature of the EU as an essentially political construction; (2) the issue of human rights in the EU; (3) the protection of cultural and religious diversity within the EU. The study shows that (...) the confessionalization of Europe promoted by strong churches on the Continent, which are legitimate actors of civil society, betray a failure to understand the logic of the European construction. To the extent to which they represent an attempt to secure a privileged position with respect to other religious or non-religious actors, they run against the functional principles and values of the Union. (shrink)

The liberal democratic regimes rest on a well-developed public sphere accessible to all citizens that favors free discussions based on reason and critical debate and serves as a space where public opinion is formed through reasoned dialogue. The new digital technologies disrupted many parts of contemporary democratic societies and transformed their public sphere. Digital transformation alters industries and markets, changing the perceived subjective value, satisfaction, and usefulness of goods or services and displacing established companies and products. Within the political realm, (...) digital transformation creates a cleavage between the vulnerable populations who are ill-informed and lack digital fluency and politicians who tend to learn about peoples‟ problems not to deal with them but to weaponize new technologies to engineer elections and win power. The rise of misinformation and disinformation undermines public trust in democratic institutions and discourages or incapacitates citizens from engaging in debates within the public sphere. On the other hand, the digital transformation of the public sphere empowers ordinary people to aggregate in various publics and counteract the domination of the mainstream parties. Our paper aims to answer whether new technologies provide citizens with ways to counter the undemocratic tendencies caused by digital transformation and engage actively in the public sphere. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to highlight the underlying themes or motifs that recur in Russian war propaganda in the context of the war in Ukraine. Using the method of thematic analysis, I analyzed the messages about the war in Ukraine that Russian opinion leaders and media institutions disseminated through the lens of the "principles of war propaganda" presented and illustrated by Arthur Ponsonby and Anne Morelli. Due to the language barrier and restrictions on access to Russian news sources, (...) we limited our analysis to articles published on the TASS news agency website and Twitter posts, which reproduce and comment on the interventions of Vladimir Solovyov, considered by the United States State Department as "the Kremlin's most energetic propagandist." In total, I analyzed 58 articles from the website of the TASS news agency and 40 Twitter posts with excerpts from the show "Evening with Vladimir Solovyov" on the Russia-1 TV channel. The analysis highlights that the "principles" defined by Arthur Ponsonby and Anne Morelli govern Russian war propaganda, at least in part. Our analysis does not exclude the possibility that Russian propagandists may have used other leitmotifs or public communication themes. Their identification and presentation could be the subject of further research. (shrink)

Gheorghe Sferlea | : Cet article examine les premières tentatives d’interprétation théologique du titre marial Theotokos au IVe siècle. Au coeur de cette histoire on retrouve Apollinaire, évêque de Laodicée et figure importante du camp pro-nicéen, qui a élaboré une théorie controversée sur l’unité du Christ, notamment en excluant l’intellect humain de la constitution du Sauveur. C’est dans le cadre de cette préoccupation plus large qu’il vit l’opportunité de tenter une appropriation théologique du titre Theotokos et qu’il en fit (...) un outil polémique dans la stratégie d’ériger sa propre position en orthodoxie christologique. L’idée que je défends ici est que Diodore de Tarse, Grégoire de Nazianze, Grégoire de Nysse et Théodore de Mopsueste se sont tous confrontés à l’interprétation proposée par Apollinaire et ont cherché les meilleurs moyens d’y réagir. | : This article examines the first attempts of theological interpretation of Marian title Theotokos in the fourth Century. At the centre of this history stands Apollinarius, bishop of Laodiceea and a significant character of the pro-Nicene movement, who elaborated a controversial account on the unity of Christ that excluded human intellect from Saviour’s constitution. It was within this broader concern that he saw the opportunity of attempting a theological appropriation of title Theotokos and made it a polemical tool in the strategy of establishing his own Christological stance as authoritative. My contention is that Diodore of Tarsus, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa and Theodore of Mopsuestia all found themselves confronted with Apollinarius’ interpretation and searched ways of reacting to it. (shrink)

