The aim of this article is to consider, in the first place, the characteristic traits of ciceronian conception about “conservatio sui” in the context of ciceronian practical philosophy, differentiating between the components of stoic tradition and the position that Cicero proposes as its own. The article makes its center in the ciceronian exposition of De finibus III and IV and passages of other works that allow us to elaborate the links between natura, ratio and lex established by Cicero. In second (...) place, the article proposes a comparison of the ciceronian elaboration of “conservatio sui” with passages of the corpus of Thomas Aquinas, specially with Tractatus de legibus of Summa Theologiae. (shrink)

In this article the author considers as a central matter the significance of M. Tullius Cicero’s conception of self-knowledge in his philosophical and political theory. With this purpose, the author justifies the contribution of Ciceronian elaboration to the matter as a rereading of the Socratic-platonic tradition, in the field of Roman philosophy, inquiring its own components. Thus, the author develops an exegesis on the characteristics of Ciceronian conception of self- knowledge in De republica, De legibus, De finibus bonorum et malorum, (...) Tusculanae disputationes and parallel texts, in order to ponder its mediation in the constitution of the political community. In this context, the author examines the rol of natural law in the development of the self-knowledge and the discovery of the human community. (shrink)

This paper faces the projections of the moral philosophy of Cicero on medieval scholastic ethics; it examines the influence of Cicero’s writings dealing with treatment of the justificating way of moral behavior starting from natural human inclinations. First, the article analyses the philosophical elaboration of the theme in the field of ciceronian thinking. Second, already inside the frame of medieval elaborations, the article deals with projections of ciceronian tradition around natural human inclinations in their relations with moral life, in the (...) philosophical developments of Thomas Aquinas about origins of virtue and natural law. (shrink)

The present study examines the Platonic, Stoic and Ciceronian antecedents in the expositions of William of Auxerre and Philip the Chancellor in their respective Summae, both of which make “ius naturale” to be the guiding principle of the practical-moral life, and which thus provides ontological and anthropological foundations. In addition, the author also investigates the meanings of the term “natura” in the Roman legal tradition, as it persisted at the beginnings of the 13th century; finally, she also considers its philosophical (...) basis. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to investigate among a group of non-profit organizations: a) the effect of ethical leadership on volunteers’ satisfaction, affective organizational commitment and intention to stay in the same organization; b) the role played by job satisfaction as a mediator in the relationship between ethical leadership and volunteers’ intentions to stay in the same organization, as well as between ethical leadership and affective commitment. An anonymous questionnaire was individually administered to 198 Italian volunteers of different non-profit (...) organizations. The questionnaire contained the Ethical Leadership Scale, the Volunteers Satisfaction Index, the Affective organization Scale, as well as questions regarding the participants’ age, sex, type of work, level of education, length of their volunteer works, intention to volunteer in the following months in the same organization. The construct as well the effects of EL on volunteers is approached in light of the Social Exchange Theory and the Social Learning Theory. Structural equation models were used to test hypothesized relationships. The results confirm the role of mediation of volunteer satisfaction in the relationships between the variables studied. In particular, ethical leadership was found to be positively associated both with volunteers’ intention of staying and with their affective commitment. In the first case this relationship is fully explained by the mediation of the volunteers’ satisfaction, while the latter is explained by both direct and indirect factors. To the authors’ knowledge, this the first attempt to understand the role played by ethical leadership on volunteers’ behavior and, more in general, in the management of non-profit organizations. Findings are relevant both for practitioners and managers of non-profit organization, since they suggest the relevance of the perception of ethical leadership by volunteers, as well as for scholars, since they further deepen the knowledge on EL and its effects on the followers. Limits of the study: the questionnaire was administered only among a group of non-statistical sample of volunteers. Furthermore, the study reached only volunteers from Italian non-profit organization. (shrink)

This study considers the ranges of the power of self-determination in human action, attending to the « status quaestionis » of the matter as it is contained in statements of Cicero on the Stoic position, his own thoughts on this matter, and the reception and re-reading of the theme in Thomas Aquinas. We thus attend to the Ciceronian exposition in De natura deorum, De divinatione and De fato on the Stoic position regarding the need for causal connection. We also study (...) the criticism added by Cicero to its transmission, and the projections of the problematic in Aquinas’s quaestio De fato, in the Summa Theologiae, and in other parallel passages. (shrink)

El presente estudio se propone examinar, por una parte, la elaboración del maestro Felipe, Canciller de París sobre principios del siglo XIII, acerca de la naturaleza del ser como bien, en el contexto de un desarrollo de metodología filosófica. En este sentido, presenta la postura del Canciller sobre el valor de las razones filosóficas en la inteligencia de la fe. Por otra parte, tiene por objeto desarrollar la concepción cósmico-antropológica del Canciller, subrayando las aportaciones de tradición platónica, aristotélica y helenística.

