Stimulated by development of reproductive technologies, many current bioethical accounts of parenthood focus on defining parenthood at or around birth. They tend to exclude from their scope some parent-child relationships that develop later in a child’s life. In reality, a parent-child relationship can emerge or dissolve over time: the parents of person A as an adolescent or adult may be different to her parents when she is a young child. To address this aspect of parenthood, we propose a new ‘mutuality (...) account’ of parenthood, grounded in the concept of ontological security. We argue that in most cases a parent-child relationship exists if there is mutual ontological security between the parent and child. We suggest that this mutual ontological security is constituted and sustained by shared frameworks of reality and cohesive personal narratives. Our intention is to broaden the conceptual understanding of parenthood, to include parent-child relationships that do not fall neatly into current bioethical accounts, and to argue against the notion that objective physiological, causal, or social ties are necessary to ‘make’ a parent. (shrink)

O presente trabalho visa analisar de forma circunscrita a relação entre os conceitos de autonomia da vontade (Autonomie des Willens) e autocracia do arbítrio (Autokratie der Willkür) na filosofia prática de Kant. Já que o filósofo Immanuel Kant foi responsável pela inovação no campo da moral ao apresentar uma concepção para “autonomia da vontade”, a qual é a faculdade da autodeterminação legislativa obrigante da razão prática pura. O problema desse conceito se encontra na sua aplicação para ações específicas. Para resolver (...) tal querela, utilizaremos o conceito também forjado por Kant como "autocracia". A autocracia se refere a aplicação efetiva da moralidade via faculdade do arbítrio. A autocracia é, em suma, o governo de si necessário para que a moralidade seja realmente executada como disciplina do arbítrio. (shrink)

The work defines the sigh as a type of breath expressing or communicating specific physical or mental internal states. To investigate the meanings of the sigh, the paper presents analyses of written and oral corpora, finding out that it may express different emotions like boredom or frustration, but also positive meanings like self-encouragement; then it focuses on the use of sighs in political debates. Finally a perception study shows participants’ agreement on the meanings of sighs in terms of valence and (...) arousal. These results lay the bases for future studies to set a clearer distinction between sighs and other vocalisations as well as other effects on its meaning caused by the combination with other body signals like rolling eyes or shaking head. (shrink)

The study aims to investigate visual attention and perceived attractiveness to known versus unknown products above and beyond self-report applying physiological methods. A cross-cultural exploratory approach allows for comparing results gathered in the United States and China. We collected field data on physiological parameters accompanied by behavioral data. Mobile eye-tracking was employed to capture attention by measuring gaze parameters and electrodermal activity serves as indicator for arousal at an unconscious level. A traditional scale approach measuring perceived attractiveness of known versus (...) novel products provide insights at a conscious level. US-American and Chinese consumers in our sample indeed process novel products differently. This can be observed at an unconscious and conscious level. Different gaze movements and arousal levels are observed at an unconscious level. Regarding behavioral data, the level of vertical orientation shapes the perceived attractiveness of novel products at a conscious level. The study showcases how physiological methods complement behavioral ones when investigating visual attention to products. It underlines varying conscious as well as unconscious visual attention and attractiveness ratings comparing known versus novel products, driven by cultural differences. Data from a field setting further enrich the implications derived for new product development and applied marketing. (shrink)

Lektüre Platons aus orthodoxer Sicht - Byzantinische Spiritualität und christlich-orthodoxe Religionsphilosophie - Neugriechische Literatur und Sprache aus gesellschaftlicher Sicht - Problematik der Modernisierung Griechenlands und seiner Positionierung in Europa.

