Building on agency and resource-based view theories, this study investigates the level of environmental disclosure (ED) practices of family versus non-family firms and explores the moderating role of board gender diversity. We test our hypotheses on a 3-year (2018–2020) panel data sample comprising 324 observations of Italian small- and medium-sized enterprises traded on the Euronext Growth Milan. Findings show that, compared to non-family firms, companies with a family firm status are characterized by lower levels of ED. Gender diversity on the (...) board, however, moderates this relationship, reducing this gap, to the extent that the family firm status is associated with higher ED when the number of women directors is high enough to constitute a critical mass. We consequently contribute to the studies on family business, corporate governance, and corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

Previously published as special issues of _The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought_ and _The Review of Political Economy_, this volume contains the papers devoted to the life and work of Piero Sraffa. Sraffa was a leading intellectual of the twentieth century. He was brought to Cambridge by John Maynard Keynes and had an important impact on the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. He received the golden medal Söderström of the Swedish Academy of Sciences for his edition of David Ricardo's (...) _Works and Correspondence_ and he is the author of _Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities_, one of the most often cited book in economics. Using hitherto unpublished material from Sraffa's literary heritage kept at Trinity College, Cambridge, the papers throw new light on the intellectual development of the young Sraffa and correct several of the received views on him and his contribution. Themes covered concern his: objectivism rediscovery and reformulation of the classical theory of value and distribution criticism of Alfred Marshall's analysis relationship with his Cambridge colleagues and friends biography around the time when he left Italy for the UK friendship with Wittgenstein and his impact on the latter's thinking. (shrink)

Summary By introducing the concept of “invariants”, Koffka endowed perceptual psychology with a flexible theoretical tool, which is suitable for representing vision situations in which a definite part of the stimulus pattern is relevant but not sufficient to determine a corresponding part of the perceived scene. He characterised his “invariance principle” as a principle conclusively breaking free from the “old constancy hypothesis”, which rigidly surmised point-to-point relations between stimulus and perceptual properties. In this paper, we explain the basic terms and (...) assumptions implicit in Koffka’s concept, by representing them in a set-theoretic framework. Then, we highlight various aspects and implications of the concept in terms of answers to six separate questions: forms of invariants, heuristic paths to them, what is invariant in an invariant, roots of conditional indeterminacy, variability vs. indeterminacy, and overcoming of the indeterminacy. Lastly, we illustrate the lasting value and theoretical power of the concept, by showing that Koffka’s insights relating to it do occur in modern perceptual psychology and by highlighting its role in a model of perceptual transparency. (shrink)

The novel pandemic called “Coronavirus Disease 2019”, as a global public health emergency and global threat, has affected many countries in unpredictable ways and impacted on physical activity behaviors to various extents. Specific populations including refugees, asylum seekers, and prisoners, are vulnerable groups with multiple complex health needs and worse health outcomes with respect to the general population worldwide and at high risk of death from the “Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome-related Coronavirus type 2”. Governments around the world have been implementing (...) preventive healthcare policies, including physical and social distancing, isolation, and confinement, to mitigate against the burden imposed by the COVID-19 outbreak. This pandemic period is characterized by reduced or lack of movement. During this period of lockdown, PA can represent an immunotherapy and a preventative approach to avoid the harmful effects of inactivity due to the pandemic. Moreover, PA could be prescribed to improve the immune system of specific populations, which particularly experience the condition of being confined. The present narrative review discusses the potential impacts of COVID-19 pandemic on these specific populations’ health status and the importance of performing PA/exercise to reduce the deleterious effects of COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, we aim to provide useful recommendations on PA/exercise for these specific populations to maintain their level of independence, physical, and mental health as well as their wellbeing. (shrink)

From the Proceedings of the meeting Mind and Life XII, 'What is matter, what is life?', held in Dharamsala, India, in 2002, in the presence of His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama.

A review of the achievements of Fr. Busa over the course of his 60 years of work in the area of computational linguistics: internal hypertexts, the systematization of allographs, lemmatization, homographs and typologies; the lexical system; the laws of economy for graphemes, for semantic typology, for heterogeneity among terms, and of the two lexical hemispheres. Finally, the project of disciplined languages is mentioned, a response to the linguistic challenge resulting from informational globalization.

Le défi des antinomies joue un rôle décisif dans l'élaboration même de la pensée kantienne ; cela devient particulièrement significatif par rapport à l'Être absolument nécessaire, qui devrait dépasser le niveau des phénomènes même lorsque, comme l'on dit dans la thèse de la quatrième antinomie, l'on l'entend comme quelque chose du monde. Dans la structure même des antinomies nous sommes forcés à aller au-delà de l'expérience, à un Être qui dépasse radicalement le monde ; en ce sens, même à l'intérieur (...) de la pensée kantienne, l'analogie classique reste la structure spécifique de la métaphysique, surtout par la possibilité de dire la transcendance sans la réduire jamais au niveau des phénomènes. The challenge of the antinomies plays a decisive role in the development of Kantian thought. This becomes particularly significant with reference to the absolutely necessary Being, which should exceed the phenomenal domain even when, as Kant says in the fourth antinomy, it is considered as a part of the world. In the structure of the antinomies we are pushed beyond experience towards a Being which radically transcends the world; in this sense, even within Kantian thought, the classical analogy remains the specific structure of metaphysics, especially by virtue of the possibility of expressing transcendence without reducing it to the phenomenal level. (shrink)

1. Critica de capire e altri scritti. 2. Scritti kantiani. 3. L'analitica trascendentale. 4. Il problema della scienza e il giudizio storico.

