In an increasingly urbanized world, construction industry is called upon to serve the needs of human society, such as environmental protection and safety in terms of infrastructure. In this context, a sustainable and ethical development means a close connection between buildings and environment. This connection can be achieved through, for example, the concept of ecological concrete or green concrete, as it is often called. The conventional process of obtaining cement and mineral aggregates from the concrete composition generates pollution, especially through (...) greenhouse gas emissions. Also, one should not ignore the fact that extraction of the raw materials affects the habitats of the sites and of the neighboring areas. When construction materials are questioned, the ethical issues lay not in the means of expression, but mainly in the means of production. More to the point, the present contribution aimed to find solutions for enhancing the adhesion of vegetal aggregates with the cement matrix, in order to obtain a material with optimal mechanical properties, which is valued as an ethical approach of building industry. Results showed that plant aggregates can be used to obtain a building material which can be improved by using partial substitution of cement by silica fume, fly ash, or by using additives and that green concrete as an environmentally friendly material offers the alternative for lower energy use and fewer CO2 emissions. Marketers must understand not only the advantages of these green materials, but also that they have an ethical commitment to provide consumers with environmentally friendly materials. (shrink)

Mihaela Miroiu, The road towards autonomy. Feminist Political Theories Polirom, Iasi, 2004.

In this paper, a special type of polysemantic words, that is, words with multiple meanings for the same part of speech, are analyzed under the name of neutrosophic words. These words represent the most dif cult cases for the disambiguation algorithms as they represent the most ambiguous natural language utterances. For approximate their meanings, we developed a semantic representation framework made by means of concepts from neutrosophic theory and entropy measure in which we incorporate sense related data. We show the (...) advantages of the proposed framework in a sentiment classification task. (shrink)

The book aims to provide both theoretical perspectives and practical approaches for teachers interested in transforming the future. Through the approaches of theoretical background but also through the studies of practical application nature, the book can serve as bibliographic support for early education programs.

This paper analyses the relations between feminism and its various ideological cores. Three tendancies are discussed here: acceptance of the ideological core, criticism and rejection of this core and, more intricately, acceptance of one core and rejection of the other. The emphasis is placed on Anglo- American second-wave liberal feminism, whose ideological nature is almost unanomously accepted, in all the meanings of the term – positive, negative, and neutral. The author adopts Christine di Stefano’s idea, that a qualified use of (...) the word „ideology” is preferable to the neglect (that never- theless must accept the presence) of the term. (shrink)

En este artículo examino el concepto de infinito en Pascal y Kant en el contexto del análisis contemporáneo de la secularización moderna, realizado por H. Blumenberg y H. Arendt. Los aspectos principales de mi análisis son: primero, el paso del sentido del término ‘infinito’ del ámbito trascendente al inmanente. Segundo, la comprensión de la modernidad secular como una mundanización desmundanizada. Tercero, la aplicación secular del concepto de infinito a la historia, en el ideal moderno del progreso. En mi opinión, estos (...) rasgos de la secularización moderna pueden observarse de manera especial en el concepto de infinito que aparece en Pascal y Kant. (shrink)

This work intends to discuss about the first generation of Romanian womenpainters within the wider context of the condition of woman within the Romanian society during the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. We will develop the following path: a) the movement of women’s emancipation in Romania – characteristics and phases; b) the Romanian art-world and this movement of women-painters.

This article highlights how Internet and new media are experienced by Romanian Seventh-Day Adventist pastors in their ministry. What is the acceptance of Web 2.0 services for neo-Protestant pastors of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, what uses of these technologies they make in their work, what is their mobilization for the appropriation of an innovative culture in the daily pastoral work, how these uses allow them to manage their religious activity, these are the main questions of a survey we conducted in (...) 2016 to shed light on uses of digital technologies by Romanian Seventh-Day Adventist pastors. (shrink)