The intuitive notion of a binary relation on information-bearers, comparingthem with respect to their closeness to the available information, is oftenconstrued in terms of comparing their symmetric difference with, orcompositional similarity to, the available information. This happens forinstance in some treatments of verisimilitude. We expound an abstractmathematical rendering of the relevant data-dependent relation in theframework of Boolean algebras. For every element t of a Boolean algebra B we construct the t-modulated Boolean algebra Btin which the order relation represents `is at (...) most as compatible with t as'' or `is at best as similar to t as''. In the case of Lindenbaum-Tarskialgebras, t expresses the available information, and the compatibilityrelation turns out to be an entwinement of inferential and conjecturalrelations. It is just classical entailment when no information is available(i.e., when t is logically true) and becomes more boldly abductive themore information is available. The rich algebraic structures of a Boolean algebra –- including its Boolean group structures –- play a significant role in this combination of deduction and abduction and also induce cautious anddaring variants of the compatibility relation. Links with the literature onverisimilitude, abduction, and related topics are indicated. (shrink)

Multitude between Innovation and NegationPaolo Virnotranslated by James CascaitoThe publication of Paolo Virno's first book in English, Grammar of the Multitude, by Semiotext in 2004 was an event within the field of radical political thought and introduced post-'68 currents in Italy to American readers. Multitude between Innovation and Negation, written several years later, offers three essays that take the reader on a journey through the political philosophy of language."Wit and Innovative Action" explores the ambivalence inevitably arising when the semiotic and (...) the semantic, grammar and experience, rule and regularity, and right and fact intersect. Virno unravels the infinite potential and wonders of everyday linguistic praxis and ambiguity. Wit, he argues, is a public performance, and its modus operandi characterizes human action in a state of emergency; it is a reaction, an articulate response, and a possible solution to a state of crisis. "Mirror Neurons, Linguistic Negation, and Mutual Recognition" examines the relationship of language and intersubjective empathy: without language, would human beings be able to recognize other members of their species? And finally, in "Multitude and Evil," Virno challenges the distinction between the state of nature and civil society and argues for a political institution that resembles language in its ability to be at once nature and history.Few thinkers take the risks required by innovation. Like a philosophical entrepreneur, Virno is engaged in no less than rewriting the dictionary of political theory, an urgent and ambitious project when language, caught in a permanent state of emergency impossible to sustain, desperately needs to articulate and enact new practices of freedom for the multitude.Paolo Virno is the author of several books, including A Grammar of the Multitude, 2004). (shrink)

Welfare science has built its foundations on veterinary medicine and thus measures of health. Since bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) tend to mask symptoms of poor health, management in captivity would benefit from advanced understanding on the links between health and behavioural parameters, and few studies exist on the topic. In this study, four representative behavioural and health measures were chosen: health status (as qualified by veterinarians), percentage of daily food eaten, occurrences of new rake marks (proxy measure of social activity), (...) and willingness to participate (WtP) in Positive Reinforcement Training sessions as qualitatively measured by their caretakers. These data were collected multiple times a day, every day over the course of a year from a multi-facility, large sample size (ndolphins= 51), allowing powerful analyses of the relationships between measures. First, it was found that dolphins with a higher WtP score also had a significantly better health status, ate a higher percentage of their daily food, and a lower occurrence of new rake marks. In addition, the WtP score was significantly lower up to 3 days before the weekly veterinary diagnosis of a decrease in health state; the percentage of daily food eaten and new rake mark measures did not show any significant change before such a diagnosis. These results suggest that WtP in training sessions is a potential behavioural measure of dolphin welfare, and an indicator of early changes in the dolphins’ health state. We therefore suggest measurement of WtP as a more practical and non-invasive tool to support veterinary care and general management. More work needs to be conducted to elucidate the influence of social behaviour on health, and to identify other potential welfare indicators, but this long-term study has shown that qualitative measures can be both practical and valid when assessing dolphin welfare. (shrink)

This paper examines the sense and extent to which emotions can be thought of as rational. Through considering a number of examples, it argues (a) that there is more than one way of understanding the claims that we often make about emotions being “rational” or “justified”; (b) that none of the models of rationality already available to us can singly account for all of the various senses in which we think of emotions as rational; yet (c) that they can do (...) so jointly, that is, by each explicating at least one of these senses. Thus, in the end it is suggested that, despite it not being right to identify emotions with either beliefs or actions, there is no obvious reason to believe that the claims we make about the rationality of our emotions need to be understood by appeal to any separate model of rationality, specific to the emotions, additional to the “cognitive” and “strategic” models already available to us for understanding the rationality of other states like beliefs and judgements on the one hand, and actions on the other. (shrink)

The way in which Stengers thinks “with” rather than “about” Whitehead is explained through an examination of the transformational function of speculative propositions. The article then investigates the significance of the recurrent theme of “coherence” throughout Whitehead’s philosophical and socio-organizational writings. This theme guides and unifies his thought through its various conceptual adventures.

