In this work, we present some traits of the socio-political and economic thought of Giuseppe Toniolo, who lived in Italy at the turn of the XIX and XX century, with special reference to the contribution that the Italian economist and sociologist gave to the definition and implementation of the principle of subsidiarity and to the ethical foundation of economic science. After outlining the definition of the subsidiarity principle in the first paragraph, we sketch the historical background in which Toniolo lived (...) and operated. We then focus on the ethical factor and on the concept of subsidiary State emerging from Toniolo’s writings. Finally, we present some of the main elements of Toniolo’s legacy with reference to the current economic and socio-political debate. (shrink)

The Stone-Weierstrass Theorem for compact Hausdorff spaces is a basic result of functional analysis with far-reaching consequences. We introduce an equational logic ⊨Δ associated with an infinitary variety Δ and show that the Stone-Weierstrass Theorem is a consequence of the Beth definability property of ⊨Δ, stating that every implicit definition can be made explicit. Further, we define an infinitary propositional logic ⊢Δ by means of a Hilbert-style calculus and prove a strong completeness result whereby the semantic notion of consequence associated (...) with ⊢Δ coincides with ⊨Δ. (shrink)

The crucial problem in the philosophy of psychiatry is to determine under which conditions certain behaviors, mental states, and personality traits should be regarded as symptoms of mental illnesses. Participants in the debate can be placed on a continuum of positions. On the one side of the continuum, there are naturalists who maintain that the concept of mental illness can be explained by relying on the conceptual apparatus of the natural sciences, such as biology and neuroscience. On the other side (...) of the continuum, there are normativists who maintain that the appropriate characterization of the concept of mental illness cannot avoid reference to epistemic, moral and other social values. Although, this article is primarily an introduction to the debate, we stress the importance of the normativist positions. (shrink)

In this paper we aim to offer a balanced argument to motivate (re)thinking about the mental illness clause within the insanity defence. This is the clause that states that mental illness should have a relevant causal or explanatory role for the presence of the incapacities or limited capacities that are covered by this defence. We offer three main considerations showing the important legal and epistemological roles that the mental illness clause plays in the evaluation of legal responsibility. Although we acknowledge (...) that these advantages could be preserved without having this clause explicitly stated in the law, we resist proposals that deny the importance of mental illness in exculpation. We argue, thus, that any attempt at removing the mental illness clause from legal formulations of the insanity defence should offer alternative ways of keeping in place these advantages. (shrink)

How psychopaths and their capacity for moral action are viewed is not only philosophically interesting but is also important and relevant for policy. The philosophical discussion of psychopathy has focussed upon the psychological faculties that are prerequisites for moral responsibility and empirical findings regarding psychopathy that are relevant to philosophical accounts of moral understanding and motivation. However, there are legitimate worries about whether psychopathy is a robust scientific construct, and there are risks attached to reifying psychopathy or other psychiatric constructs. (...) We defend the concept of psychopathy by pointing out the relevance of empirical studies about it for our ordinary practices of ascribing moral responsibility and folk psychological accounts of moral understanding and motivation. (shrink)

In this paper, we develop an impure somatic theory of emotion, according to which emotions are constituted by the integration of bodily perceptions with representations of external objects, events, or states of affairs. We put forward our theory by contrasting it with Prinz's pure somatic theory, according to which emotions are entirely constituted by bodily perceptions. After illustrating Prinz's theory and discussing the evidence in its favor, we show that it is beset by serious problems—i.e., it gets the neural correlates (...) of emotion wrong, it isn't able to distinguish emotions from bodily perceptions that aren't emotions, it cannot account for emotions being directed towards particular objects, and it mischaracterizes emotion phenomenology. We argue that our theory accounts for the empirical evidence considered by Prinz and solves the problems faced by his theory. In particular, we maintain that our theory gives a unified and principled account of the relation between emotions and bodily perceptions, the intentionality of emotions, and emotion phenomenology. (shrink)

Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.

