Gegen bestimmte positivistische und neopositivistische Einschränkungen, die immer noch in unserer Gesellschaft verankert sind, argumentiert Agazzi, dass die Erkenntnis des Unsichtbaren nicht nur in der Wissenschaft, sondern auch in der Metaphysik, in der Moral, in der Ästhetik und in anderen Bereichen, in gewissem Sinne auch in der Religion, möglich sei. Das Buch untersucht zudem viele Beispiele dieses Wissens und untersucht nicht nur die großen Klassiker der Philosophie, sondern auch verschiedene unvergängliche Meisterwerke der Kunst, Musik und Literatur. Es ist nicht nur (...) eine erkenntnistheoretische Abhandlung, sondern ein Buch der Philosophie im umfassendsten und traditionellsten Sinne, denn es behandelt Wissen nicht nur um seiner selbst willen, sondern auch als Leitfaden für Kultur, Moral, Glück und den Sinn des Lebens. Damit liefert es auch einige wichtige Anregungen, wie wir unserer krisenhaften Zeit und einer ungewissen Zukunft begegnen können. Trotz Agazzis sprichwörtlicher Strenge und Klarheit ist sein Projekt so bedeutsam und anspruchsvoll, dass ich hier bestimmte Punkte diskutiere, welche eine weitere Erläuterung und Argumentation verdienen. (shrink)

This paper seeks to establish whether the categories of MacIntyrean virtue ethics as applied to business organizations are meaningful in a non-western business context. It does so by building on research reported in Moore : 363–387, 2012) in which the application of virtue ethics to business organizations was investigated empirically in the UK, based on a conceptual framework drawn from MacIntyre’s work. Comparing these results with an equivalent study in Sri Lanka, the paper finds that the categories are meaningful but (...) that there are both similarities to and considerable differences in the content of these categories from the UK study. The paper draws on aspects of institutional theory to explore and explain these findings. Overall, there is supportive evidence that the categories of MacIntyrean virtue ethics are generalizable, and so can be used to characterize problems of organizational virtue and vice around the world, while providing evidence that there may be polities which are more conducive to the ‘practice-like conduct of production’ : 77–91, 2008). (shrink)

This essay addresses the relationships between prescription and description in legal rules. The analysis will focus on the culture-laden connotations of factual categories implied in all legal sentences and/or provisions. This investigation is spurred by the need to assess the impact of cultural difference in people’s understanding of legal imperatives and, symmetrically, how that impact is to be considered in the application of law. Differences in ways of categorizing the world could position the cultural pre-understanding required by law, and the (...) pluralism recognized and protected by constitutional principles and human/fundamental rights discourse, at a crossroads. Hence, even when we find an illegitimacy or an ignorance about what legal rules do not explicitly state but instead implicitly presuppose, this does not exclude that behind that ignorance there may be something worthy of legal protection. A question emerges: is it legitimate and reasonable to consider the ignorantia facti resulting from differing ways of categorizing the factual world as automatically and uncritically subject to the principle ignoratia legis non excusat? The essay continues with an assessment of the possible consequences of ignorantia facti in the administration of justice in multicultural societies and migration contexts. For this purpose, the opportunity for an intercultural use of law—including within national law—will be considered as a means of avoiding the discriminatory application of ignorantia facti. This topic will be addressed by leveraging both semiotic and cultural-anthropological analytical tools, including the well-known greimasien “contrat de véridiction”. (shrink)

Deployment Realism resists Laudan’s and Lyons’ objections to the “No Miracle Argument” by arguing that a hypothesis is most probably true when it is deployed essentially in a novel prediction. However, Lyons criticized Psillos’ criterion of essentiality, maintaining that Deployment Realism should be committed to all the actually deployed assumptions. But since many actually deployed assumptions proved false, he concludes that the No Miracle Argument and Deployment Realism fail. I reply that the essentiality condition is required by Occam’s razor. In (...) fact, there is a simpler formulation of essentiality which escapes Lyons’ criticisms and rescues the No Miracle Argument and Deployment Realism from their purported historical counterexamples: a hypothesis is essential when it has no proper parts (in Yablo’s sense) sufficient to derive the same prediction. Although essentiality so conceived cannot be detected prospectively, this is just natural, and it is not a problem but an advantage for Deployment Realism. (shrink)

We propose a method of learning indicative conditional information. An agent learns conditional information by Jeffrey imaging on the minimally informative proposition expressed by a Stalnaker conditional. We show that the predictions of the proposed method align with the intuitions in Douven, 239–263 2012)’s benchmark examples. Jeffrey imaging on Stalnaker conditionals can also capture the learning of uncertain conditional information, which we illustrate by generating predictions for the Judy Benjamin Problem.