ZusammenfassungDie Tournee des indischen Balletts Menaka durch Hunderte von deutschen Städten zwischen 1936 und 1938 hat reiche Quellen in Form von Theaterkritiken hinterlassen. Dieser Artikel versucht zu klären, welche Rolle die Aufführungen bei der Aktualisierung eines spezifischen Wissens über Indien spielten, das zum einen auf der Annahme einer Blutsverwandtschaft des deutschen und des indischen Volks beruhte und zum anderen auf einer nationalsozialistischen Utopie der kulturellen Erneuerung durch die Kunst. Es soll dargestellt werden, inwiefern die einzigartige Erfahrung dieses indischen Theaterereignisses als (...) Diskursinstrument zur Konsolidierung einer völkischen Wahrnehmung von Kunst im Allgemeinen und vor allen von Musik, diente. (shrink)

Science-fiction (SF) has become a reference point in the discourse on the ethics and risks surrounding artificial intelligence (AI). Thus, AI in SF—science-fictional AI—is considered part of a larger corpus of ‘AI narratives’ that are analysed as shaping the fears and hopes of the technology. SF, however, is not a foresight or technology assessment, but tells dramas for a human audience. To make the drama work, AI is often portrayed as human-like or autonomous, regardless of the actual technological limitations. Taking (...) science-fictional AI too literally, and even applying it to science communication, paints a distorted image of the technology's current potential and distracts from the real-world implications and risks of AI. These risks are not about humanoid robots or conscious machines, but about the scoring, nudging, discrimination, exploitation, and surveillance of humans by AI technologies through governments and corporations. AI in SF, on the other hand, is a trope as part of a genre-specific mega-text that is better understood as a dramatic means and metaphor to reflect on the human condition and socio-political issues beyond technology. (shrink)

In this study caring is shown to be a membershipbound activity to kin and gender categories with strong moral connotations. Being a daughter or being a son are good enough reasons for becoming a caregiver, more so for women than for men. Caregivers were interviewed within the research project The role of women in family care of disabled elderly conducted by the Social and Economic Research Department of INRCA, Ancona, Italy. Transcripts of the interviews were analyzed through a detailed discourse (...) analysis within an ethnomethodological framework. Interview data are treated as interactional encounters that occasion members to display relevant aspects of their identities and morally adequate images of being a caregiver. In the interview interaction, interlocutors display an orientation towards the production of a moral order in which duty and responsibilities are allocated on the basis of gender distinction. Males are generally described as not being responsible for caring tasks, except for situations in which females are absent or sick, that is, for serious reasons. Caregivers'' perception of time dedicated to caring is pervasive. Most caregivers said it occupied all their time, but gender differences were noticeable. Caring tasks are recognized as gender specific practices, thus failing to carry out these tasks is morally sanctionable when women are involved, but not so for men. Many caregivers described caring for older relatives as an intense source of stress, involving serious physical and psychological problems. The study on moral and identity issues related to caregiving highlights endangering constructions of caring. (shrink)

This study identifies some of the ethical issues that arise in the everyday practice of researching in collecting interactional data. A form of conceptualizing ethics in research is proposed as awareness of the social dimension of research practices and their transformative nature. The collection of ethnographic data—including interviewing, observing, audiovisual recording, and other methods—is achieved by means of social interactions that necessarily imply issues of face, relevance, appropriateness, politeness, and identity, to name a few. Research activities have an impact on (...) both the setting and the participants in the study, in fact, they become part of the setting studied. At times, participants may be using the research activity for their own ends. It is important for researchers to be aware of and responsible for the impact they have on the setting under study. Some ethical problems encountered conducting actual research activities are discussed as an illustration: issues related to negotiation of consent in semipublic settings and to the protection of informants’ anonymity. The actual resolution of these problems is presented as research findings from the everyday practice of doing research. Systematic reflection on the social and interactional dimension of how ethical decisions are taken during actual research activities could make legislation on the protection of research participants and ethical guidelines more realistic and useful. (shrink)