This paper faces the projections of the moral philosophy of Cicero on medieval scholastic ethics; it examines the influence of Cicero's writings dealing with treatment of the justificating way of moral behavior starting from natural human inclinations. First, the article analyses the philosophical elaboration of the theme in the field of ciceronian thinking. Second, already inside the frame of medieval elaborations, the article deals with projections of ciceronian tradition around natural human inclinations in their relations with moral life, in the (...) philosophical developments of Thomas Aquinas about origins of virtue and natural law. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between contextual work-related factors on the one hand, in terms of job demands (i.e., risk factors) and job resources (i.e., protective factors), and work-family conflict in teachers on the other. Building on the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model, we hypothesized that job demands, namely qualitative and quantitative workload, are positively associated with work-family conflict in teachers. Moreover, in line with the buffer hypothesis of the JD-R, we expected job resources, in terms (...) of support from supervisor, job autonomy, and participation in decision making, to affect this association, which is expected to be stronger when job resources are low. The study was conducted in an Italian secondary school. Overall, 122 teachers completed a self-report questionnaire aimed at determining work-family conflict, as well as job demands and resources. The hypothesized relationships were tested using moderated multiple regression. The results of this study largely support our predictions. First, both aspects of workload were positively associated with work-family conflict. Secondly, job resources, including support from supervisor and participation in decision making, buffered this association, which was stronger when resources were low. On the contrary, job autonomy did not buffer the association between workload and work-family conflict. Overall, the results of this study are consistent with the Job Demands-Resources model and contribute to to the understanding of work–family conflict among teachers. More specifically, our study suggests that teachers with high levels of job resources, namely support from supervisor and participation in decision making, can effectively cope with job demands, in terms of both qualitative and quantitative workload, thus preventing negative consequences such as conflict between work and family domains. Interventions aimed at preventing work-family conflict among teachers should encourage organizations to optimize the balance between job demands and resources, as well as the identification and training of the workers at risk of work-family conflict. (shrink)

The Victorian period in Britain was an “age of reform.” It is therefore not surprising that two of the era’s most eminent intellects described themselves as reformers. Both William Whewell and John Stuart Mill believed that by reforming philosophy—including the philosophy of science—they could effect social and political change. But their divergent visions of this societal transformation led to a sustained and spirited controversy that covered morality, politics, science, and economics. Situating their debate within the larger context of Victorian society (...) and its concerns, _Reforming Philosophy_ shows how two very different men captured the intellectual spirit of the day and engaged the attention of other scientists and philosophers, including the young Charles Darwin. Mill—philosopher, political economist, and Parliamentarian—remains a canonical author of Anglo-American philosophy, while Whewell—Anglican cleric, scientist, and educator—is now often overlooked, though in his day he was renowned as an authority on science. Placing their teachings in their proper intellectual, cultural, and argumentative spheres, Laura Snyder revises the standard views of these two important Victorian figures, showing that both men’s concerns remain relevant today. A philosophically and historically sensitive account of the engagement of the major protagonists of Victorian British philosophy, _Reforming Philosophy_ is the first book-length examination of the dispute between Mill and Whewell in its entirety. A rich and nuanced understanding of the intellectual spirit of Victorian Britain, it will be welcomed by philosophers and historians of science, scholars of Victorian studies, and students of the history of philosophy and political economy. (shrink)

This article provides a much‐needed review of the neural bases of implicit statistical learning. Batterink, Paller and Reber focus on the neural processes that underpin performance in experimental paradigms employed in implicit learning and statistical learning research. An important insight is that learning across all paradigms is supported by interactions between the declarative and nondeclarative memory systems of the brain. They conclude with a helpful discussion of future directions of research.