Applying machine learning algorithms to automatically infer relationships between concepts from large-scale collections of documents presents a unique opportunity to investigate at scale how human semantic knowledge is organized, how people use it to make fundamental judgments (“How similar are cats and bears?”), and how these judgments depend on the features that describe concepts (e.g., size, furriness). However, efforts to date have exhibited a substantial discrepancy between algorithm predictions and human empirical judgments. Here, we introduce a novel approach to generating (...) embeddings for this purpose motivated by the idea that semantic context plays a critical role in human judgment. We leverage this idea by constraining the topic or domain from which documents used for generating embeddings are drawn (e.g., referring to the natural world vs. transportation apparatus). Specifically, we trained state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms using contextually-constrained text corpora (domain-specific subsets of Wikipedia articles, 50+ million words each) and showed that this procedure greatly improved predictions of empirical similarity judgments and feature ratings of contextually relevant concepts. Furthermore, we describe a novel, computationally tractable method for improving predictions of contextually-unconstrained embedding models based on dimensionality reduction of their internal representation to a small number of contextually relevant semantic features. By improving the correspondence between predictions derived automatically by machine learning methods using vast amounts of data and more limited, but direct empirical measurements of human judgments, our approach may help leverage the availability of online corpora to better understand the structure of human semantic representations and how people make judgments based on those. (shrink)

The book reviews of the early Philosophical Transactions have not been considered a dominant feature of the journal, and thus more research is needed to enrich our understanding of them. This paper begins this process by describing some of the basic features of the reviews, before moving on to address the issue of how they were composed. The specific focus here is on how Henry Oldenburg’s correspondence influenced the process in various ways. As it turns out, there are episodes when (...) Oldenburg’s exchanges impacted the timing, length, content, form, and sometimes even the very existence of the book reviews. It thus seems that these reviews were rooted just as much in epistolary correspondence as other texts published in the Transactions. (shrink)

The article concerns the life and work of the most important contemporary Spanish philosophers, Fernando Savater. It focuses on describing his activism and the reasons which led him to participate in the public life. The author also analyses the thinker’s two major concerns, which are anti-nationalism and the defence of democtratic values. The investigation shows that Savater’s view on the two issues is strictly related to his biography and the socio-political changes experienced by Spanish people in the last fifty years. (...) The solutions the philosopher presents for his compatriots are parallel to his proposals of shifts in the politics of the whole European Union. (shrink)

The presented papers are very interesting. They differ and complement one another… . Orlova's presentation is a model of structuralization, scientific rigor, extreme precision, and clarity. Shemanov's paper provides a philosophical basis for culturology. I asked what place culturology occupies in the field of knowledge. It turned out that to answer this question it is first necessary to present the system of manifestations of a society's life activity and only then, when we have the matrix, can we compare our idea (...) of culture with it in order to make it relevant to that matrix. This is to correlate the patrix and the matrix. But since there are no generally accepted schemata of society, no developed schemata of its cognitive activity, I had to work on my own. I offer two schemata but, in view of the time limit, I will only indicate certain items of this context so as to make it clear what I am talking about and from what premises I proceed. There are several premises. The first is the main problem that must be borne in mind in any theorizing. How is our material existence correlated with the realization of our creative potential, our subjectivity? This is the problem of man's spiritual development. It would appear to be a truism. But it is necessary to find a philosophical expression for this problem. This means to find a formula, because if a study is not summed up in a formula it has to be continued. The philosophical equivalent of the problem of existence is: existence determines consciousness, consciousness reflects existence. This is a contribution of Marxism. It would seem that those who theorized about the active nature of consciousness, thought, and the subjective factor have all the advantages, since that was all they worked on and spoke of the primacy of consciousness. Why, then, have they not discovered the formula of the correlation between material existence and creative subjectivity? Because then there is a clash of two paradigms, and formal logic comes into force, stating that it is necessary to make a choice, for there is no third way. We want to construct a philosophical equivalent of the activity of consciousness and say what role it plays. As long as we simply say that it plays a huge or important role, or that consciousness has a reverse effect, our research has not been completed. If existence determines consciousness, then thought, in turn, makes reality similar to itself. Consequently, I distinguish existence and reality. But whence this distinction? If we go back to the definition that matter is a philosophical category for denoting objective reality, then it becomes clear that objective reality is that which exists outside and independently of us. If we have different words-outside of us and independently of us-then this is a substantial difference. Even so perspicacious an analyst as Freud separated these concepts with a comma. So I tried to separate them vertically and horizontally. Vertically, we have that which is in reality and, horizontally, that which exists independently of us. We obtain a definite square. Existence-consciousness-activity-reality. Everything else is purely technical. Here is the genesis of the matrix. This leads to many consequences. Superimposing this schema on the matrix, I obtained a fairly clear picture. They turn out to be relevant to each another. We get varieties of knowledge such as intuitive or, if we think in binary oppositions, the instinctive is opposed to the distantive variety, and first of all science, because it knows not directly, but through mediation. Instinctive knowledge is instantaneous, one-time knowledge. Here the logic of common sense and other things operates. And then, when we correlate activity and reality, we have the objective and subjective varieties. Corresponding to these varieties, as a result of cognition we acquire knowledge: intuitive-direct, distantive-mediated, subjective-procedural, and objective-object-oriented. If we take such characteristics as the bases of cognitive varieties, the means of knowledge, the forms of knowledge, cognitive approaches, and objects of knowledge, we get a special table. Mendeleev had a table of chemical elements; I have a table of social elements consisting of twenty-eight squares. In a division into so many categories, if there is a logical mistake, there must be a flaw somewhere. I do not detect any flaws here, and this indicates that such a division is not fortuitous: the table reflects a law. There are also other premises such as "we are in the world, and the world is in us." We are in the world physically, while the world is in us mentally. We live surrounded by nature, but also at the price of nature. My schemata are based on these presuppositions. Consequently, one cannot counterpose the achievements of philosophical materialism and idealism. At this stage they must be not opposed, but synthesized, united. This is to dismiss the claim of every doctrine that it is absolute. If we see the relatively rational in each doctrine and join them together, we shall get a contemporary synthetic philosophy that works. I was able to show how this methodology works, in this case, with this example. In analyzing such an urgent social phenomenon as conflict, I found that conflict situations can be broken down into elements. Now I know how to order the sides in a conflictual situation, how they are correlated. And when there is a link with a schema of categories, then things work well. (shrink)

