Background The legitimacy of conscientious objection to abortion continues to fuel heated debate in Italy. In two recent decisions, the European Committee for Social Rights underlined that conscientious objection places safe, legal, and accessible care and services out of reach for most Italian women and that the measures that Italy has adopted to guarantee free access to abortion services are inadequate. Nevertheless, the Ministry of Health states that current Italian legislation, if appropriately applied, accommodates both the right to conscientious objection (...) and the right to voluntary abortion. Main body One empirical argument used to demonstrate that conscientious objection does not create barriers to abortion is the “no correlation” argument, which the Italian Committee for Bioethics employed to demonstrate that no association exists between conscientious objection and waiting times for voluntary abortion in Italy and to support the weak form of conventional comprise adopted by the Italian legislation to balance the conflict between women’ autonomy and healthcare professionals’ moral integrity. Conversely, we showed how the “no correlation” argument fails to demonstrate the absence of a relationship between the number of conscientious objectors and waiting times for voluntary abortion, and that the limitations of the “no correlation” argument itself demonstrate how it is still difficult to describe the real effect of conscientious objection on the access to abortion services and to evaluate the suitability of conventional compromise to effectively balance conflicting moral principles. Conclusion Further studies are needed to better describe the relationship between conscientious objection and waiting times for voluntary abortion. If new evidence would show that the increasing proportion of objectors does undermine the efficacy of the Italian law and the right of a woman to freely obtain a voluntary abortion, new ways will need to be found to address the conflict between moral principles and restrict the protection accorded to the principle of moral integrity. This would inevitably imply the need to constrain and to redefine the terms and conditions for claiming conscientious objection. (shrink)

Research on organizational epistemic vice alleges that some organizations are epistemically malevolent, i.e. they habitually harm others by deceiving them. Yet, there is a lack of empirical research on epistemic malevolence. We connect the discussion of epistemic malevolence to the empirical literature on organizational deception. The existing empirical literature does not pay sufficient attention to the impact of an organization’s ability to control compromising information on its deception strategy. We address this gap by studying eighty high-penalty corporate misconduct cases between (...) 2000 and 2020 in the United States. We find that organizations use two different strategies to deceive: Organizations ‘sow doubt’ when they contest information about them or their impacts that others have access to. By contrast, organizations ‘exploit trust’ when they deceive others by obfuscating, concealing, or falsifying information that they themselves control. While previous research has focused on cases of ‘sowing doubt’, we find that organizations ‘exploit trust’ in the majority of cases that we studied. This has important policy implications because the strategy of ‘exploiting trust’ calls for a different response from regulators and organizations than the strategy of ‘sowing doubt’. (shrink)

Keine ausführliche Beschreibung für "Die Leidenschaft der Erkenntnis" verfügbar.

This essay argues for the applicability and importance of the notion of the unconscious in Fichte’s Jena period, with a focus on the,second’ Wissenschaftslehre. The essay begins by arguing for the existence of a fundamental tension in Fichte’s philosophy: namely, between a,transcendence’ principle – that the conditions for consciousness cannot themselves be present within experience, since they ground that experience – and an,immanence’ principle that there is no genuine reality outside of consciousness. It is shown that this tension is particularly (...) evident if one observes some of the conflicting ways in which Fichte employs the notions of,intellektuelle Anschauung’ and,unmittelbares Bewusstsein.’ Fichte seems to violate the immanence principle especially insofar as he characterizes the conditions of the possibility of consciousness as a series of,actions,’ which, qua actions, must be,real’ in some sense: insofar as they are both real and not present to consciousness, it is argued, they must be unconscious. Although Fichte does not wholly embrace the notion of unconscious mental activity due to his adherence to the immanence principle, his conception of the,two series’ of the Wissenschaftslehre as well as some of his uses of the notion of,unmittelbares Bewusstsein’ in particular allow the recognition that Fichte has a rich but inchoate conception of the unconscious. (shrink)