On Miranda Fricker’s influential account, the central case of testimonial injustice occurs if and only if the speaker receives a credibility deficit owing to identity prejudice of the hearer. Her critics have taken issue with her view, arguing that cases in which speakers are given more credibility than they deserve, may also amount to testimonial injustice. Furthermore, they argue, these cases cannot be captured by Fricker’s account of objectification as the primary epistemic harm of testimonial injustice; rather, it is an (...) account of othering that best captures a wide range of epistemic injustices. In this paper, I join Fricker’s critics in advancing a novel case of testimonial injustice through identity-prejudicial credibility excess – the adultification of black girls in testimony-giving settings. When testifying, black girls are likely to receive a credibility excess with respect to adult topics such as sex and consent because they are perceived as older, more self-reliable, and mature than they actually are by the hearers. Nevertheless, when examining the girls’ intersecting social identities defined by age, race and gender, it becomes clear that this constitutes an unjustly and prejudicially inflated estimation of their credibility. These cases also involve hermeneutical injustice since the identity-prejudicial credibility excess denies the victims a meaningful opportunity to make sense of their traumatic experiences of sexual assault. I conceptualize this compounded injustice as testimonial obfuscation, where an identity-prejudicial credibility evaluation (either in excess or deficit) causes an experience to remain unintelligible to the hermeneutically marginalized speaker. (shrink)

Feminist authors claim that many of the advertising messages are promoting stereotypical images of the genders. However, if in social sciences, gender stereotypes have been facilitated and enforced by religious ideologies, the connections between gender stereotypes in advertising and religious ideologies remain to be investigated. The purpose of this paper is to analyze these connections. Using the tools and methods of philosophy of communication, the paper attempts to emphasize a double discourse of advertising: an external one that derives from existing (...) religious ideologies, and an internal one that borrows the structure and elements of modern religiosity. If the first one is enforcing the gender stereotypes, the second one is more innovative and less related to stereotypical images of genders. When advertising is approached from the perspective of philosophy of communication, its most conspicuous aspect is its narrative dimension. One way in which narratives of advertising are constructed is in the form of myth. We can see that, in some circumstances, advertising has a function similar to myth, or includes structures of depth coming from the world of myth or of religion understood in a broader sense. The power of those elements is derived not from the realm of merchandise value, but from the one of traditional mentalities and cultural representations. In order to illustrate my research on the relation between gender, religion and advertising, I choose a sample of ads, that I analyze using the tools of philosophy of communication. Thus, my research has led me to a nuanced understanding of the relation between gender stereotypes and religion in advertising. (shrink)

As Mircea Eliade’s translator and biographer Mac Linscott Rickett states, Eliade involved the whole discipline of the history of religions in the quest for meaning. The paper examines Eliade’s approach of religious documents, with benefits and shortcomings as appraised by some of his American critics, and looks closely at the Eliadean creative hermeneutics and the ambitious mission he envisaged for the discipline he has founded in the United States.

Mihaela Mihai on the tension between some public art and the commitments of a liberal democracy.

Conference of Mihaela Miroiu, "Fetzele patriarhului".

This study explored the influence of healthcare ageism on nurses’ moral distress. Episodic interviews were conducted on 25 Romanian nurses in 2020. Thematic analysis revealed that all moral distress sources reported reflected macro-, meso- and micro-level ageism, benevolent and hostile, self- or other-directed, including stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination of older patients. The COVID-19 pandemic-related ageist measures increased healthcare ageism and transformed nurses’ representations of older patients accordingly. Nurses felt moral conflict both when passively witnessing ageist acts and when perpetrating them (...) to adhere to group norms, highlighting the need to combat ageism for both patients’ and nurses’ well-being. (shrink)

Social robots are increasingly developed for the companionship of children. In this article we explore the moral implications of children-robot friendships using the Aristotelian framework of virtue ethics. We adopt a moderate position and argue that, although robots cannot be virtue friends, they can nonetheless enable children to exercise ethical and intellectual virtues. The Aristotelian requirements for true friendship apply only partly to children: unlike adults, children relate to friendship as an educational play of exploration, which is constitutive of the (...) way they acquire and develop virtues. We highlight that there is a relevant difference between the way we evaluate adult-robot friendship compared to children-robot friendship, which is rooted in the difference in moral agency and moral responsibility that generate the asymmetries in the moral status ascribed to adults versus children. We look into the role played by imaginary companions (IC) and personified objects (PO) in children’s moral development and claim that robots, understood as Personified Robotic Objects (PROs), play a similar role with such fictional entities, enabling children to exercise affection, moral imagination and reasoning, thus contributing to their development as virtuous adults. Nonetheless, we argue that adequate use of robots for children’s moral development is conditioned by several requirements related to design, technology and moral responsibility. (shrink)

Mihaela Miroiu, Otilia Dragomir (eds.), Naşterea. Istorii trăite (Giving Birth. Life-stories), Iaşi: Polirom, 2010.

