Increased globalisation has also seen increased scrutiny of corporate behaviour by the communities. Clearly managers are under increased pressure from stakeholders not only to outperform their competitors, but also are expected to do so in an ethical manner. In order to act ethically an individual is expected to have a well-developed moral imagination and moral reasoning. Literature on ethical reasoning research indicates a positive relationship between higher levels of moral reasoning and ethical behaviour. This paper presents the findings of a (...) study of the moral reasoning/moral development of managers working in large manufacturing enterprises situated in the state of Punjab in India. Kohlberg's theory of Cognitive Moral Development forms the basis of the study. Moral Judgement Interview developed by Weber, on the basis of Kohlberg's theory was used for the study. Moral Reasoning Scores were calculated using Abbreviated Scoring Guide. More than half of the managers scored at post-conventional level of reasoning while assessing the moral dilemmas. The reasoning scores varied for the three dilemmas. (shrink)

Attraverso i dubbi che Tschirnhaus rivolge a Spinoza circa l’impercettibilità degli attributi e la distinzione dell'essenza dell'intelletto divino con l'essenza dell'intelletto umano, il presente saggio si propone di studiare il rapporto fra totalità e parte e il senso dell’immanenza nell’ontologia spinoziana, con particolare attenzione alla diade implicazione-esplicazione che ne permette il funzionamento. La comunanza formale propria dell’immanenza, la quale fonda l’implicazione e l’esplicazione, risulta il concetto chiave per comprendere a un tempo lo statuto sinfonico dell’universo modale, in cui ogni cosa (...) singolare richiama l'altra e il tutto, e il delicato empirismo che costituisce il terzo genere di conoscenza. (shrink)

Now that well-paying jobs in film criticism have largely evaporated, while blogs, message boards, and social media have given new meaning to the saying that "everyone's a critic," urgent questions have emerged about the critic's status and purpose. In Film Criticism in the Digital Age, ten scholars from across the globe, as well as critics and bloggers, come together to consider whether we are witnessing the extinction of serious film criticism or seeing the seeds of its rebirth in a new (...) form. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this essay I draw attention to conceptual similarities in Walter Benjamin’s and Theodor W. Adorno’s reflection about language, with special attention to Benjamin’s 1916 essay about language as such, including its theological impulses. In Adorno’s case, I concentrate on language theory as it comes forth in relation to his philosophy of music and the supposed language-character of music. I argue that this particular connection between Benjamin and Adorno is largely unexplored in the literature, and I show that their conceptual (...) affinities have far-reaching consequences for a proper understanding of Adorno’s philosophy as a whole. Music is of fundamental importance for Adorno’s critical theory, and this fact points to an intricate entwinement between materialism and theology, stemming from Benjamin’s theory of language. Thinking of music as secularized prayer means to emphasize that music relates to reality in a way that resembles the logic of Benjamin’s understanding of a pre-lapsarian language of... (shrink)

This paper investigates if and to what point it is possible to trade on news sentiment and if deep learning, given the current hype on the topic, would be a good tool to do so. DL is built explicitly for dealing with significant amounts of data and performing complex tasks where automatic learning is a necessity. Thanks to its promise to detect complex patterns in a dataset, it may be appealing to those investors that are looking to improve their trading (...) process. Moreover, DL and specifically LSTM seem a good pick from a linguistic perspective too, given its ability to “remember” previous words in a sentence. After having explained how DL models are built, we will use this tool for forecasting the market sentiment using news headlines. The prediction is based on the Dow Jones industrial average by analyzing 25 daily news headlines available between 2008 and 2016, which will then be extended up to 2020. The result will be the indicator used for developing an algorithmic trading strategy. The analysis will be performed on two specific cases that will be pursued over five time-steps and the testing will be developed in real-world scenarios. (shrink)