O mais divulgado modelo iconográfico mariano da época contemporânea, presente em quase todos os templos católicos do mundo, nasceu em Portugal na sequência das Aparições de Fátima de 1917. Não teria o conhecido desenvolvimento sem que no processo cultual interviesse a disciplina escultórica que logo em 1920 faria cristalizar, através do escopro de um santeiro, a imagem de Nossa Senhora do Rosário de Fátima. O estudo do tipo, do arquétipo e dos subtipos da Virgem de Fátima, primeiramente produzidos em oficinais (...) trabalhos de santeiros e, em fase posterior, interpretados por artistas, permite entender os contornos do nascimento de uma realidade imagética, isto é, de uma iconografia ex nihilo e o seu, necessariamente, tardio desenvolvimento estético. (shrink)

Il capitolo esplora le possibilità teoretiche della nozione di cooperazione non-ideale, situandola nel contesto delle attuali ricerche in ontologia sociale e in relazione alle indagini sull’intenzionalità collettiva e individuale. Attraverso un’analisi di taglio interdisciplinare, viene problematizzata la dicotomia tra cooperazione e competizione, evidenziando come esse siano di frequente intrecciate nella vita sociale e istituzionale. Partendo dai contributi teorici di J.R. Searle e R. Tuomela, si analizzano i limiti delle letture idealizzate della cooperazione che trascurano aspetti conflittuali e contestuali delle interazioni (...) sociali. In particolare, la distinzione tra diverse modalità di cooperazione (I-mode, pro-group I-mode, e we-mode) e la nozione di we-reasoning sono utilizzate per comprendere le trasformazioni dell’agency individuale e collettiva. Il testo integra prospettive filosofiche con casi empirici, come il cooperative learning e i giochi da tavolo, per illustrare l’interdipendenza tra competizione e cooperazione. A partire da questo sfondo, la teoria del striving play di C. Thi Nguyen e la nozione di agency transformation di Petersson vengono riprese come chiavi interpretative per comprendere il passaggio tra frame individualistici e collettivi. Tali evoluzioni sono inoltre spesso mediate da artefatti sociali e culturali che strutturano l’interazione tra soggetti, attraverso specifiche architetture relazionali. Viene quindi proposta una visione non-idealizzata della cooperazione che include la complessità delle interazioni sociali, considerando la tensione tra consenso e conflitto, offrendo strumenti concettuali per comprendere come artefatti e strutture sociali influenzino le possibilità di azione collettiva. (shrink)

Why, for such a long time, has there been no Kantian point of view among the most influential theories about thought experiments? The primary historical reason – the main trends in the philosophy of science have always rejected the existence of a priori knowledge – fits a theoretical reason. Kant oscillated between two very different views about the a priori: on the one hand, he attributed to it a particular content, whereas on the other hand he insisted on its purely (...) formal character. The first interpretation of the a priori was one-sidedly developed by Ørsted and led to his untenable notion of thought experiment. The other interpretation, however, can be further developed into new Kantian theories of thought experiments in the natural sciences and in philosophy. (shrink)

The conventional interpretation that Pierre Duhem condemned outright any type of thought experiment in Ernst Mach’s sense should be, at least in large part, rejected. Although Duhem placed particular emphasis on the perils of thought experiments that Mach had overlooked or at least underestimated, he retained the core idea of Mach’s theory, according to which thought experiments cannot break free from the ultimate authority of real-world experiments. This similarity between Duhem’s and Mach’s views about thought experiments is not the only (...) one. Just as there was in Duhem’s criticism of “expériences fictives” a tendency leading him to give voice to one of Mach’s basic empiricist claims, so also there was in Mach’s interpretation of thought experiments a tendency in the direction of Duhem’s conventionalism. If Mach’s and Duhem’s conceptions of thought experiments are compared, there results an importantly similar, although not identical, tension that should properly be taken into account in the more general comparison between Mach and Duhem. (shrink)

