How good gets better and bad gets worse: measuring the face of emotion Given the history of the past, black South African students from different settings face unique academic and emotional climate. Using the Differential Emotions Scale which focuses on ten discrete emotions, and building upon Boyle's seminal work, this study reports a repeated-measure multiple discriminant function analysis for individual items across raters. The findings further indicate that majority of the DES items are sensitive indicators of the different innate and (...) universal facial expressions. However, the construct requires revision so that it offers the examiner maximum flexibility in assessment at diverse levels, in terms of more extensive norming and programmatic replication. In brief, the DES potentially has much to offer provided that it is adequately developed for use in non-Western nations or contexts. (shrink)

In The Slow Professor, Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber discuss how adopting the principles of the Slow movement in academic life can counter the erosion of humanistic education.

Children are presumptively regarded as incompetent to make their own medical decisions, and the responsibility for making such decisions typically falls to parents. Parental authority is not unlimited, however, and ethical guidelines identifying appropriate bounds on this authority are needed. One proposal currently gaining support is the Harm Threshold (HT), which asserts that the state may only legitimately intervene in parental decision-making when serious and preventable harm to children is likely. This paper considers two questions: in virtue of what underlying (...) principle or property does the HT gain its purported justification?; and does this underlying principle or property ground the HT as its proponents conceive of it? I identify two separate grounds represented in the literature: (i) J.S. Mill’s Harm Principle; and (ii) the liberty interests of parents. I find that the HT is not sufficiently grounded in either of these, revealing a substantial conceptual difficulty for its advocates. (shrink)

In her 2015 article, Helena Olofsdotter Stensöta notes that ‘the ethics of care is often used as a lens to dissect the current arrangement of care provision (or rather non-care provision) in polici...

This book brings together anthropological studies of human-animal relations among Indigenous Peoples in three regions of the Americas: the Andes, Amazonia and the American Arctic. Through ethnographic essays, the authors illustrate and compare entanglements of human and other-than-human lives.

In signaling games, a sender has private access to a state of affairs and uses a signal to inform a receiver about that state. If no common association of signals and states is initially available, sender and receiver must coordinate to develop one. How do players divide coordination labor? We show experimentally that, if players switch roles at each communication round, coordination labor is shared. However, in games with fixed roles, coordination labor is divided: Receivers adjust their mappings more frequently, (...) whereas senders maintain the initial code, which is transmitted to receivers and becomes the common code. In a series of computer simulations, player and role asymmetry as observed experimentally were accounted for by a model in which the receiver in the first signaling round has a higher chance of adjusting its code than its partner. From this basic division of labor among players, certain properties of role asymmetry, in particular correlations with game complexity, are seen to follow. (shrink)

The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT; Frederick, 2005) is designed to measure the tendency to override a prepotent response alternative that is incorrect and to engage in further reflection that leads to the correct response. It is a prime measure of the miserly information processing posited by most dual process theories. The original three-item test may be becoming known to potential participants, however. We examined a four-item version that could serve as a substitute for the original. Our data show that it (...) displays a.58 correlation with the original version and that it has very similar relationships with cognitive ability, various thinking dispositions, and with several other rational thinking tasks. Combining the two versions into a seven-item test resulted in a measure of miserly processing with substantial reliability (.72). The seven-item version was a strong independent predictor of performance on rational thinking tasks after the variance accounted for by cognitive ability and thinking dispositions had been partialled out. (shrink)

Maggie Günsberg explores the intersection between gender portrayal and other social categories of class, age and the family in the Italian theatre from the Renaissance to the present day. She examines the developing relationship between patriarchal strategies and the formal properties of the dramatic genre such as plot, comedy and realism. She also considers conventions specific to drama in performance, including images of both femininity and masculinity. An interdisciplinary approach, drawing on semiotics, psychoanalysis, philosophy, theories of spectatorship and dramatic (...) theory from a feminist perspective, informs Günsberg's critique of landmarks in Italian theatrical history, including work by Machiavelli, Ariosto, Goldoni, D'Annunzio and Pirandello. The book concludes with a chapter on the plays of Franca Rame, assessing the impact of this important figure on contemporary Italian theatre. (shrink)

A perennial debate in the field of global ethics revolves around the possibility of a universalist ethics as well as arguments over the nature, and significance, of difference for moral deliberation. Decolonial literature, in particular, increasingly signifies a pluriverse – one with radical ontological and epistemological differences. This book examines the concept of the pluriverse alongside global ethics and the ethics of care in order to contemplate new ethical horizons for engaging across difference. Offering a challenge to the current state (...) of the field, this book argues for a rethinking of global ethics as it has been conceived thus far. (shrink)

Evans & Levinson (E&L) focus on differences between languages at a superficial level, rather than examining common processes. Their emphasis on trivial details conceals uniform design features and universally shared strategies. Lexical category distinctions between nouns and verbs are probably universal. Non-local dependencies are a general property of languages, not merely non-configurational languages. Even the latter class exhibits constituency.