According to Jim Pryor’s dogmatism, when you have an experience with content p, you often have prima facie justification for believing p that doesn’t rest on your independent justification for believing any proposition. Although dogmatism has an intuitive appeal and seems to have an antisceptical bite, it has been targeted by various objections. This paper principally aims to answer the objections by Roger White according to which dogmatism is inconsistent with the Bayesian account of how evidence affects our rational credences. (...) If this were true, the rational acceptability of dogmatism would be seriously questionable. I respond that these objections don’t get off the ground because they assume that our experiences and our introspective beliefs that we have experiences have the same evidential force, whereas the dogmatist is uncommitted to this assumption. I also consider the question whether dogmatism has an antisceptical bite. I suggest that the answer turns on whether or not the Bayesian can determine the priors of hypotheses and conjectures on the grounds of their extra-empirical virtues. If the Bayesian can do so, the thesis that dogmatism has an antisceptical bite is probably false. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss whether there are genuinely *diachronic* constraints of practical rationality, that is, pressures on combinations of practical attitudes over time, which are not reducible to mere synchronic rational pressures. Michael Bratman has recently argued that there is at least one such diachronic rational constraint that governs the stability of intentions over time. *Pace* Bratman, I argue that there are no genuinely diachronic constraints on intentions that meet the stringent desiderata set by him. But I show that (...) there are at least two synchronic rational constraints with distinctive and important, although only indirect, diachronic dimensions. Neither of them, however, supports the practical conservatism in the face of normative underdetermination that, according to Bratman, is part and parcel of the diachronic rationality of intention stability. (shrink)

In this paper, I will discuss the various ways in which intentions can be said to be conditional, with particular attention to the internal conditions on the intentions’ content. I will first consider what it takes to carry out a conditional intention. I will then discuss how the distinctive norms of intention apply to conditional intentions and whether conditional intentions are a weaker sort of commitments than the unconditional ones. This discussion will lead to the idea of what I call (...) the ‘deep structure’ of intentions. Roughly, this is the idea that the conditional nature of our intentions is only partially made explicit in the expressions we use to communicate our intentions and in the explicit form of our thinking about and reasoning with them. Most conditions that qualify our intentions are part of a deep functional structure that can be evinced by observing the actual psychological functioning of intentions and by considering the rational requirements that they engage. I will argue that the deep structure of intentions is characteristically conditional. Genuinely unconditional intentions are only limiting instances of conditional intentions and their contribution to agency can only be understood in light of this fact. I will conclude by showing that the characteristic conditional structure of intentions is intimately related to distinctive features of human agency, especially to its unity over time. (shrink)

It is often argued that future-directed decisions are effective at shaping our future conduct because they give rise, at the time of action, to a decisive reason to act as originally decided. In this paper, I argue that standard accounts of decision-based reasons are unsatisfactory. For they focus either on tie-breaking scenarios or cases of self-directed distal manipulation. I argue that future-directed decisions are better understood as tools for the non-manipulative, intrapersonal division of deliberative labor over time. A future-directed decision (...) to ϕ gives rise to a defeasible exclusionary reason to ϕ. This reason is grounded on the default authority that is normally granted to one’s prior self as an “expert” deliberator. I argue that this kind of exclusionary reason is the only one that can account for the effectiveness of future-directed decisions at shaping our diachronic agency without violating our autonomy over time. (shrink)

In this chapter, we investigate whether psychopathy is a mental disorder. We argue that addressing this question requires engaging, at least, with three principal issues that have conceptual, empirical, and normative dimensions. First, it must be established whether current measures of psychopathy individuate a unitary class of individuals. By this we mean that persons classifed as psychopaths should share some relevant similarities that support explanation, prediction, and treatment. Second, it must be proven that psychopathy harms the person who has it. (...) Third, it must be established that the harm associated with psychopathy is relevant for the ascription of disorder status. Regarding this latter issue, we argue that psychopathy should be considered a disorder if its harmfulness derives from certain incapacities or limited capacities. These incapacities should affect basic competences that are justifably required for conducting a preferable type of life. Within this framework, we tentatively advance the hypothesis that some normatively justifed conclusions and empirical evidence about psychopathy, that needs nonetheless to be further investigated, might support the claim that people with psychopathy have a mental disorder. (shrink)