We offer a novel picture of mathematical language from the perspective of speech act theory. There are distinct speech acts within mathematics, and, as we intend to show, distinct illocutionary force indicators as well. Even mathematics in its most formalized version cannot do without some such indicators. This goes against a certain orthodoxy both in contemporary philosophy of mathematics and in speech act theory. As we will comment, the recognition of distinct illocutionary acts within logic and mathematics and the incorporation (...) of illocutionary force indicators in the formal language for both goes back to Frege’s conception of these topics. We are, therefore, going back to a Fregean perspective. This paper is part of a larger project of applying contemporary speech act theory to the scientific language of mathematics in order to uncover the varieties and regular combinations of illocutionary acts present in it. For reasons of space, we here concentrate only on assertive and declarative acts within mathematics, leaving the investigation of other kinds of acts for a future occasion. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe eyes reveal important social messages, such as emotions and whether a person is aroused and interested or bored and fatigued. A growing body of research has also shown that individuals with large pupils are generally evaluated positively by observers, while those with small pupils are perceived negatively. Here, we examined whether observed pupil size influences approach-avoidance tendencies. Participants performed an Approach-Avoidance Task using faces with large and small pupil sizes. Results showed that pupil size influences the accuracy of arm (...) movements. Specifically, individuals were less prone to approach a face with small pupils than a face with large pupils. Conversely, participants were less prone to avoid a face with large pupils than a face with small pupils. Collectively, these findings suggest that perceivers attend to a facial cue – pupil size – when interacting with others. (shrink)

Thought experiments de facto play many different roles in biology: economical, ethical, technical and so forth. This paper, however, is interested in whether there are any distinctive features of biological TEs as such. The question may be settled in the affirmative because TEs in biology have a function that is intimately connected with the epistemological and methodological status of biology. Peculiar to TEs in biology is the fact that the reflexive, typically human concept of finality may be profitably employed to (...) discover mechanical-experimental causal relations in all living beings—with the obvious caveat that we do not hypostatise and interpret this concept as an ontological quality, since this would land one in an implicitly animistic, pre-Galilean view of nature. From a methodical point of view, the concept of finality is an essential assumption as well as a powerful heuristic tool in the practice of biology, that is, in the investigation of living beings in an intersubjectively testable and reproducible way. (shrink)

While philosophers tend to consider a single type of causal history, biologists distinguish between two kinds of causal history: evolutionary history and developmental history. This essay studies the peculiarity of development as a criterion for the individuation of biological traits and its relation to form, function, and evolution. By focusing on examples involving serial homologies and genetic reprogramming, we argue that morphology (form) and function, even when supplemented with evolutionary history, are sometimes insufficient to individuate traits. Developmental mechanisms bring in (...) a novel aspect to the business of classification—identity of process-type—according to which entities are type-identical across individuals and natural kinds in virtue of the fact that they form and develop through similar processes. These considerations bear important metaphysical implications and have potential applications in several areas of philosophy. (shrink)

The COVID-19 outbreak has seen people in many countries asked to radically modify their way of life in compliance with sweeping safety measures. During the current crisis, technology is turning out to be key, in that it allows practitioners to deliver psychological services to people who would otherwise be unreachable. However, professionals cannot solely rely on their traditional modes of practice, in that different methods are required to bring to light the needs of those affected by the emergency. People are (...) being overwhelmed by a cascade of unusual and unexpected events that are putting a strain on their everyday routines and usual meaning-making systems; ongoing challenges to their employment and financial status will likely divert personal resources away from psychological well-being. We therefore argue that psychologists should also consider the needs of the general population. Among those who may require help – aside from the main targets of psychological intervention, such as healthcare personnel and COVID-19 patients and their relatives – specific attention should be paid to those who are not at the center of the crisis. We suggest that this large segment of potential users may benefit from a non-medical approach focused on the promotion of meaning-making processes. Indeed, the disruptive nature of the current situation hinders sense-making and threatens to undermine psychological balance and well-being, at an individual as well as at a societal level. The present article proposes a methodological perspective based on the reconstruction of meaning-making processes (sense of coherence, predictability, metaphors, narratives). Specifically, psychological interventions should promote personal and collective resources with a view to: “normalizing” current distressful experiences (i.e., acknowledging that such reactions are normal in light of the present situation); widening the observational field, taking relational contexts into account, and promoting an understanding of distressful experiences as coping strategies; fostering meaning-making/reconstruction processes through the use of appropriate metaphors and narratives; promoting a sense of coherence. We present two clinical vignettes to illustrate how these principles might be applied in practice. In conclusion, the exceptional psychological challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic require practitioners to adopt a broad and flexible perspective on clinical intervention. (shrink)

Wittgenstein will seinen "Standpunkt weit draußen einnehmen" und philosophische Probleme mit ethnologischem Blick sehen. Ist seine scharfe Auseinandersetzung mit James Frazers Hauptwerk, The Golden Bough. A Study in Magic and Religion, eine Einübung in diese "ethnologische Betrachtungsweise"? Brusotti zeigt in seinem Werk,dass Wittgensteins Denken sprach- und kulturphilosophisch neue Horizonte eröffnet.