In this paper I analyze a case of extreme response to need of security in the landscape of advanced democracies: the role of Golden Dawn in the management and reproduction of the profound socio-economic crisis in Greece. I argue that the keys behind the success of such a party are to be found in two distinct but self-reinforcing elements: its organizational strength and its anti-system ideology. The most significant organizational structures and activities which transformed Golden Dawn into a quasi-mafia style (...) “industry of private protection” are thus investigated, along with the most important contents of its radical and anti-systemic message. (shrink)

This Special Issue titled "Severe Uncertainty in Science, Medicine and Technology" aims to shed new light on the understanding of severe uncertainty and its multifaceted implications. The main idea of the papers of this collection is that, despite possible sophisticated statistical judgments towards future risks in science, medicine, and technology, severe forms of uncertainty still exist.While ignorance is usually assumed to be a total absence of knowledge, uncertainty often refers to the incompleteness of knowledge or information. In its extreme form, (...) this is called "severe uncertainty" but is also known as "fundamental," "radical," "deep," "great," or "genuine" uncertainty. A common characteristic of these... (shrink)

We refine the intuitively appealing idea that you are blameworthy for something if it happened because you did not care enough. More formally: you are blameworthy for X (where X may be an action, omission, or outcome) just in case there is the right causal-explanatory relation between your poor quality of will and X. First, we argue that blameworthiness for actions, omissions, and outcomes is concerned with negative differences: you are blameworthy for the fact that X occurred instead of X*, (...) where X is worse than X*. Second, we argue that the way in which your quality of will is poor has to fit what you are blameworthy for. With these refinements, the account already gives intuitively correct verdicts in cases of forgetting, making a negative difference to a nevertheless good result, and doing an action with runaway consequences. We then discuss what the right causal-explanatory relation is and suggest that it is simply causation, understood in the right way. Here, we draw on the account of causation developed in Touborg, The Dual Nature of Causation. According to this account, there are two necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for causation. Roughly, C causes E rather than E* iff (a) C is process-connected to E, and (b) C makes E more secure and E* less secure. With this account of causation, our account of blameworthiness now also gives correct verdicts in omission, pre-emption, and switching cases, Frankfurt-style cases, and collective harm cases. (shrink)

In this article we use proportional hazards models to examine how low-level processes affect the probability of making a saccade over time, through the period of fixation, during reading. We apply the Cox proportional hazards model to investigate how launch distance (relative to word beginning), fixation location (relative to word center), and word frequency affect the hazard of a saccadic response. This model requires that covariates have a constant impact on the hazard over time, the assumption of proportional hazards. We (...) show that this assumption is not supported. The impact of the covariates changes with the time passed since fixation onset. To account for the non-proportional hazards we fit step functions of time, resulting in a model with time-varying effects on the hazard. We evaluate the ability to predict the timing of saccades on held-out fixation data. The model with time-varying effects performs better in predicting the timing of saccades for fixations as short as 100 ms and as long as 500 ms, when compared both to a baseline model without covariates and a model which assumes constant covariate effects. This result suggests that the time-varying effects model better recovers the time course of low-level processes that influence the decision to move the eyes. (shrink)

Nowadays, almost everyone seems to agree that science is facing an epistemological crisis – namely the replicability crisis – and that we need to take action. But as to precisely what to do or how...

Do I cause global warming, climate change and their related harms when I go for a leisure drive with my gas-guzzling car? The current verdict seems to be that I do not; the emissions produced by my drive are much too insignificant to make a difference for the occurrence of global warming and its related harms. I argue that our verdict on this issue depends on what we mean by ‘causation’. If we for instance assume a simple counterfactual analysis of (...) causation according to which ‘C causes E’ means ‘if C had not occurred, E would not have occurred’, we must conclude that a single drive does not cause global warming. However, this analysis of causation is well-known for giving counterintuitive results in some important cases. If we instead adopt Lewis’s analysis of causation, it turns out that it is indeterminate whether I cause global warming when I go for a single drive. Still, in contexts where we seek to control or understand global warming, there is a pressure to adopt a more fragile view of this event. When we adopt such a view, it turns out that a single drive does cause global warming. This means that we cannot like Sinnott-Armstrong and Kingston and Sinnott-Armstrong reject the idea that I should refrain from going for a leisure drive simply because such a drive does not cause global warming. (shrink)