In this paper we focus on transmission and failure of transmission of warrant. We identify three individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for transmission of warrant, and we show that their satisfaction grounds a number of interesting epistemic phenomena that have not been sufficiently appreciated in the literature. We then scrutinise Wright’s analysis of transmission failure and improve on extant readings of it. Nonetheless, we present a Bayesian counterexample that shows that Wright’s analysis is partially incoherent with our analysis of (...) warrant transmission and prima facie defective. We conclude exploring three alternative lines of reply: developing a more satisfactory account of transmission failure, which we outline; dismissing the Bayesian counterexample by rejecting some of its assumptions; reinterpreting Wright’s analysis to make it immune to the counterexample. (shrink)

We discuss a well-known puzzle about the lexicalization of logical operators in natural language, in particular connectives and quantifiers. Of the many logically possible operators, only few appear in the lexicon of natural languages: the connectives in English, for example, are conjunction _and_, disjunction _or_, and negated disjunction _nor_; the lexical quantifiers are _all, some_ and _no_. The logically possible nand (negated conjunction) and Nall (negated universal) are not expressed by lexical entries in English, nor in any natural language. Moreover, (...) the lexicalized operators are all upward or downward monotone, an observation known as the Monotonicity Universal. We propose a logical explanation of lexical gaps and of the Monotonicity Universal, based on the dynamic behaviour of connectives and quantifiers. We define update potentials for logical operators as procedures to modify the context, under the assumption that an update by \( \phi \) depends on the logical form of \( \phi \) and on the speech act performed: assertion or rejection. We conjecture that the adequacy of update potentials determines the limits of lexicalizability for logical operators in natural language. Finally, we show that on this framework the Monotonicity Universal follows from the logical properties of the updates that correspond to each operator. (shrink)

Both sustainability and identity are said to be paradoxical issues in organizations. In this study we look at the paradoxes of corporate sustainability at the individual level by studying the identity work of those managers who hold sustainability-dedicated roles in organizations. Analysing 26 interviews with sustainability managers, we identify three main tensions affecting their identity construction process: the business versus values oriented, the organizational insider versus outsider and the short-term versus long-term focused identity work tensions. When dealing with these tensions, (...) some interviewees express a paradoxical perspective in attempting to accept and maintain the two poles of each of them simultaneously. It emerges in particular that metaphorical reasoning can be used by sustainability managers in varied ways to cope with the tensions of identity work. We read these findings in light of the existing literature on the relation between paradoxes and identity work, highlighting and discussing their implications for both research and practice. (shrink)

We combine computable structure theory and algorithmic learning theory to study learning of families of algebraic structures. Our main result is a model-theoretic characterization of the learning type InfEx_\iso, consisting of the structures whose isomorphism types can be learned in the limit. We show that a family of structures is InfEx_\iso-learnable if and only if the structures can be distinguished in terms of their \Sigma^2_inf-theories. We apply this characterization to familiar cases and we show the following: there is an infinite (...) learnable family of distributive lattices; no pair of Boolean algebras is learnable; no infinite family of linear orders is learnable. (shrink)

In Aristophanes' Male and Female Revolutions author Kenneth M. De Luca offers a detailed study of two of Aristophanes' plays and reveals how each illuminates the other and the question of the rule of law through the lens of democracy. De Luca uses classical thought to clarify contemporary and foundational issues in political theory.

In this paper we show how Dummett-Prawitz-style proof-theoretic semantics has to be modified in order to cope with paradoxical phenomena. It will turn out that one of its basic tenets has to be given up, namely the definition of the correctness of an inference as validity preservation. As a result, the notions of an argument being valid and of an argument being constituted by correct inference rules will no more coincide. The gap between the two notions is accounted for by (...) introducing the distinction between sense and denotation in the proof-theoretic-semantic setting. (shrink)

Effective and specifically targeted social and therapeutic responses for antisocial personality disorders and psychopathy are scarce. Some authors maintain that this scarcity should be overcome by revising current syndrome - based classifications of these conditions and devising better biocognitive classifications of antisocial individuals. The inspiration for the latter classifications has been embedded in the Research domain criteria approach (RDoC). RDoC - type approaches to psychiatric research aim at transforming diagnosis, provide valid measures of disorders, aid clinical practice, and improve health (...) outcomes by integrating the data on the genetic, neural, cognitive, and affective systems underlying psychiatric conditions. In the first part of the paper, we discuss the benefits of such approaches in comparison to the dominant syndrome-based ones and review recent attempts at building biocognitive classifications of antisocial individuals. Other researchers, how ever, have objected that biocognitive approaches in psychiatry are committed to an untenable form of explanatory. (shrink)