In an unpublished text from the early postwar period, Georges Canguilhem deals with Nietzsche’s maxim “Become who you are!” Is this “apparently contradictory formula of a philosopher full of contradictions” really only seemingly inconsistent? Canguilhem regards it as a norm whose supposed metaphysical or objective content dissolves upon further analysis. So he here discerns a new instance of the same potential confusion he had already addressed in his classical essay on The Normal and the Pathological (1943). According to him, the (...) formula “become who you are!” must not be misunderstood in a naturalistic sense, a tendency from which not even Nietzsche himself, Canguilhem thinks, was entirely free. Besides the French philosophy of his time, his philosophical inquiry into “Become who you are!” critically engages two classic German Nietzsche scholars, Ernst Bertram and Karl Jaspers, as well as the French interpreters of the latter’s philosophy of Existenz, Mikel Dufrenne and Paul Ricœur. Finally, the paper highlights Nietzsche’s specific importance for Canguilhem and the ambivalence in his privileged relationship to the German thinker. (shrink)

In this paper, we aim at identifying a concept of man that can represent a reference point for those who work or supervise social processes characterized by commercial or economic purposes. Economic, management, and organizational theories and ideas have a large impact on the way we think of ourselves, and we act accordingly. By making a radical departure from the ontological assumptions, this paper proposes a shifting of the current paradigm in terms of how we theorize about man. In order (...) to do this, we analyze the ontological level of the relationship between the idea of happiness and the concept of man from medieval scholastics, and the relationship between the idea of happiness and functionalism in social science. We first prove the formal equivalence between the structures of human choice as described in the qq. 6–21 Prima Secundae of the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas, and the model of problem-solving behavior as conceptualized in popular management models. Then we show that the Aquinas theory of action could provide a more adequate view of economy and business in the sociocultural and environmental context in which they operate. Finally, we present the implications of this study for management theory, practice, and education. (shrink)

The concept of an objective spatial direction in special relativity is investigated and theories assuming light-speed isotropy while accepting the existence of a privileged spatial direction are classified, including so-called very special relativity. A natural generalization of the proper time principle is introduced which makes it possible to devise non-optical experimental tests of spatial isotropy. Several common misunderstandings in the relativistic literature concerning the role of spatial isotropy are clarified.

This paper examines the tension between wave function realism and interpretations of gauge symmetries within quantum mechanics. We explore how traditional views of gauge symmetries as descriptive redundancies challenge the principles of wave function realism, which regards the wave function as a real entity. By noting that, through the case study of a quantum particle in an electromagnetic field, gauge transformations impact the wave function’s phase, we present a dilemma for wave function realism. We discuss potential resolutions, including redefining ontological (...) commitments to accommodate gauge-invariance. (shrink)

Emoticons and facial emojis are ubiquitous in contemporary digital communication, where it has been proposed that they make up for the lack of social information from real faces. In this paper, I construe them as cultural artifacts that exploit the neurocognitive mechanisms for face perception. Building on a step-by-step comparison of psychological evidence on the perception of faces vis-à-vis the perception of emoticons/emojis, I assess to what extent they do effectively vicariate real faces with respect to the following four domains: (...) (1) the expression of emotions, (2) the cultural norms for expressing emotions, (3) conveying non-affective social information, and (4) attention prioritization. (shrink)

Biologists employ a suggestive metaphor to describe the complexities of molecular interactions within cells and embryos: cytological components are said to be part of “ecosystems” that integrate them in a complex network of relations with many other entities. The aim of this essay is to scrutinize the molecular ecosystem, a metaphor that, despite its longstanding history, has seldom be articulated in detail. I begin by analyzing some relevant analogies between the cellular environment and the biosphere. Next, I discuss the applicability (...) of the molecular ecosystem concept in actual scientific practice. (shrink)