Nussbaum attempts to undermine the sharp distinction between literature and philosophy by arguing that literary texts (tragic poetry particularly) distinctively appeal to emotion and imagination, that our emotional response itself is cognitive, and that Aristotle thought so too. I argue that emotional response is not cognitive but presupposes cognition. Aristotle argued that we learn from the mimesis of action delineated in the plot, not from our emotional response. The distinctions between emotional and intellectual writing, poetry and prose, literature and philosophy, (...) the imaginative and the unimaginative do not cut along the same lines. That between literature and philosophy is not hard and fast: philosophy can be dramatic (eg Plato's dialogues) and drama can be philosophical (eg some of Shakespeare's plays), but whether either is emotional or not, or written in poetry or prose, are other questions. (shrink)

In the course of his critique on institutions and modern society, the historian and philosopher Ivan Illich seeks to understand how the conception of limitation has changed from antiquity to modernity. Illich speaks about the fading of an aesthetic of proportionality and complementarity, which has framed the perception of beings as well as that of space and time. Within this aesthetic, the experience of fundamental otherness was a constitutive element. The article illustrates Illich’s historical analysis and points out its significance (...) for a reflection on the Christian practice of friendship. In the practice of friendship, otherness and complementarity are experienced in a horizon of freedom. In this context, thresholds and visible passages do not function as divisions or mediums of exclusion, but as perceptible markers, which can enable personal action in qualitatively differing spaces. (shrink)

The 360° medium, an immersive dome-based video projection environment (immersive dome environment (IDE)) also called ‘fulldome’, is often seen as an old concept of a traditional planetarium setting. This article invites the reader to look at it as a unique, hybrid media format, which opens new ways of perception.

This paper examines the essential yet ambivalent role of the law, i.e. of limits and prohibitions, within the subjective experience of desire. In order to investigate the dialectics between limit and desire, it firstly focuses on the perspective of George Bataille and his analysis of eroticism. Moreover, the contribution takes into account the perspective of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who focus on the relationship of desire to capitalist society, in order to affirm a different revolutionary economy of desire, celebrating (...) immediate libidinal transgressions against any limitations. On the contrary, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan shows the absolute need of the law for the experience of desire and the process of subjectivation, since only through the Symbolic order the subject can join a sociolinguistic community. The final part of the contribution aims at enlightening possible correspondences among these perspectives, focusing on the Letters of the Apostle Paul and his profound understanding of the dialectics between law and desire. The Pauline Epistles offer a significant paradigm to understand the necessary but not sufficient role of the law in the experience of the Christian believer as well as of the subject as such. (shrink)

RESUMO: No presente artigo, o tema da política será pensado a partir das críticas às constituições morais valorativas delineadas por Nietzsche. Nesse sentido, pretende-se elucidar que o posicionamento deste autor, por um lado, indica uma leitura crítica da política a partir da sua formação democrática, por esta considerar o homem de maneira universal e rebaixar seus valores ligado a sua singularidade. E, por outro lado, possibilitar uma distinta percepção da organização política. Isto devido ao fato de se observar uma nova (...) perspectiva para a questão política, cujo interesse seja de afirmar a vida, estimular novos valores, vontades e desejos que levem o homem a outras formulações de existência. Palavras-chave: Nietzsche, política, valores, afirmação da vida. (shrink)

This study examines the theology of the fourth-century bishop, Hilary of Poitiers, concentrating particularly on two commentaries written at different times in his life. The main focus of the study is on Hilary's anthropological theology.