PurposeTrust is a social factor at the foundations of human action. The pervasiveness of trust explains why it has been studied by a large variety of disciplines, and its complexity justifies the difficulties in reaching a shared understanding and definition. As for all the social factors, trust is continuously evolving as a result of the changes in social, economic and technological conditions. The internet and many other Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) solutions have changed organizational and social life. Such mutated (...) scenarios challenged what researchers know about trust, thus several studies tried to investigate the difference between online and traditional (physical) environments. The purpose of this paper is to solve this multi‐dimensional puzzle by presenting a conceptual framework that will take into consideration the complexity of ICT mediated‐trust.Design/methodology/approachThe extant literature still lacks a homogeneous framework and presents a large amount of different perspectives, each one addressing a very specific issue. By using the methodology suggested by Short and Cropanzano the paper proposes a conceptual model for understanding the dynamics of trust in online settings. In doing so the authors' adopted the Actor Network Theory conceptual frame for disentangling the ambiguous role of technology in its relation with trust.FindingsThis paper provides an ultimate conceptual model on trust in virtual settings.Research limitations/implicationsThe proposed model will help systematize the extant contributions and also identify the gaps that can be addressed by future researches.Originality/valueThe model permits the understanding of the dynamics of trust in online settings. (shrink)

Crispin Wright has given an explanation of how a first time warrant can fall short of transmitting across a known entailment. Formal epistemologists have struggled to turn Wright’s informal explanation into cogent Bayesian reasoning. In this paper, I analyse two Bayesian models of Wright’s account respectively proposed by Samir Okasha and Jake Chandler. I argue that both formalizations are unsatisfactory for different reasons, and I lay down a third Bayesian model that appears to me to capture the valid kernel of (...) Wright’s explanation. After this, I consider a recent development in Wright’s account of transmission failure. Wright suggests that his condition sufficient for transmission failure of first time warrant also suffices for transmission failure of supplementary warrant. I propose an interpretation of Wright’s suggestion that shield it from objections. I then lay down a fourth Bayesian framework that provides a simplified model of the unified explanation of transmission failure envisaged by Wright. (shrink)

In this paper we provide a compact presentation of the verisimilitudinarian approach to scientific progress (VS, for short) and defend it against the sustained attack recently mounted by Alexander Bird (2007). Advocated by such authors as Ilkka Niiniluoto and Theo Kuipers, VS is the view that progress can be explained in terms of the increasing verisimilitude (or, equivalently, truthlikeness, or approximation to the truth) of scientific theories. According to Bird, VS overlooks the central issue of the appropriate grounding of scientific (...) beliefs in the evidence, and it is therefore unable (a) to reconstruct in a satisfactory way some hypothetical cases of scientific progress, and (b) to provide an explanation of the aversion to falsity that characterizes scientific practice. We rebut both of these criticisms and argue that they reveal a misunderstanding of some key concepts underlying VS. (shrink)

Background Italy was the first European country to be involved with the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, many healthcare professionals were deployed and suddenly faced end-of-life care management and its challenges. Aims To understand the experiences of palliative care professionals deployed in supporting emergency and critical care staff during the COVID-19 first and second pandemic waves. Research design A qualitative descriptive design was adopted, and in-depth interviews were used to investigate and analyse participants’ perceptions and points of view. Participants and (...) research context Twenty-four healthcare professionals (physicians, nurses, psychologists, physiotherapists, and spiritual support) from the most affected areas of Italy were recruited via the Italian society of palliative care and researchers’ network. Ethical considerations The University Institutional Board granted ethical approval. Participants gave written informed consent and agreed to be video-recorded. Findings The overarching theme highlighted participants’ experience supporting health professionals to negotiate ethical complexity in end-of-life care. Crucial topics that emerged within themes were: training emergency department professionals on ethical dimensions of palliative and end-of-life care, preserving dying patients’ dignity and developing ethical competence in managing end-of-life care. Conclusions Our study showed palliative care teams’ challenges in supporting health professionals’ ethical awareness in emergencies. However, while they highlighted their concerns in dealing with the emergency staff’s lack of ethical perspectives, they also reported the positive impact of an ethically-informed palliative care approach. Lastly, this study illuminates how palliative care professionals’ clinical and ethical competence might have assisted a cultural change in caring for dying patients during COVID-19 and future emergencies. (shrink)