Communities most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, such as reduced access to material resources and increased exposure to adverse weather conditions, are intimately tied to a considerable amount of cultural and biological diversity on our planet. Much of that diversity is bound up in the social practices of Indigenous groups, which is why these practices have great long-term value. Yet, little attention has been given to them by philosophers. Also neglected have been the historical conditions and contemporary realities (...) that constrain these practices and devalue the knowledge of their practitioners. In this essay, we make the case for preserving a diverse range of social practices worldwide, and we argue that this is possible only by strengthening the communities of practitioners who enact them in the contexts in which they are adaptive. By concentrating on Indigenous communities, we show how focusing on practices can transform how Indigenous and other local communities are represented in global climate-change conversations and policy as a matter of justice. More specifically, we argue that practice-centered thinking and local practices provide critical insights for determining the extent to which climate policies protect and enable transformative change. (shrink)

Operationalism and theoretical entities. The thesis of the“theory ladenness” of observation leads to an antinomy. In order to solve this antinomy a technical operationalism is sketched, according to which theories should in principle not contain anything that cannot be reduced to technical procedures. This implies the rejection of Quine's underdeterminacy thesis and of many views about the theoretical-observational distinction, e.g. neopositivistic views, van Fraassen's view, Sneed-Stegmüller's view. Then I argue for the following theses: 1. All scientific concepts are theory laden (...) in the sense that they allow us to anticipate possible experiences, but they have to be in principle fully observable, i.e. integrally convertible into operational-technical applications. 2. The observation/theory distinction can be maintained as a historical one: what is observable depends on the instruments that are available at any stage of the development of science. 3.In principle theoretical entities are empirically real in Hacking's sense. However, some aspects of Hacking's realism are to be criticized. Theoretical entities are to be resolved into the totality of the interrelated properties accessible to us by means of theoretical points of view embodied in scientific instruments. (shrink)

Al hilo de la idea apuntada por el último Foucault de una historia de la verdad,se tratará de rastrear y analizar en el pensamiento del francés el carácter decisivo que tiene el momento platónico en relación con dicha historia. Así, se habrá de mostrar cómo la genealogía del sujeto moderno de verdad ha de remontarse hasta Platón para encontrar allí ciertos elementos decisivos para la compresión de nuestra historia, en la que ciertas relaciones entre el poder, la verdad y el (...) sujeto han venido a resultar determinantes, dando lugar al doble juego de objetivación y subjetivación –de dominación y libertad– que caracteriza nuestro mundo.Following on the concept of “a history of the truth” by de late Foucault, we will look into the Frenchman´s mind and attempt to pursue and analyse the sigificance of the platonic movement in relation to such history. This way, it will be necessary to show how the genealogy of the modernsubject of the truth has to return back to Plato to find there certain decisive elements for the comprehension of our history, in which certain relationships amongst the “power, the truth, and the subject matter have shown themselves as determinants agents, givind room to a double game of the objectivity and subjectitivity, of domination and freedom that marks our World. (shrink)

In this paper—Part 2 of 3—we discuss one of the two main types of soft-line responses to manipulation cases, which we refer to as manipulator-focused views. Manipulator-focused views hold, roughly, that the reason that Victim lacks responsibility (or lacks full responsibility) is because of the way the action is related to the Manipulator. First, we introduce these views generally, and then we survey some detailed versions of such views. We then introduce cases of natural forces, often taken to be a (...) problem for such approaches in general, followed by a discussion of various sorts of cases—accidental results, lucky manipulators, and parallel cases—that present challenges for some of the detailed versions of such views. We conclude with some thoughts about the prospects for manipulator-focused views going forward. (shrink)

The appearance of the body signals socially relevant states and traits, but the how these cues are perceived is not well understood. Here we examined judgments of emotion and sex from the body’s ap...

Cette étude montre comment s’élabore une doctrine de l’objet, et de l’objectité, de la scolastique du XIIIe siècle jusqu’au XVIIe, par une succession de créations conceptuelles et de ruptures interprétatives. Elle débouche sur l’opposition entre concept formel et concept objectif au XVIIe siècle. De cette histoire retrouvée découle une nouvelle évaluation de l’argument cartésien sur l’existence de Dieu.This study shows how a theory of object, and of « objectity » is elaborated, from XIIIth century’s scholasticism to the XVIIth century, through (...) a series of conceptual creations and interpretative breaks. It runs into the opposition between formal and objective concept in the XVIIth century. From this rediscovered story follows a new assessment on the Cartesian argument for God’s existence. (shrink)