This paper advances a novel conception of the child’s best interest in regard to pediatric surgeries that do not promote the preventive or therapeutic health needs of children, or elective pediatric surgeries (EPS). First, children’s capacity for decision-making is examined, and the best decision-making model for EPS is identified as the Best Interest Standard. What follows is a discussion of the interests of children in the context of EPS, the correlation of fundamental interests to rights, and guidelines for weighing children’s (...) competing interests. Next, the rights and duties of parents as proxy decision makers are considered. Finally, a reinterpretation of the Best Interest Standard is proposed, identifying as paramount a child’s ability to make elective medical decisions for herself when she reaches maturity. (shrink)

According to Frantz Fanon, the psychological and social-political are deeply intertwined in the colonial context. Psychologically, the colonizers perceive the colonized as inferior and the colonized internalize this in an inferiority complex. This psychological reality is co-constitutive of and by material relations of power—the imaginary of inferiority both creates and is created by colonial relations of power. It is also in this context that violence takes on significant political import: violence deployed by the colonized to rebel against these colonial relations (...) and enact a different world will also be violent in its fundamental disruption of this imaginary. The ethics of care, on the other hand, does not seem to sit well with violence, and thus Fanon’s political theory more generally. Care ethics is concerned with everything we do to maintain and repair our worlds as well as reasonably possible. Violence, which ruptures our psycho-affective, material, and social-political realities, seems antithetical to this task. This article seeks to reconsider this apparent antinomy between violence and care via a dialogue between Fanon and the ethics of care. In so doing, this article mobilizes a relational conceptualization of violence that allows for the possibility that certain violences may, in fact, be justifiable from a care ethics perspective. At the same time, I contend that violence in any form will also eventually demand a caring response. Ultimately, this productive reading of Fanon’s political theory and the ethics of care encourages both postcolonial philosophers and care ethicists alike to examine critically the relation between violence and care, and the ways in which we cannot a priori draw lines between the two. (shrink)

So often deployed as a jingoistic, even menacing rallying cry, or limited by a focus on passing moments of liberation, the rhetoric of freedom both rouses and repels. Does it remain key to autonomy, justice, and well-being, or is freedom's long star turn coming to a close? Does a continued obsession with it enliven and emancipate, or reflect a deepening nihilism (or both)? On Freedom examines such questions by tracing the concept's complexities in four realms: art, sex, drugs, and climate. (...) Drawing on a vast range of material, Maggie Nelson explores how we might think, experience, or talk about freedom in ways responsive to the conditions of our day. Her abiding interest lies in ongoing "practices of freedom" by which we negotiate our interrelation with others, with all the care and constraint that entails, while accepting difference and conflict as integral to our communion. As with all of Nelson's work, how she thinks-and how that thinking expresses itself in style-is crucial to the book's achievement. Through her generosity, rigor, and willingness to critically engage reigning pieties, Nelson shows that new forms of thinking and talking are available to us, ones that welcome a chorus of voices, and recommit us to our entanglement, even at its most difficult. On Freedom is an ambitious, essential book that reinvigorates the art of criticism. (shrink)

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)

The Harm Threshold (HT) holds that the state may interfere in medical decisions parents make on their children’s behalf only when those decisions are likely to cause serious harm to the child. Such a high bar for intervention seems incompatible with both parental obligations and the state’s role in protecting children’s well-being. In this paper, I assess the theoretical underpinnings for the HT, focusing on John Stuart Mill’s Harm Principle as its most plausible conceptual foundation. I offer (i) a novel, (...) text-based argument showing that Mill’s Harm Principle does not give justificatory force to the HT; and (ii) a positive account of some considerations which, beyond significant harm, would comprise an intervention principle normatively grounded in Mill’s ethical theory. I find that substantive recommendations derived from Mill’s socio-political texts are less _laissez-faire_ than they have been interpreted by HT proponents. Justification for state intervention owes not to the severity of a harm, but to whether that harm arises from the failure to satisfy one’s duty. Thus, a pediatric intervention principle derived from Mill ought not to be oriented around the _degree_ of harm caused by a parent’s healthcare decision, but rather, the _kind_ of harm—specifically, whether the harm arises from violation of parental obligation. These findings challenge the interpretation of Mill adopted by HT proponents, eliminating a critical source of justification for a protected domain of parental liberty and reorienting the debate to focus on parental duties. (shrink)

This essay argues that feminist theory has focused, in the main and for too long, on theories of the body, in a legitimate reaction to a Western masculine coupling of beauty with a female or idealized maternal body and the sublime with male creativity. In consequence, there are few productive feminist accounts of female or maternal beauty. However, Virginia Woolf’s writings about beauty, mothers and the body, if read through the lens of post-Lacanian theory - particularly the work of Luce (...) Irigaray and Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger - do offer a moving and positive feminist account of women and beauty. The essay analyses Woolf’s ideas about beauty in general, before focusing on To the Lighthouse and The Voyage Out in relation to the writings of Woolf’s mother Julia Stephen. (shrink)

Memories and notes on the teaching of Cesare Vasoli and on the main lines of his studies of philosophy and history of culture.

La logica di Croce -- Croce oggi -- Lo storicismo assoluto e l'ideologia sociale -- Il negativo e l'ombra del male -- Il concetto della natura e la storia -- Universalismo e mondo tedesco nella Kulturphilosophie di Ernst Cassirer -- Storicismo e marxismo di Gramsci.

Basic research is often weird, and it's often boring. It's the years spent mapping the neurons of zebra fish, so that future scientists can have a more detailed biological model to work with. It's the chemical analysis that has to happen, so that two decades from now somebody else can discover a new cancer-fighting drug. Basic research is about curiosity, and knowledge for knowledge's sake. By it's very nature, basic research relies on public funding. But by it's very nature, it's (...) hard to explain how the public benefits from the basic research we fund. (shrink)