In der zehnten Vorlesung der Grundzüge des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters schreibt Fichte: »Ueber nichts ist, ganz besonders in der Zeitepoche, die wir durchlebt, mehr geschrieben, gelesen und gesprochen worden, als über den Staat.« Diese Aussage Fichtes klingt autobiographisch, da der Philosoph seit den ersten Jahren seiner geistigen Tätigkeit den Problemen der Staatstheorie eine starke Aufmerksamkeit gewidmet hat. Das könnte leicht bewiesen werden, auch mit Hilfe der reichen Sekundärliteratur über dieses Gebiet der Fichteschen Philosophie: das Interesse für das politische Denken Fichtes war (...) aus verschiedenen Gründen auch in Zeiten lebhaft, als das Interesse für andere Gebiete der Transzendentalphilosophie gering war. Trotzdem scheint mir das Problem, welches ich hier kurz behandeln will, relativ vernachlässigt worden zu sein. (shrink)

According to constitutivism, we can justify the authority of aims and norms on the ground that they are inescapable. Constitutivist views divide between ambitious and modest ones. According to ambitious constitutivism, the inescapability of aims grounds their unconditional authority, whereas according to modest constitutivism, the inescapability of aims only grounds their conditional authority. Either way, both forms of constitutivism share the assumption that inescapability grounds authority, which in turn presupposes that at the foundation of normativity we find aims and norms (...) that can be evaluated as having or lacking authority. In this paper I shall defend a form of constitutivism that rejects this assumption. According to this view, which I shall call Hinge Constitutivism, at the foundation of epistemic normativity we find an aim, the truth-aim, that is altogether beyond the evaluation in terms of the ordinary notion of authority. Moreover, I shall argue that to aim at truth is a condition of possibility for justifying the authority of any other aims or norms. In this sense, to aim at truth is a hinge of deliberation. (shrink)

This paper questions different conceptions of Medical Humanities in order to provide a clearer understanding of what they are and why they matter. Building upon former attempts, we defend a conception of Medical Humanities as a humanistic problem-based approach to medicine aiming at influencing its nature and practice. In particular, we discuss three main conceptual issues regarding the overall nature of this discipline: (i) a problem-driven approach to Medical Humanities; (ii) the need for an integration of Medical Humanities into medicine; (...) (iii) the methodological requirements that could render Medical Humanities an effective framework for medical decision-making. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the structure of our temporally extended agency. We do not have the power to act directly at a distance, so any of our temporally extended projects must be sustained over its temporal unfolding by momentary actions. We need both the capacity to organize these momentary steps in light of a synoptic overview of the extended activity as a whole and to sustain our motivation to continue to pursue the extended activity. Hence, the distinctive mode in which we (...) act over time is that of ’planning agency,’ which requires a form of temporal identification that goes beyond mere psychological continuity. I then discuss the differences in internal structure between merely continuous and integrated activities, and between telic and atelic ones. I provide a taxonomy of the different kinds of temporal goods and values and how these structures might bear on the risk of crisis of meaning in our temporal existence. I then touch briefly on the issue of how our mortality might make a difference to the structure of what we find valuable and how it relates to the temporal features of our agency. In the closing section, I discuss the effects of the moving temporal location of the agent (with her local executive powers) relative to her extended pursuits, including the asymmetries generated by the distinction between past and future stages of the activity and the moving horizon of what the agent can anticipate and (indirectly) control. (shrink)

There are some distinct methodological challenges, and possible pitfalls, for neuroethics when it evaluates neuroscientific results and links them to issues such as moral or legal responsibility. Some problems emerge in determining the requirements for responsibility. We will show how philosophical proposals in this area need to interact with legal doctrine and practice. Problems can occur when inferring normative implications from neuroscientific results. Other problems arise when it is not recognized that data about brain anatomy or physiology are relevant to (...) the ascription of responsibility only when they are significantly correlated with the psychological capacities contemplated by the legal formulations of responsibility. We will demonstrate this by considering two significant cases concerning psychopathy. Some paradigms that aim at measuring higher-order capacities, such as moral understanding, have limited validity. More robust paradigms for the study of learning in restricted controlled conditions, on the other hand, have limited ecological validity across individuals and context to be of any use for the law. (shrink)