This essay, between serious and facetious, addresses an apparently secondary implication of the planetary tragedy produced by Covid-19. It coincides with the ‘problem of the veil,’ a bone of contention in Islam/West relationships. More specifically, it will address the question of why the pandemic has changed the proxemics of public spaces and the grammar of ‘living together.’ For some time—and it is not possible to foresee how much—in many countries people cannot go out, or enter any public places, without wearing (...) a sanitary mask. In short, almost all of us, by obligation or by urgent advice from the public authorities of the various countries, will not live the public sphere with our faces uncovered. The alteration of the social context affecting many Western countries will inevitably involve also the ‘local’ perception of the Islamic veil and—as a matter of equality—the consistency of the prohibition of wearing it. What will thus become of the ban on wearing it in public places established by some countries such as France and asseverated by the ECHR? If everyone can and will have to go around with their faces covered, why should only Islamic women be discriminated against? Will not the change in boundary conditions produced by Covid-19 also induce Western people to re-categorize the meaning of the veil? And will this re-categorization not directly affect the ‘fact’ of wearing the veil, that is, its empirical perception? And still, will this psycho-semantic change not show how empirical perceptions are cultural constructs rather than ‘objective facts,’ as such allegedly independent from the observer’s point of view? Consequentially, will the plurality of perceptions and cultural meanings related to the gesture of covering one’s own face not gain renewed relevance in determining the legitimacy of wearing the veil? The socio-semantic earthquake produced by Covid-19 compels us to rethink this and other issues orbiting around the translation of ‘facts’ into legal language; furthermore, it highlights the instrumentality of many ideological/partisan and ethnocentric assumptions passed off as objectivity regarding those alleged ‘facts.’ The essay will attempt to provide an answer to the above questions by proposing a semiotic-legal approach to intercultural conflicts and, indirectly, the pluralism in law. (shrink)

The Bible recounts that in Eden, Adam gives names to all the animals. But those names are not only representations of the animals’ nature, rather they shape and constitute it. The naming by Adam contains in itself the divide between the human and non-human. Then, there is the Fall: Adam falls and forgets Being. Though he may still remember the names he gave to the animals in Eden, he is no longer sure about their meaning. Adam will have to try (...) to remember his own intentions. Through this effort he can also become aware of how he thinks, who he is, and what was the natural order he knew before the Fall. Medieval bestiaries tell us this story. Bestiaries are works of word play populated by animal figures. They depend on back-and-forth anthropomorphization, or circular metaphor. Animal figures are portrayed as both a mirror of human nature and a window on it. Bestiaries served as means for the moral education of human beings and, at the same time, a way to criticize the current state of humanity, including political and ethical habits. Within the moral irony of medieval bestiaries we can find the origin of the invented nature that modernity will try, subsequently, to insert into natural rights discourse through the teleological oxymoron of their naturalized and naturalizing counter-factuality. I will propose a historical-semiotic journey through the ironic representations of the human-beasts from the ancient world to contemporaneity. The proposal resulting from this cultural excursion is that the words included in the many national and international Rights declarations operate much like the names Adam gave to the animals and still more as they were re-read in medieval bestiaries, both textual and musical. So, can the words of Rights still serve as musical scores, open to an infinite play of re-signification? If we were able to overcome the modern culture/nature and human being/animal dualisms, we could cast, today as in the past, a zoological gaze on human rights by means of contemporary bestiaries and, in this way, perhaps find the gist of rights’ names and our ever regained and ever lost again humanity. (shrink)