È ormai diffusa la letteratura che mostra il carattere infrastrutturale delle piattaforme digitali. Brevemente sondata, ma sostanzialmente assunta questa dimensione, in questo articolo l’obiettivo è indagare le implicazioni politiche di tale categorizzazione. Nello specifico, risulterà particolarmente centrato analizzare il carattere tecnico, estetico ed egemonico del potere delle piattaforme, le declinazioni in termini governamentali, e le sfide che esse pongono all’attore statale.

A recent study has argued from theological and classicizing parallels that the first, anti-pagan book of Augustine’s De consensu euangelistarum belongs between 406 and 412 CE. This article defends the traditional dating ca. 400–405 CE, implied by Retractationes. Uncertainty over the dating of parallels in De trinitate 1–4 cautions against reliance on theological peculiarities (a variant of John 5:19 and the phrase unitas personae, both otherwise paralleled in the 410s CE or later), while a close review of the patterns of (...) classical citation proves resemblance to De ciuitate dei to be superficial. Not only does Augustine demonstrably cite the same classical texts on widely separated occasions, De consensu euangelistarum 1 evinces little of Augustine’s later knowledge of Porphyry and Varro. The crowning proof comes, however, in a brief rebuttal to pagan complaints over contemporary misfortunes. Although he focuses on Rome’s religious history, Augustine omits any hint of Alaric’s sack (410 CE), the religious-political instability of 408–409 CE, or Radagaisus’ invasion of Italy (405–406 CE), all of key importance for later works. The book’s method, scope, and tenor place it neatly within the span 400–405 CE, as our first testimony to the interreligious milieu for which De ciuitate dei would later be aimed. (shrink)

The institutionalization of a rights-based proportionality review shares a number of salient features and puzzles with the practice of contestation that the Socrates of the early Platonic dialogues became famous for. Understanding the point of Socratic contestation, and its role in a democratic polity, is also the key to understanding the point of proportionality based rights review. To begin with, when judges decide cases within the proportionality framework they do not primarily interpret authority. They assess reasons. Not surprisingly, they, like (...) Socrates, have been prone to the charge that they offend the values and traditions of the community. The article discusses four types of pathologies that occasionally infect democratic decision-making that rights-based proportionality review is particularly suited to identify. But more basic and equally important is a second kind of justification: Proportionality-based judicial review institutionalizes a right to contest the acts of public authorities and demand a public reasons-based justification. Having a legal remedy that allows for the contestation of acts by public authorities before an impartial and independent court and demanding its justification in terms of public reason is as basic a commitment of liberal democracy as the right to vote. The real question is not whether judicial review is democratically legitimate, but how judicial institutions ought to be structured to best serve their democracy-enhancing and rights protecting purpose. If Socrates was right to insist that the practice of contestation he engaged in deserves the highest praise in a democratic polity, it is equally true that a well structured and appropriately embedded court engaged in rights based proportionality review deserves to be embraced as a vital element of liberal constitutional democracy. (shrink)

This essay is one of ten contributions to a special editorial feature in The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 49.2, in which authors were invited to address the following questions: What is the future of Nietzsche studies? What are the most pressing questions its scholars should address? What texts and issues demand our urgent attention? And as we turn to these issues, what methodological and interpretive principles should guide us? The editorship hopes this collection will provide a starting point for discussions (...) about the most fruitful directions for Nietzsche scholarship to take and the most promising avenues for building on the best recent work. (shrink)