BackgroundEthics consult services are well established, but often remain underutilized. Our aim was to identify the barriers and perceptions of the Ethics consult service for physicians, advance practice providers (APPs), and nurses at our urban academic medical center which might contribute to underutilization.MethodsThis was a cross-sectional single-health system, anonymous written online survey, which was developed by the UCSD Health Clinical Ethics Committee and distributed by Survey Monkey. We compare responses between physicians, APPs, and nurses using standard parametric and non-parametric statistical (...) methods. Satisfaction with ethics consult and likelihood of calling Ethics service again were assessed using a 0–100 scale using a 5-likert response structured (0 being “not helpful at all” to 100 being “extremely helpful”) and results presented using box plots and interquartile ranges (IQR).ResultsFrom January to July 2019, approximately 3800 surveys were sent to all physicians, APPs and nurses with a return rate of 5.5—10%. Although the majority of respondents had encountered an ethical dilemma (85–92.1%) only approximately half had ever requested an Ethics consult. The primary reason for physicians never having requested a consult was that they never felt the need for help (41%). For APPs the primary reasons were not knowing an Ethics consult service was available (33.3%) or not knowing how to contact Ethics (27.8%). For nurses, it was not knowing how to contact the Ethics consult service (30.8%) or not feeling the need for help (26.2%). The median satisfaction score (IQR) for Ethics consult services rated on a 0–100 scale, from physicians was 76 (29), for AAPs 89 (49), and nurses 70 (40) (p = 0.62). The median (IQR) of likelihood of consulting Ethics in the future also on a 0–100 scale was 71 (47) for physicians, 69 (45) for APPs, and 61 (45) for nurses (p = 0.79). APP’s and nurses were significantly more likely than physicians to believe that the team did not act on the Ethics consult’s recommendations.ConclusionsBased on the results presented, we were able to identify actionable steps to better engage healthcare providers—and in particular APPs and nurses—and scale up institutional educational efforts to increase awareness of the role of the Ethics consult service at our institution. Actionable steps included implementing a system of ongoing feedback that is critical for the sustainability of the Ethics service role. We hope this project can serve as a blueprint for other hospital-based Ethics consult services to improve the quality of their programs. (shrink)

Sexual self-determination is considered a fundamental human right by most of us living in Western societies. While we must abide by laws regarding consent and coercion, in general we expect to be able to engage in sexual behaviour whenever, and with whomever, we choose. For older people with dementia living in residential aged care facilities (RACFs), however, the issue becomes more complex. Staff often struggle to balance residents' rights with their duty of care, and negative attitudes towards older people's sexuality (...) can lead to residents' sexual expression being overlooked, ignored, or even discouraged. In particular, questions as to whether residents with dementia are able to consent to sexual activity or physically intimate relationships pose a challenge to RACF staff, and current legislation does little to assist them. This paper will address these issues, and will argue that, while every effort should be made to ensure that no resident comes to harm, RACFs must respect the rights of residents with dementia to make decisions about their sexuality, intimacy and physical relationships. (shrink)

This article examines three cases of mid-20th-century oil media—oil-related imagery, iconographies, and media—in visual culture: a series of popular science books entitled The Story of Oil published in the US, an oil-themed set of Kuwaiti postage stamps (1959), and an art exhibition in Zurich (1956) titled Welt des Erdöls: Junge Maler sehen eine Industrie (World of Petroleum: Young Artists See an Industry). While depicting crude oil in its natural habitat was a common photographic theme in the early 20th-century United States, (...) the material discussed shows that, by the mid-20th century, crude oil no longer had the same visual presence. The iconography of oil in the three case studies came to rely increasingly on images of oil infrastructure and on context-specific depictions of living within petro-modernity or petro-culture, meaning lifestyles fueled by cheap fossil energy. However, it is not just the changes in visual representations of petroleum that matter; any debate about the visibility and invisibility of petroleum has to take into account the very media through which petroleum has become visually communicated—that is, the precise forms of oil's mediatization. The aesthetic negotiation of petroleum through media-based visual representations has been crucial for the dematerialization of fossil matter in its conversion to fossil energy, as well as the decoupling of sites of extraction from sites of production and consumption in the public imagination. As petro-culture has morphed into national or even global culture (rather than representing just one possible energy source among many), oil media has paved the way for our intimate relationship with fossil energy-dependent lifestyles, which is one of the biggest drivers of climate change. (shrink)

Laura Marcus is one of the leading literary critics of modernist literature and culture. Dreams of Modernity: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Cinema covers the period from around 1880 to 1930, when modernity as a form of social and cultural life fed into the beginnings of modernism as a cultural form. Railways, cinema, psychoanalysis and the literature of detection - and their impact on modern sensibility - are four of the chief subjects explored. Marcus also stresses the creativity of modernist women writers, (...) including H. D., Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf. The overriding themes of this work bear on the understanding of the early twentieth century as a transitional age, thus raising the question of how 'the moderns' understood the conditions of their own modernity. (shrink)