Luigi Giussani, a high school religion teacher throughout the 1950s and 1960s, grounded his teachings in the vast body of experience to be found in Christianity's two-thousand-year history. He told his students, “I'm not here to make you adopt the ideas I will give you as your own, but to teach you a method for judging the things I will say.” Throughout his life, education was one of Giussani's primary intellectual interests. He believed that effective education required an adequate (...) background in the Christian tradition, presented within a lived experience that underscored the capacity of the faith to answer universal questions. What he proposed was a process that allowed one to sift through tradition, critically examining it and comparing it against the ultimate criteria for judgment: the desires of the heart. In Giussani's view, the primary concern was to “educate the human heart as God made it.” In The Risk of Education he states that fear leads students to associate this process of criticism with negativity or doubt. Yet, without an education in criticism, students cannot develop conviction. At a time when young people are abandoning the church and questioning the value of faith, Giussani's method of judging and verifying Christianity as an experience seems a necessary intervention. In The Risk of Education he argues that, ultimately, education and the Christian message reveal themselves through human freedom. (shrink)

Nel mio articolo propongo una lettura dei §§ 79-84 della Critica del Giudizio, parte della sezione Metodologia del Giudizio teleologico. Dapprima mi interrogo sul significato di una Methodenlehre del Giudizio teleologico, che rintraccio in un’attività metariflessiva del Giudizio; procedo poi ad una lettura analitica del testo nelle sue varie articolazioni, nella quale passo in rassegna le questioni attinenti alla specificità dello statuto epistemologico della teleologia, alla possibile convivenza tra finalismo e meccanicismo nella scienza della natura, all’origine della vita, allo scopo (...) ultimo della natura e allo scopo finale della creazione; approdo, infine, ad un’interpretazione per cui l’intera teleologia rationis humanae, che si estende dalla teleologia naturale alla teleologia morale passando per l’antropologia e per la filosofia della storia, viene in questa sezione riarticolata intorno ad un nuovo fulcro concettuale di livello trascendentale, che può garantire l’effettivo collegamento tra queste diverse parti della filosofia proprio perché esso non si esercita in forma di dominio legislativo, ma in forma di riflessione sul molteplice empirico e sulla causalità teleologica propria dell’uomo. (shrink)

Scopo della presente ricerca è identificare all’interno della «Dialettica» della prima Critica i due tipi di necessità, naturale e funzionale, di cui sono portatori i concetti puri della ragione nonché di chiarire in che modo l’uno sia legato all’altro. Partendo da un chiarimento terminologico relativo alla parola idea si vuole rendere conto del significato del completamento della serie delle condizioni dell’intelletto da parte della ragione, tanto nei termini di una sistematizzazione dell’esperienza quanto nell’ottica di un rimando alla libertà come forma (...) incondizionata di causalità nel regno della ragion pratica. (shrink)

The question considered is whether it is possible to trace a theoretical strategy for a criminal policy on the basis of Marx's work. The answer offered is that Marxian political and economic analysis does not supply any general theory of criminality and that any attempt to formulate such a theory (as in Lenin, Paukanis or Gramsci) necessarily leads to authoritarian and regressive conceptions of crime and punishment. Nevertheless the authors maintain that it is possible to trace three theoretical suggestions within (...) Marxian thought which allow of a fruitful approach to the criminal question. The first suggestion relates to the economic roots of many aspects of modern criminality; the second regards the Christian and bourgeois superstition of moral liberty and individual culpability; the third suggestion deals with the lack of a guaranteed social space as the prime root of crime. These theoretical suggestions permit clarification of the social character of penal responsibility and this character points to the need for the socialization (but not deregulation) of criminal treatment. (shrink)

In the course of 1901, V. Crémieu published the results of some experiments carried out to test the magnetic effects of electric convection currents. According to Crémieu, his experiments had proved that convection currents had no magnetic effects and consequently they were not equivalent to conduction currents, that is they were not ‘real’ electric currents. These negative results conflicted with those of well-known experiments carried out by other researchers, in particular with Rowland's experiments, and with Maxwell's, Hertz's and Lorentz's theories, (...) which was more shocking. The publication of Crémieu's experiments raised a controversy which involved directly or indirectly some leading French and British physicists, and led Rowland together with his student Pender to re-perform his experiments. Pender's results confirmed those preiously obtained by Rowland, in striking conflict with those of Crémieu. The importance of Crémieu's experiments was stressed by Poincaré in some of his publications, where he analysed and criticized various aspects of the question. However, he was involved more deeply: his correspondence with Crémieu shows that many of the experiments performed by Crémieu were conceived by Poincaré and carried out with his guidance. To put an end to the controversy, Poincaré obtained Kelvin's support to organize Crémieu's and Pender's joint experiments. The results of these experiments showed that the conflicting results obtained previously were due to an ‘anomalous’ behaviour of the dielectrics used by Crémieu in his apparatus. (shrink)

La piega critica del realismo filosofico di Tommaso rivela una realtà inaferrabile dischiudendo al soggetto nuove possibilità conoscitive, che ci restituiscono un Tommaso un po' meno tomista.

Some important results about art gallery theorems are proposed, starting from Chvátal’s essay, using also polygon triangulations and orthogonal polygons.