The paper contains a conceptual proposal, its key idea being that the successful functioning of a rule embedding artifact designed to regulate a practice (not pertaining to its use) produces the same result as the successful performance of the rule-invoking non-communicative actions belonging to the practice in case.

The main thesis of my article is that the viability of the European Union does not depend so much on its political structure as on its being anchored in a culture-based public sphere and on the establishment of a cultural European citizenship. The public sphere could be defined as an unique world, characterized by consensus and cooperation, in which only public goods can be sought and acquired, or as an unique world, characterized by rivalry and competition, in which everyone could (...) pursue their private interests, but only if there is a consensus regarding an objective and fair procedure. In any way, we cannot speak of a pluralism of public spheres - like the black public sphere, the LGBT public sphere, etc. - but (at the most) a plurality of interests represented in the public sphere, under the reserve of respecting a fair procedure, which allows the expression of axiological judgments. The EU needs a progressive citizenship, from civil citizenship to cultural citizenship, depending on the acquired skills, behavior and virtues. One deserves cultural citizenship and have the right (or, perhaps the privilege) to manifest - in the public sphere - a way of life and a cultural identity only if promote authentic values: virtues, rationality, free will etc. The problematic aspects of the European media sphere are obstacles on the way to establishing an authentic European cultural citizenship. They can be kept under control by assuming a healthy reactionary attitude and associating every element of change and contingent progress (speed, reductive simplicity, user's solitude, pictoriality, lateralness, data overload, immediacy, segmentation, social amnesia, etc.) with an element of moderation and equilibrium. Only thus can the media contribute in the making of a viable union of the European peoples, grounded on a well articulated European cultural citizenship. (shrink)

The central thesis of this article is that populism is a side effect of liberal democracy and a reliable indicator of the relationship between liberal democracy and its polar opposite ‒ illiberal majoritarianism. As long as liberal democracy prevails over illiberal majoritarianism, populism remains dormant. Populism rises and becomes conspicuous only if certain manifestations of illiberal majoritarianism or illiberal elitism reach a critical point in terms of number and impact. More exactly, populism becomes active when there are too few reasonable (...) and effective responses to the growth of illiberal majoritarianism. Illustrating the defense mechanism of compensation, the rise of populism correlates with a cluster of exaggerated or overdone reactions to actions inspired by illiberal majoritarianism. These reactions vary sharply from one society to another according to (a) the specific challenges of illiberal majoritarianism, (b) the reactivity of people who bear the liberal democratic values, and (c) the credibility enjoyed by the mainstream liberal democratic forces in that society. In brief, although illiberal majoritarianism sets off a cluster of populist reactions in any society, the rise of populism always takes distinct forms. Thus, it is confirmed the status of populism as a chameleonistic phenomenon. The argumentative thread has four main parts. Firstly, it is developed a constitutive model of liberal democracy as an ideal political system that is underpinned by the following organizing principles or attractors: inclusiveness, political equality, political participation, predominance of concurrent majority, the containment and predictability of the government power, and the enforcement of the non-aggression principle. Secondly, the attractors of liberal democracy are contrasted against the recent state of affairs in the Euro-Atlantic space to illustrate the assertion presented here that today illiberal majoritarianism tends to prevail over liberal democracy. In the third step, it is argued that the countless definitions of populism only emphasize different symptoms of the rise of populism, depending on the particular circumstances in which society evolves. Finally, it is substantiated the claim that populism and populists can and should be integrated into the democratic political system, in particular into the democratic public sphere. (shrink)