A major open question in the borderlands between epistemology and philosophy of science concerns whether Bayesian updating and abductive inference are compatible. Some philosophers—most influentially Bas van Fraassen—have argued that they are not. Others have disagreed, arguing that abduction, properly understood, is indeed compatible with Bayesianism. Here we present two formal results that allow us to tackle this question from a new angle. We start by formulating what we take to be a minimal version of the claim that abduction is (...) a rational pattern of reasoning. We then show that this minimal abductivist principle, when combined with Bayesian updating by conditionalization, places surprisingly strong and controversial constraints on how we must measure explanatory power. The lesson is not that Bayesianism is definitely incompatible with abduction, but that both compatibilism and incompatibilism have hitherto unrecognized consequences. We end the paper by formulating these consequences in the form of a trilemma. (shrink)

Hooks et al. note that microbiota-gut-brain research suffers from serious methodological flaws and interpretative issues. We suggest two corrective measures: first, taking more seriously the need of interdisciplinary work; second, interpreting some of the methodological issues as ordinary challenges of standardization, typical of emerging disciplines.

It has now been more than a year since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, despite the colossal and unprecedented scientific effort that has been put into it, many claims are still opaque, and many issues must be solved. Among these, one deserves the attention of philosophers of science: the scientific controversy about the theories of SARS-CoV-2 transmission. In this short paper, I analyze the debate between the droplet theory and the airborne theory of viral transmission. I argue that (...) the acceptance of the droplet theory has been due to the philosophical commitments of the dominant scientific actors to a specific theory of evidence, which has become dominant in western democracies, and to a specific set of non-epistemic values, rather than to scientific considerations alone. (shrink)

This article discusses the contribution of the Capability Approach within the theoretical framework of moral philosophy, political theory and political philosophy. Starting from delineating the contours to properly interpret this contemporary political doctrine, the A. recognises its primary roots in the human emotional development, as outlined by the American political philosopher Martha Nussbaum. Then the A. offers a comparative review of the Nussbaumean conception of emotions in Upheavals of Thought as well as in the most recent contributions on the topic. (...) The concepts of fear and security prompted us to the discussion, a posteriori from the cognitive development and the ‘securisation’ of human rights as promoted by education (especially in lifelong learning of children and women). (shrink)

The prevailing assumption in literary studies tends to be that a ‘we’ narrative voice is either that of an individual purporting to speak for a group, or that of a collective of people whose perspectives have coalesced into a unified one. Recent work on social agency across the cognitive humanities suggests another way of understanding what might be conveyed by such a ‘we’. Social cognition research shows that individuals can have their capacities changed and enhanced when they interact with others, (...) and suggests that ‘we-representations’ in the individual mind may result from the transformative effects of interaction. In this paper, we draw on a specific instance of storytelling in the plural, William Faulkner’s ‘A Rose for Emily’, to articulate a theory of this ‘individual we’, and to show its potential in refining our understanding of ‘we’ narratives. We also propose that in future research the interdisciplinary study of the ‘we’ could engage with insights from literature as well as from philosophy and science. (shrink)

In On What Matters Derek Parfit advocates the Kantian Contractualist Formula as one of three supreme moral principles. In important cases, this formula entails that it is wrong for an agent to act in a way that would be partially best. In contrast, Parfit’s wide value-based objective view of reasons entails that the agent often have sufficient reasons to perform such acts. It seems then that agents might have sufficient reasons to act wrongly. In this paper I will argue that (...) such reasons are a symptom of a fundamental inconsistency between the Kantian Contractualist Formula and Parfit’s view of reasons. The formula requires that we consider what everyone could rationally will, while a wide value-based objective view requires that we consider only what the agent has sufficient reasons for doing. The same inconsistency is particularly obvious in Parfit’s version of the Consent Principle, which share important features with the Kantian Contractualist Formula. Parfit accepts that moral principles might entail that we sometimes have sufficient reasons to act wrongly. However, to accept that supreme moral principles have such implications is objectionable if you, like Parfit, also hold that principles with such implications should be rejected or revised. I suggest that we could abandon the requirement that we have to consider the reasons of everyone. This would make the Kantian Contractualist Formula consistent with Parfit’s view of reasons, at least in this respect. I also argue that we can keep most implications of the Kantian Contractualist Formula that Parfit finds attractive. (shrink)