Widely recognized as one of the main characteristics of Latin Aristotelianism, the 'Christianisation' of Aristotle from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century has received as yet little attention. Aiming to answer the need for a more systematic investigation, the articles here collected approach Christian readings of the Stagirite|s works from different perspectives. Setting aside abstract discussions about |degrees of orthodoxy|, they address a few specific questions: which |images| of Aristotle were offered by Medieval and Renaissance interpreters, and in particular how (...) did some of them argue that - far from being a pagan or even an impious thinker - he did not contradict the truths revealed by Holy Scripture? (shrink)

Standard metasemantic frameworks render word meanings resistant to the control of ordinary speakers, and hinder our ability to exercise sovereignty over the denotations of words. The literature suggests three main responses to the problem: views on which ordinary denotational interventions cannot cause changes to semantic reality, views on which we should drop the metasemantic premises that generate the difficulty, and views on which denotational interventions boil down to operations on a non-recalcitrant region of the semantic spectrum. I review these responses (...) and argue that they face difficulties. Then, I draw on linguistic work on variation to make an alternative proposal. I suggest that part of the problem hinges on a tendency to think about standing meanings under heavily idealized assumptions of intra-linguistic homogeneity. To amend this, we should consider endorsing a localist ontology for semantic properties that allows individual vocabulary items to bear variable standing meanings at different communities of speakers of a public language. The result, I argue, is a middle-ground framework which accepts the difficulties of wide-scope meaning change while granting speakers semantic self-determination, and strikes an attractive balance between a few central desiderata. (shrink)

What is the mental realization of our knowledge of the meaning of words? Does the lexical side of our semantic competence depend on the fact that we have dedicated representations of the semantic properties of lexemes or does it arise from world knowledge, encyclopedic information, and non-linguistic categorization? According to meaning eliminativism, lexical concepts have no robust psychological reality and our ability to use the words of a language should not be explained in terms of knowledge of their conventional semantic (...) value, conceived as their array of possible senses. To start, I will briefly explain what meaning eliminativism is and illustrate the key arguments that have been offered in its defense. Then, I will argue that such arguments are not as persuasive as they wish, and I will show that there are convincing theoretical and empirical reasons to maintain that meaning eliminativism is not a plausible claim about the nature of our lexical skills. (shrink)

In this chapter we argue that Robert Hare's psychopathy checklist revised (PCL-R) offers a construct of psychopathy that is valid enough for philosophical investigations of the moral and legal responsibility of psychopathic offenders.

Recentemente Cellucci (2008) ha argomentato che la riflessione filosofica, per essere feconda, deve essere tra le altre cose un’indagine sul mondo che mira in primo luogo alla conoscenza. In questa indagine la filosofia è contigua alla scienza, entrambe non devono avere alcuna restrizione nei loro campi di applicazione, entrambe utilizzano sostanzialmente gli stessi metodi. Inoltre, e in ciò si misurerebbe il maggior valore della filosofia, questa batte vie ancora inesplorate dando origine, eventualmente, a nuove scienze.La scienza cognitiva, lo sfondo teorico (...) adottato in queste pagine per affrontare la dimensione comunicativa, è un approccio interdisciplinare che mette insieme diversi campi di ricerca per analizzare la mente e i processi cognitivi, ed è nata da antiche intuizioni filosofiche, sostanzialmente dall'incontro di diverse tradizioni filosofiche con alcuni sviluppi della logica e dell’informatica. È dunque il prodotto di una riflessione filosofica feconda. Nel cap. 1 sono stati presentati i principali modelli della comunicazione del Novecento, e sono stati da ultimo toccati alcuni contributi classici che si situano nel solco degli studi della scienza cognitiva. In questo capitolo si illustreranno gli elementi che compongono questo specifico approccio, e si cercherà di isolare alcune questioni di fondo che attualmente animano il dibattito sul rapporto tra mente, linguaggio e comunicazione. (shrink)