This paper aims to measure the quality of all Romanian cities’ websites in 2019 and 2022, before and after the disruptive event of COVID-19. Since the official websites are the core instrument of e-governance, the changes in the quality of Romanian cities’ websites reflect the changes in the development of urban e-governance in Romania. The COVID-19 lockdowns and contact restrictions and the moving of most activities into the online environment had the potential to impact the performance of Romanian cities’ websites (...) significantly and catalyze the progress of local e-governance. The quality of Romanian cities’ official websites was measured using an adapted survey instrument proposed by Holzer and Kim and Manoharan, Melitski, and Holzer. The tool covers five critical criteria of website quality or performance: personal data security, usability, content, services, and citizen participation. The research results may seem contrary to expectations: the improvements of websites have been incremental rather than transformational. Although our research provides only a case study, we may assert that the reform of traditional administration remains a step-by-step process. Our study’s main contribution consists in showing that the progress of e-governance is an incremental process even in a situation of emergency that requires the moving of most activities into the online environment. (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s Private Language Argument was received within the Pittsburgh School of Philosophy as raising new and interesting difficulties for the traditional empiricist model of knowledge justification. While McDowell’s attempt to solve the difficulties in question is still debated, I claim that a different solution to the same difficulties might have been suggested by Wittgenstein himself in On Certainty.

The very existence of society depends on the ability of its members to influence formatively the beliefs, desires, and actions of their fellows. In every sphere of social life, powerful human agents (whether individuals or institutions) tend to use coercion as a favorite shortcut to achieving their aims without taking into consideration the non-violent alternatives or the negative (unintended) consequences of their actions. This propensity for coercion is manifested in the doxastic sphere by attempts to shape people’s beliefs (and doubts) (...) while ignoring the essential characteristics of these doxastic states. I argue that evidential persuasion is a better route to influence people’s beliefs than doxastic coercion. Doxastic coercion perverts the belief-forming mechanism and undermines the epistemic and moral faculties both of coercers and coercees. It succeeds sporadically and on short-term. Moreover, its pseudo doxastic effects tend to disappear once the use of force ceases. In contrast to doxastic coercion, evidential persuasion produces lasting correct beliefs in accordance with proper standards of evidence. It helps people to reach the highest possible standards of rationality and morality. Evidential persuasion is based on the principles of symmetry and reciprocity in that it asks all persuaders to use for changing the beliefs of others only those means they used in forming their own beliefs respecting the freedom of will and assuming the standard of rationality. The arguments in favor of evidential persuasion have a firm theoretical basis that includes a conceptual clarification of the essential traits of beliefs. Belief is treated as a hypercomplex system governed by Leibniz’s law of continuity and the principle of self-organization. It appears to be a mixture consisting of a personal propositional attitude and physical objects and processes. The conceptual framework also includes a typology of believers according to the standards of evidence they assume. In this context, I present a weak version of Clifford’ ethical imperative. In the section dedicated to the prerequisites for changing beliefs, I show how doxastic agents can infuse premeditated or planned changes in the flow of endogenous changes in order to shape certain beliefs in certain desired forms. The possibility of changing some beliefs in a planned manner is correlated with a feedback doxastic (macro-mechanism) that produces a reaction when it is triggered by a stimulus. In relation with the two routes to influence beliefs, a response mechanism is worth taking into consideration – a mechanism governed to a significant extent by human conscience and human will, that appears to be complex, acquired, relatively detached from visceral or autonomic information processing, and highly variable in reactions. Knowing increasingly better this doxastic mechanism, we increase our chances to use evidential persuasion as an effective (although not time-efficient) method to mold people’s beliefs. (shrink)