Millions of people in our world are in need of assistance: from the global poor, to refugees, from the victims of natural disasters, to those of violent crimes. What are our responsibilities towards them? Christian Barry and Gerhard Øverland’s answer is plausible and straightforward: we have enforceable duties to assist others in need whenever we can do so ‘at relatively moderate cost to ourselves, and others’. Barry and Øverland defend this answer on the ground that it best fits our intuitions (...) in a variety of hypothetical rescue scenarios. I argue that, although Barry and Øverland’s view is intuitively appealing, appeal to intuitive cases is insufficient to vindicate it satisfactorily. Intuitive cases alone do not allow us to establish: (i) what costs count as moderate and (ii) whether assistance-based responsibilities are, in fact, enforceable. These considerations suggest that Barry and Øverland’s defence of their preferred answer to the assistance question may be incomplete. (shrink)

Implicit bias is one of the most successful cases in recent memory of an academic concept being translated into practice. Its use in the National Science Foundation ADVANCE program—which seeks to promote gender equality in STEM careers through institutional transformation—has raised fundamental questions about organizational change. How do advocates translate theories into practice? What makes some concepts more tractable than others? What happens to theories through this translation process? We explore these questions using the ADVANCE program as a case study. (...) Using an inductive, theory-building approach and combination of computational and qualitative methods, we investigate how the concept of implicit bias was translated into practice through the ADVANCE program and identify five key features that made implicit bias useful as a change framework in the academic STEM setting. We find that the concept of implicit bias works programmatically because it is demonstrable, relatable, versatile, actionable, and impartial. While enabling the concept’s diffusion, these characteristics also limit its scope. We reflect on implications for gender theories of organizational change and for practitioners. (shrink)

Interview of M. Laura Lattanzi and Paz López to the artist and writer Leticia Obeid.

In 2010, Connecticut implemented an offence prohibiting minors from engaging in sexting. This legislation was part of a range of reforms across the United States aiming to better tailor the criminal law’s response to youth sexting by distinguishing sexting from child abuse material. Drawing from submissions to the Connecticut General Assembly’s Sexting Bill, media reports and recent ‘sexting’ cases, this article adopts a feminist perspective and examines the justifications for and implications of this sexting statute. It argues that while aiming (...) to create a distinction between child abuse material and sexting through a ‘lesser’ offence, these paternalistic reforms are informed by some of the same logics shaping child pornography/child abuse material law. Therefore, this statute is situated on a continuum of paternalistic legislation which utilises the constitutive expressive function of the criminal law to register anxieties about young people’s sexual and technological practices. As a result, this statute conflates victims and perpetrators of image based sexual abuses and fails to meet its deterrent and protective aims. (shrink)

RNA's role in genome rearrangement. Ciliated protists, such as Oxytricha, shown, have two types of nuclei that differentiate from each other. Development in these microbial eukaryotes provides a paragon for studies of genome remodeling, with extensive use of non‐coding RNAs. On pages 84–87 of this issue, Wenwen Fang and Laura Landweber discuss how RNA‐guided processes of genome rearrangement or repair could influence other eukaryotes. Cover by Wenyi Fang. SEM images courtesy of Robert Hammersmith.

This article reflects on the ‘Philosophy and Gender’ project, which introduced the pedagogical technique known as the ‘Community of Inquiry’ into an undergraduate Gender and the Law course at the University of Western Australia. The Community of Inquiry is a pedagogy developed by Matthew Lipman in the discipline of Philosophy that facilitates collaborative and democratic philosophical thinking in the context of teaching philosophy in schools. Our project was to see if this pedagogy could advance two objectives in Gender and the (...) Law at undergraduate level: ‘reflexive thinking’ and ‘standpoint thinking’. We conclude that the Communities of Inquiry had a significant influence on the development of ‘reflexive thinking’ but appeared to have limited influence on the development of ‘standpoint thinking’. Here we provide a practitioner reflection on an exploratory new approach to teaching in a tertiary setting, with a view to setting an agenda for more systematic research in the future. (shrink)

In his article, “Defining Death: Beyond Biology,” John Lizza argues in favor of a civil definition of death, according to which the potential for consciousness and social interaction marks us as the “kind of being that we are.” In this commentary, I critically discuss this approach to the bioethical debate on the definition of death. I question whether Lizza’s account is based on a full recognition of the “practical, moral, religious, philosophical, and cultural considerations” at play in this debate. I (...) further propose that a truly ethical debate on definitions of death ought to concentrate on how different definitions of death are used in diverse contexts – what definitions of death do – and focus less on who has the right definition of death for all situations. (shrink)