Summary The paper discusses the political thought of Cesare Balbo (1789?1853), a leading Risorgimento moderate liberal and politician, in the context of the efforts by the Piedmontese political elite to support and legitimise the constitutional regime introduced by King Charles Albert in 1848. Revising current interpretations of Risorgimento moderate liberalism as backward and provincial, it seeks to locate the political thought of Balbo and his colleagues at the heart of contemporary European, and particularly French, debates regarding liberty and aristocracy. In (...) particular, it argues that the views of Balbo and more broadly Piedmontese moderate liberals on centralisation, the importance of a social elite to defend freedom, and equalisation, were conversant with the ideas of Guizot, Chateaubriand, Burke and Tocqueville. Their harsh condemnation of republican virtue, on the other hand, rendered their liberalism peculiar in the Italian context, where Tuscan moderate liberals continued to resort to the language of civic humanism after 1848 to defend their political and social model. (shrink)

Digital tools offer new dimensions and additional contexts both in teaching and in researching Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, providing users with visual insights into his carefully planned work. This essay investigates interactive and visual representations of material and spatial systems of the Fragmenta and the deep interaction between the digital code created to build the Petrarchive’s visual indexes and the original Medieval forms.

ABSTRACTDespite the growing research on the emergence of the term ‘Europe’ in the Early Modern Period and its implications, concepts and conceptualizations, most studies rely on vernacular sources exclusively. The vast and even unclear amount of Neo-Latin literature processing the discourse on Europe and European identity has yet attracted only little interest. With its proper investigation starting now, the following article aims to make a corresponding contribution by examining a treatise of one of the most prominent Neo-Latin writers of the (...) seventeenth century, John Barclay. The treatise in question, entitled Icon animorum, has received scant attention in modern Neo-Latin scholarship so far, notwithstanding its early modern popularity, its excellent Latin and its famous author. The article will thus atone for the lack of both the work’s literary and historical credit. The argument will show that with his Icon, Barclay has not just created a description of European nations typical of his time, but that he has, in fact, reached out to a supranational concept of Europe according to the principle of ‘unity in diversity’. (shrink)

I show that it is not possible to uniquely characterize classical logic when working within classical set theory. By building on recent work by Eduardo Barrio, Federico Pailos, and Damian Szmuc, I show that for every inferential level (finite and transfinite), either classical logic is not unique at that level or there exist intuitively valid inferences of that level that are not definable in modern classical set theory. The classical logician is thereby faced with a three-horned dilemma: Give up uniqueness (...) but preserve characterizability, give up characterizability and preserve uniqueness, or (potentially) preserve both but give up modern classical set theory. After proving the main result, I briefly explore this third option by developing an account of classical logic within a paraconsistent set theory. This account of classical logic ensures unique characterizability in some sense, but the non-classical set theory also produces highly non-classical meta-results about classical logic. (shrink)

relative to the actual world) of a propositional theory are defined. A theory is ‘closer to the truth’ the logically stronger its positive content and the logically weaker its negative content. This proposal delivers the same verisimilar preordering of theories that has been defined by Brink and Heidema as a ‘power ordering’. The preordering may be collapsed to a partial ordering and then embedded into a complete distributive lattice. The preordering may also be refined to a partial ordering by employing (...) the ‘convex content’ and the ‘non-convex content’ of each theory. Philosophical implications and historical relations are discussed. (shrink)

This paper presents a model of persuasion in terms of goals and beliefs. Among the various ways to influence people, that is, to raise or lower the likelihood for them to pursue some goal, ranging from threat to suggestion, persuasion is viewed as a case of communicative non-coercive goal hooking. A persuader leads a persuadee to pursue some goal out of a free choice, i.e., by convincing him/her that the proposed goal is useful for some other goal that the persuadee (...) already has. It is argued that the Aristotelian persuasive strategies of logos, ethos and pathos (rational argumentation, the speaker¿s credibility and reliability, and the appeal to emotion) are always present in every persuasive discourse, and that they are exploited to raise the value of the goal proposed and to strengthen the believability of the link between it and the persuadee¿s previous goals. The paper proposes an analysis of discourse in terms of a hierarchy of goals as a tool to single out these strategies within the discourse structure. By applying this model to different kinds of persuasive messages (political discourse, advertising, dialogues in the health domain), it shows how, in the fragments presented, this kind of analysis allows to clarify the relationships between the persuader¿s and the persuadee¿s goals and to elucidate how much and how directly the persuader appeals to logos, ethos and pathos in his/her discourse. (shrink)