Although gender differences in attitudes toward animal research have been reported in the literature for some time, exploration into the nature of these differences has received less attention. This article examines gender differences in responses to a survey of attitudes toward the use of animals in research. The survey was completed by college students and consisted of items intended to tap different issues related to the animal research debate. Results indicated that women were more likely than men to support tenets (...) of the animal protection movement. Likewise, women were more likely than men to favor increased restrictions on animal use and were more concerned than men about the suffering of research animals. Analysis of item contents suggested that women endorsed items reflecting a general caring for animals, were more willing than men to make personal sacrifices such as giving up meat and medical benefits in an effort to protect animals, and were more likely than men to question the use of animals in research on scientific grounds. Men, on the other hand, tended to emphasize the potential benefits arising from the use of animals in research. (shrink)

Forsyth’s (1980) Ethics Position Questionnaire and Hunt et al.’s (1989) Corporate Ethical Value Questionnaire are used to examine the ethical ideologies of senior managers from organizations listed in the Australian Stock Exchange. The results indicate how corporate ethical values, religion, gender, and age are related to the idealism and relativism of senior Australian managers. After discussing the results, limitations of the study are offered. Finally, managerial implications are provided and recommendations for future research are given.

Debriefing is a standard ethical requirement for human research involving the use of deception. Little systematic attention, however, has been devoted to explaining the ethical significance of debriefing and the specific ethical functions that it serves. In this article, we develop an account of debriefing as a tool of moral accountability for the prima facie wrong of deception. Specifically, we contend that debriefing should include a responsibility to promote transparency by explaining the deception and its rationale, to provide an apology (...) to subjects for infringing the principle of respect for persons, and to offer subjects an opportunity to withdraw their data. We also present recommendations concerning the discussion of deception in scientific articles reporting the results of research using deception. (shrink)

Modern science’s ability to produce, store, and analyze big datasets is changing the way that scientific research is practiced. Philosophers have only begun to comprehend the changed nature of scientific reasoning in this age of “big data.” We analyze data-focused practices in biology and climate modeling, identifying distinct species of data-centric science: phenomena-laden in biology and phenomena-agnostic in climate modeling, each better suited for its own domain of application, though each entail trade-offs. We argue that data-centric practices in science are (...) not monolithic because the opportunities and challenges presented by big data vary across scientific domains. (shrink)

Background The perception of organ donation and brain death among Syrian population has not been previously explored. The goal of this study is to evaluate the attitude and knowledge of organ donation among Syrians and the willingness of this population to donate their organs. Methods We conducted a survey-based cross-sectional study in four hospitals in Aleppo, Syria in November 2019. Patient demographic, awareness of brain death; and attitude toward organ donation were collected and analyzed. Results A total of 350 individuals (...) were invited to participate in the survey among whom 303 agreed to participate in the study. The majority of our participants heard about organ donation with television, social media, and the internet being the most common sources of information. When assessing knowledge about brain death, only 40% answered 3 or more questions correctly. Fifty-eight percent of respondents agreed with the idea of organ donation and 183 would like to donate their organs one day. The leading motivation to organ donation was the desire to help, while the most common reason to refuse donation was the refusal to disfigure a dead body by removing an organ. Religious reasons were cited as motivation for organ donation by 43% of participants, and a reason for refusing to donate organs by 24%. Most respondents were unaware of the laws and legislations related to organ donation in Syria. When asked if religion and law were encouraging organ donation, 76% of respondents would donate their organs. Although more positive attitude was found in those with better brain death knowledge, this did not translate into more willingness to donate organs in this group of participants. Conclusions The promotion of organ donations from deceased donors is a necessity given the rising shortage of organs. The information provided by this study could help policy makers build future strategies to promote deceased organ donation programs and overcome current obstacles preventing such initiatives from achieving their goals. (shrink)

The paper explains the application of a Social Innovation Based Transformative Learning (SIBTL) pedagogical approach in an undergraduate, final year business ethics course taught at an Australian university. Using social innovation as an enabling process to extend students’ cognitive, behavioural and managerial competencies in an integrated manner, the paper describes how the SIBTL approach helps ethics teachers to promote students’ ethical action.