This paper examines the mechanisms involved in the interpretation of utterances that are both metaphorical and ironical. For example, when uttering 'He's a real number-cruncher' about a total illiterate in maths, the speaker uses a metaphor with an ironic intent. I argue that in such cases both logically and psychologically, the metaphor is prior to irony. I hold that the phenomenon is then one of ironic metaphor, which puts a metaphorical meaning to ironic use, rather than an irony used metaphorically (...) (§1). This result is then used to argue for the claim that in metaphor, it is metaphorical, not literal, meaning that determines the utterance‘s truth conditions. Gricean accounts, which exclude metaphorical meaning from truth conditional content and rely entirely on conversational implicature, are seen to be unsatisfactory. Five contextualist arguments are briefly discussed to the conclusion that metaphorical content is part of truth-conditional content, rather than implicated (§2). (shrink)

This article seeks to examine the ways in which courts of constitutional review have tried to deal with public sentiments within societies emerging from large-scale oppression and conflict. A comparative analysis of judicial review decisions from post-communist Hungary, post-apartheid South Africa and post-dictatorial Argentina is meant to show-case how judges have, more or less successfully, recognised and pedagogically engaged social negative feelings of resentment and indignation towards former victimisers and beneficiaries of violence. Thus, the article hopes to pave the way (...) for more in-depth research on one of the most neglected dimensions of post-conflict societies: public affect. (shrink)

This paper aims to restore, from the political thought of Merleau-Ponty, the rightful place of conflict. To achieve this hypothetical premise it is necessary to consider some issues that are woven into possible readings of the origin or foundation of politics. First, tracing back to the original cartesian proposition that the body is related with extensive substance invalid when detecting who we are. Then, considering the reading Merleau-Ponty makes of Machiavelli considering the notion of riot or mass under a conflicting (...) structure of politics in relation to the subject. In this regard, it is noted from this reading, the conditions proposed by Merleau-Ponty to highlight the importance of the singular in a politically shared space. And finally, to understand these problem areas of the history of philosophy as their own "world of life" where the contingent has a particular sense understood as the ontological place of the practical subject. Thus, in this context, it is possible to reconcile from Merleau-Ponty in the area of the contingent, body and language; what is felt and thought; perceived and settled. To understand the features of sedimentation helps to the formation of the localized subject; that is, it habituated or instituted. (shrink)

This article will present my autobiographical journey: from communism to capitalism, from the banking system and the pedagogy of the oppressed to problem-posing education. My personal experiences are seen as a way of emigrating internally and as part of the struggle through the process of self-actualisation and self-understanding. In effect, the practice of intellectual freedom shifts from a personal to a civic perspective. My wish for social justice, especially for children from diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds living in a global (...) society, will be considered, with reference to the voluntary work in the Romanian community. Thus, from a postmodern perspective, the autobiographical process is not just about self, but also about the Other. (shrink)

En De Oratore y otros escritos, Cicerón critica la retórica de los estoicos. Afirma que su elocuencia es “confusa, oscura, árida y cortada” y que sus tratados de retórica sirven más “para aprender a callar” que para aprender a hablar persuasivamente. ¿Qué decían los estoicos de la retórica para que Cicerón tenga sus preceptos en tan baja estima? En este trabajo exploro el problema, con miras a entender los fundamentos psicológicos y epistemológicos de la concepción estoica de la retórica y (...) contrastarlos con los de la retórica ciceroniana. En mi opinión, la disputa reza, más que sobre cuestiones de estilo, sobre la validez de la convicción que se produce por vías alternas a la argumentación racional o lógica . Dicha convicción es indeseable para los estoicos; para Cicerón, necesaria y conveniente.In De Oratore and other works, Cicero criticizes the rhetoric of the stoics. He claims that their eloquence is “obscure, dry and excessively brief” and their treatises on rhetoric are more useful to “learn how to be silent” than to learn how to speak persuasively . What did the stoics say about rhetoric so that Cicero holds their precepts in such low esteem? In this paper I attempt to clarify the psychological and epistemological presupposition that underlie the Stoic conception of rhetoric, in order to compare them with those behind Ciceronian rhetoric. In my opinion, rather than a controversy on matters of style, the dispute concerns the validity of a conviction gained through means other than rational or logical argument . Such conviction is undesirable for the stoics; for Cicero, it is rather necessary and convenient. (shrink)