The problem of self-governing of a community (more precisely, the involvement of its members in collective actions directed towards achieving a common goal) is extremely important. In our opinion, it is necessary to give honest answers to the following questions: (a) What are the constituents of collective actions meant to help obtaining public goods and how should they be determined? (b) How useful, rational and legitimate are civic actions (in general) and the measures of self-government of a community (in particular)? (...) (c) What are the resources, rights and duties in a self-governing community? (d) What parts can professional communicators play, in order to stimulate their fellow citizens’ participation in the art of self-governing? Civic participation in realizing the common good has several aspects, starting with voting participation and ending with the community’s self-mobilization. Professional communicators (in this case, public relations specialists) may contribute to building a self-governing society by playing six parts: the town crier, the steward, the traffic manager, the conductor, the creator and the facilitator. (shrink)

Technology and society are deeply interconnected, as technology emerges from the existent cultural framework and consequently shapes society on the micro level of human interaction and the larger scale of social structure and system. This paper tackles the digital transformation present in Industry 4.0 and Society 5.0. We analyse disruptive digital technologies by focusing on the social or cultural context of their creation, their core philosophy, and the impact they seem to have or how society may be shaped by their (...) extended implementation and adoption. As technology is basically not neutral in its purpose, serving different personal and organizational interests, we use a multiple point-of-view approach to our study in order to elaborate an encompassing representation of the phenomenon. (shrink)

The aim of this conceptual paper is to discuss the issue of managing fake news in the online environment, from an organizational perspective, by using reactive PR strategies. First, we critically discuss the most important definitions of the umbrella term fake news, in the so-called post-truth era, in order to emphasize different challenges in conceptualizing this elusive social phenomenon. Second, employing some valuable contribution from literature, we present and illustrate with vivid examples 10 categories of fake news. Each type of (...) fake news is discussed in the context of organizational communication. Based on existent literature, we propose a 3D conceptual model of fake news, in an organizational context. Furthermore, we consider that PR managers can use either reactive PR strategies to counteract online fake news regarding an organization, or communication stratagems to temporarily transform the organization served into a potential source of fake news. The existing typology of reactive public relations strategies from the literature allow us to discuss the challenge of using them in counteracting online fake news. Each reactive PR strategy can be a potential solution to respond to different types of online fake news. Although these possibilities seem to be extensive, in some cases, PR managers can find them ineffective. In our view, this cluster of reactive PR strategies is not a panacea for managing fake news in the online environment and different strategic approaches may be need, such as communication stratagems. In this context, communication stratagems consist in using organization as a source or as a vector for strategic creation and dissemination of online fake news, for the benefit of the organization. We conclude that within online environment PR managers can employ a variety of reactive PR strategies to counteract fake news, or different communication stratagems to achieve organizational goals. (shrink)

Comme tous les autres projets humains, les politiques de santé publique sont souvent affectées par des imperfections et des erreurs. Cependant, elles sont mieux ancrées dans les résultats de la recherche scientifique que d’autres actions humaines en général, et politiques gouvernementales en particulier. D’une manière générale, les données sur lesquelles reposent les politiques de santé publique remplissent les conditions suivantes : méthodes de recherche rigoureuses, tests indépendants et précis, reproductibilité des résultats, mesure du taux d’erreur, capacité à écarter des hypothèses (...) rivales et un degré d’acceptation satisfaisant au sein de la communauté scientifique. Les politiques de santé publique comprennent des campagnes de vaccination de la population, en particulier des enfants. Ces actions de vaccination sont considérées comme sûres et efficaces par les institutions publiques, les organisations de santé, les médecins et les chercheurs en santé. Malgré cela, un nombre croissant de parents choisit de ne pas vacciner leurs enfants. Les fausse nouvelles sur les vaccins publiées dans les médias, en particulier dans les nouveaux médias, par les influenceurs, ont contribué certainement à cette tendance. Ces influenceurs sont insuffisamment qualifiés ou totalement non qualifiés pour commenter l’innocuité et l’efficacité des vaccins dans les médias. Par conséquent, ils ne peuvent pas produire des données fiables et des opinions qualifiées, c’est-à-dire des informations indépendantes, précises, pertinentes, fiables et complètes. Cependant, ces influenceurs parviennent à influencer, dans une large mesure, le comportement des parents en matière de vaccination. La stratégie de lutte contre les fausses nouvelles en publiant des preuves contraires est évidemment nécessaire, mais pas suffisante parce que beaucoup de fausses infos sur les vaccins fonctionnent comme des mythes. Etant fixées d’une manière partiellement irrationnelle, les mythes anti-vaccination ne peuvent être démystifiés seulement avec les dernières preuves scientifiques. C’est pourquoi il est nécessaire d’envisager des stratégies de relations publiques capables d’influencer des opinions collectives irrationnelles. (shrink)