This paper assesses the novelty of NSMs - or better, of any social and political movement in contemporary Western societies - in the light of their capacity to develop systems of relationships which cut across established social and political cleavages. It illustrates first the relational bases of Rokkan's concept of cleavage, and its contribution to the understanding of social movements; it then shows how Simmel's concept of the intersection of social circles and his distinction between concentric and crosscutting circles may (...) be fruitfully applied to the analysis of political cleavages and their changing forms. In the conclusions, the elements of an approach to the study of the newness of social movements, based on the integration of Rokkan's and Simmel's principles, are introduced. (shrink)

Dans l’histoire et le débat autour de l’anthropologie philosophique allemande du XXe siècle, l’œuvre et le destin du médecin juif-allemand Paul Alsberg (1883-1965) constituent un véritable cas qui permit d’interroger la genèse et la validité de l’anthropologie philosophique même. En suivant Joachim Fischer, on entend ici par « Philosophische Anthropologie » une orientation de la pensée du XXe siècle, dont le fil rouge offre une réponse originale à la « destruction de l’idéalisme pendant le XI...

The paper explains the application of a Social Innovation Based Transformative Learning pedagogical approach in an undergraduate, final year business ethics course taught at an Australian university. Using social innovation as an enabling process to extend students’ cognitive, behavioural and managerial competencies in an integrated manner, the paper describes how the SIBTL approach helps ethics teachers to promote students’ ethical action.

Decoding the human genome in the past decades has brought into focus a computationally intensive operation through DNA profiling. The typical search space for these kinds of problems is extremely large and requires specialized hardware and algorithms to perform the necessary sequence analysis. In this paper, we propose an innovative and scalable approach to exact multi-pattern matching of nucleotide sequences by harnessing the massively parallel computing power found in commodity graphical processing units. Our approach places careful consideration on preprocessing of (...) DNA datasets and runtime performance, while exploiting the full capabilities of the heterogeneous platform it runs on. Finally, we evaluate our models against real-world DNA sequences. (shrink)

The present paper provides a comparative analysis of imperial and canonical legislation concerning the abduction of lay or consecrated women in the 4th century, when both legislations delineated the distinctive features of the abovementioned crimen. The imperial law showed both an extreme severity towards abductors and a leniency towards lay and consecrated women, who were considered innocent; however, women were not allowed to live together with their abductors. The canonical legislation also severely punished abductors and considered lay women innocent; however, (...) contrary to the provisions in the civil laws, the ecclesiastical legislation condemned consecrated women who consented to abduction. The paper aims to reconstruct the basic outline of both legislative systems and to identify a set of key features that might describe female submission to both the will of male members of the family and to the provisions in the canonical laws: indeed, the consent to abduction often represented an extreme attempt on the part of women to determine their own lives. (shrink)

1 Orestano e l’anagrafe di un significato Chi si avvicina alla crescente letteratura sull’ontologia sociale provenendo da studi di filosofia del diritto ha spesso la sensazione di avere a che fare con qualcosa di familiare. Ciò dipende in parte dal fatto che la riflessione sul diritto ha da sempre una dimensione ontologica. Andando molto indietro nel tempo si trovano diverse testimonianze della consapevolezza che postulare l’esistenza di qualcosa non sia un’operazione intellettuale innocente....

In this essay both the facts/values and facticity/normativity divides are considered from the perspective of global semiotics and with specific regard to the relationships between legal meaning and spatial scope of law’s experience. Through an examination of the inner and genetic projective significance of categorization, I will analyze the semantic dynamics of the descriptive parts comprising legal sentences in order to show the intermingling of factual and axiological/teleological categorizations in the unfolding of legal experience. Subsequently, I will emphasize the translational (...) and enactive cognitive disposition underlying the construction of the second premise of the so-called judiciary syllogism and thereby the untenability of the idea that ‘law makes its facts.’ Hence, I will try to bring to the fore the cultural pre-assumptions encapsulated in the positivistic and therefore also formalistic or analytical approaches to legal experience and the loss of their inner consistency when legal experience confronts the phases and major changes of global semiotics. Finally, I will strive to relativize the opposition between the positivist and non-positivistic theories of law in view of an understanding of legal experience focused not only, or at least not primarily, on what ‘law is’ but also on ‘how’ it unwinds through, and _in spite of_, environmental and semantic transformations. (shrink)