En este artículo se quiere mostrar cómo el bien la verdad y la belleza, al ser propiedades que se identifican con el ser, es decir, trascendentales, develan algunas características del ser perfecto en los entes imperfectos. Esto es posible desde el pensamiento de Tomás de Aquino, porque dios, que es aquel que crea, al hacerlo transmite algo de su propio ser a su obra; así como el artista se refleja en algún respecto en su creación. En el caso de dios, (...) este reflejo se llama vestigio, y tiene carácter analógico. Sin embargo, permite que una criatura racional encarnada pueda descubrirlo por medio de la contemplación del universo, lo que transforma a la creación en un fenómeno ierofánico. En este trabajo mostraremos cómo cada trascendental revela un aspecto de la divinidad. La verdad la hace inteligible, la bondad deseable y la belleza digna de ser amada. (shrink)

Moshe Idel, Ascension on High in Jewish Mysticism: Pillars, Lines, Ladders Budapest:Central European University Press, 2005.

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Apology An apology is the act of declaring one’s regret, remorse, or sorrow for having insulted, failed, injured, harmed or wronged another. Some apologies are interpersonal (between individuals, that is, between friends, family members, colleagues, lovers, neighbours, or strangers). Other apologies are collective (by one group to another group or by a group to an […].

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

With this nuanced and interdisciplinary work, political theorist Mihaela Mihai tackles several interrelated questions: How do societies remember histories of systemic violence? Who is excluded from such histories' cast of characters? And what are the political costs of selective remembering in the present? Building on insights from political theory, social epistemology, and feminist and critical race theory, Mihai argues that a double erasure often structures hegemonic narratives of complex violence: of widespread, heterogeneous complicity and of "impure" resistances, not easily (...) subsumed to exceptionalist heroic models. In dialogue with care ethicists and philosophers of art, she then suggests that such narrative reductionism can be disrupted aesthetically through practices of "mnemonic care," that is, through the hermeneutical labor that critical artists deliver—thematically and formally—within communities' space of meaning. Empirically, the book examines both consecrated and marginalized artists who tackled the memory of Vichy France, communist Romania, and apartheid South Africa. Despite their specificities, these contexts present us with an opportunity to analyze similar mnemonic dynamics and to recognize the political impact of dissenting artistic production. Crossing disciplinary boundaries, the book intervenes in debates over collective responsibility, historical injustice, and the aesthetics of violence within political theory, memory studies, social epistemology, and transitional justice. (shrink)

The definition and measurement of the impact of laws and courts is a subject of disagreement and uncertainties. In this article, law is understood as a public, general, and binding command enforceable through state coercion. Assessments on the effects of laws on democracy and development focus on changes in specific social indicators. The evaluation of impact relates to the availability and reliability of judicial statistics and the impact of laws depends on political and social conditions. The interaction of laws can (...) be studied in three contextual variables: the structure and competitiveness of political systems, the structure and performance of the judiciary, and the organizational endowments of the social or political actors, such as social and labor movements that use the law. This interaction shows how and why certain conditions affect impact. It also speculates, about some additional developments that might follow from the relationships between law and these three variables. (shrink)

During the last decade there has been burgeoning research concerning the ways in which we should think of and apply the concept of responsibility for Artificial Intelligence. Despite this conceptual richness, there is still a lack of consensus regarding what Responsible AI entails on both conceptual and practical levels. The aim of this paper is to connect the ethical dimension of responsibility in Responsible AI with Aristotelian virtue ethics, where notions of context and dianoetic virtues play a grounding role for (...) the concept of moral responsibility. The paper starts by highlighting the important difficulties in assigning responsibility to either technologies themselves or to their developers. Top-down and bottom-up approaches to moral responsibility are then contrasted, as we explore how they could inform debates about Responsible AI. We highlight the limits of the former ethical approaches and build the case for classical Aristotelian virtue ethics. We show that two building blocks of Aristotle’s ethics, dianoetic virtues and the context of actions, although largely ignored in the literature, can shed light on how we could think of moral responsibility for both AI and humans. We end by exploring the practical implications of this particular understanding of moral responsibility along the triadic dimensions of ethics by design, ethics in design and ethics for designers. (shrink)

Este trabajo busca analizar los personajes que Tácito destaca como dignos de mérito durante el nuevo sistema político del Principado y que reciben una alabanza o elogio por parte del historiador en la primera héxada de sus _Anales. _Se examinan también los factores que se constituyen como meritorios bajo el reinado de Tiberio y que reciben algún tipo de compensación política por parte del emperador.