The framework for this contribution is the transformation of the textual community, namely, modern society, into a digital community, in other words, a network society. This paper analyzes two theses. The first holds that the text, due to its genetic and historic nature, is always IMMUTABLE, STABLE, and never mobile. For this reason, the text represents the foundational element of a specific society, modern society. The second thesis is based on the assertion that within information and hypertext technologies two diverse (...) views confront and contrast each other. I locate these tendencies in the following key words: “dream” (Nelson) and “intellect” (Engelbart). Hypertext technology and culture represent the most transformative location and agency, they are the actors of the paradigm shift in which we are implicated. The hypertext revolution is based on the criticism of and attack against the material supports of writing and reading, as well as typographic technologies. Hypertext fights and wins this battle. However, hypertext technology is not able to reach the deep structure of alphabetic culture that is made not only of material support but also mental and bodily experience, consolidated and evolving, and of social relationships that are implied in the materiality of the support. La cornice di riferimento di questo contributo è la trasformazione della società testuale, cioè della società moderna, in società digitale, ovvero nella società dei network. Nell’intervento vengono analizzate due tesi: la prima afferma che il testo, per sua natura genetica e storica, è sempre IMMUTABILE, STABILE e non è mai mobile e per questo è fondativo di una società specifica, quella che noi chiamiamo la società moderna. La seconda tesi si basa sull’assunto che all’interno della cultura informatica e tecnologica che genera gli ipertesti si confrontano e si scontrano due idee diverse. Identifico queste due tendenze nelle parole chiave: dream (Nelson) e intellect (Engelbart). La tecnologia e la cultura ipertestuale sono il luogo e l’agente più fortemente trasformativi, gli attori del cambio di paradigma che ci coinvolge. La rivoluzione ipertestuale ha le sue basi nell’attacco e nella critica dei supporti materiali della scrittura e della lettura e sulle tecnologie tipografiche. L’ipertesto combatte e vince questa battaglia. La tecnologia ipertestuale non riesce però a raggiungere la struttura profonda della cultura alfabetica che è composta non solo da supporti ma da esperienze sia della mente sia del corpo, da relazioni sociali consolidate e mutanti che sono sottese e operanti con la materialità del supporto. (shrink)

1. Chiarificazione e valutazione. H.L.A. Hart è stato uno dei più influenti filosofi del diritto del ventesimo secolo. In particolare nei paesi di lingua inglese, i suoi scritti sono stati a lungo il punto di riferimento per gli studiosi della disciplina. Tale opinione è largamente diffusa, anche tra coloro – e non sono pochi – che ne hanno criticato, talvolta in modo severo, i lavori. Di recente questo primato è stato messo in discussione per via della crescente attenzione suscitata dal (...) pens... (shrink)

Hart’s criticism of Devlin’s stance on the legal enforcement of morality has been highly influential in shaping a new liberal sensibility and in paving the way to many important legal reforms in the UK. After 50 years it is perhaps time to go back to Law, Liberty and Morality to see it in the perspective of the general evolution of Hart’s thought since the early 50s. This is a period of extraordinary creativity for the Oxford philosopher, in which he writes (...) many important contributions to legal, moral and political philosophy. Prominent among these is ‘Are There Any Natural Rights?’, an article that sets the agenda for Hart’s subsequent work on liberty, fairness and rights, and provides the philosophical background for the liberal understanding of the relations between law and morality defended in Law, Liberty and Morality. (shrink)

The article has three parts. The first is devoted to the analysis of some features of Italian philosophy that might be used to explain why analytic philosophy of politics, and analytic philosophy in general, has few practitioners. The second part gives an explanation of the relatively small audience Rawls has among liberals in Italy. Some features of the Italian liberal tradition might be helpful in explaining this fact; hence a short presentation of these features (as exemplified by Croce) is outlined. (...) The third part deals with the reception of Rawls's ideas among the small group of analytic political philosophers in Italy. (shrink)

Zhu Guangqian's Life and Philosophy: An Introduction is Mario Sabattini's last uncompleted work dedicated to the work of Zhu Guangqian, one of the most representative figures of contemporary Chinese aesthetics. Since the '30s, Zhu Guangqian had an active role in China both on the literary and philosophical scenes, and, through his writings, he exerted an important influence in the moulding of numerous generations of intellectuals. Some of his works have been widely read, and they still provoke considerable interest in (...) China, on the mainland as well as in Taiwan and Hong Kong. (shrink)