> Wealthy nations must do much more, much faster. The United Nations General Assembly in September 2021 will bring countries together at a critical time for marshalling collective action to tackle the global environmental crisis. They will meet again at the biodiversity summit in Kunming, China, and the climate conference 26) in Glasgow, UK. Ahead of these pivotal meetings, we—the editors of health journals worldwide—call for urgent action to keep average global temperature increases below 1.5°C, halt the destruction of nature (...) and protect health. Health is already being harmed by global temperature increases and the destruction of the natural world, a state of affairs health professionals have been bringing attention to for decades.1 The science is unequivocal; a global increase of 1.5°C above the preindustrial average and the continued loss of biodiversity risk catastrophic harm to health that will be impossible to reverse.2 3 Despite the world’s necessary preoccupation with COVID-19, we cannot wait for the pandemic to pass to rapidly reduce emissions. Reflecting the severity of the moment, this editorial appears in health journals across the world. We are united in recognising that only fundamental and equitable changes to societies will reverse our current trajectory. The risks to health of increases above 1.5°C are now well established.2 Indeed, no temperature rise is ‘safe’. In the past 20 years, heat-related mortality among people aged over 65 has increased by more than 50%.4 Higher temperatures have brought increased dehydration and renal function loss, dermatological malignancies, tropical infections, adverse mental health outcomes, pregnancy complications, allergies, and cardiovascular and pulmonary morbidity and mortality.5 6 Harms disproportionately affect the most vulnerable, including children, older populations, ethnic minorities, poorer communities and those with underlying health problems.2 4 Global heating is also contributing to the decline in …. (shrink)

Alison Simmons, in Simmons (1999), argues that Descartes in Meditation Six offered a teleological account of sensory representation. According to Simmons, Descartes’ view is that the biological function of sensations explains both why sensations represent what they do (i.e., their referential content) and why they represent their objects the way they do (i.e., their presentational content). Moreover, Simmons claims that her account has several advantages over other currently available interpretations of Cartesian sensations. In this paper, I argue that Simmons’ teleological (...) account cannot be sustained for both theoretical and textual reasons and that it does not have the advantages it is claimed to have. (shrink)

Research represents an essential component of the response to infectious disease outbreaks and to other public health emergencies, whether they are localised, of international concern, or global. Research conducted in such contexts also comes with particular ethics challenges, the awareness of which has significantly grown following the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, the Zika outbreak in Latin America and the COVID-19 pandemic. These challenges include the need for implementing meaningful community engagement with the researched communities, not just to build unidirectional (...) trust towards the research team, but to achieve a genuine and mutually respectful partnership before, during and after the research. Here, we describe the real-life experience of 10 well-established research clinics in Nairobi, where a successful experience of community engagement linking prevention and care to research was interrupted during the COVID19 pandemic. We contrast this experience with the concept and processes of community engagement as described in selected scientific manuscripts and guidelines, to formulate some conclusions and recommendations. We contend that more action is needed, from research ethics committees and other key-research stakeholders, to align policies and practices with ethics guidance and with evidence-based recommendations from the academic literature, to achieve meaningful community engagement during emergency research, irrespective of the scale and location of an outbreak or public health crisis. Failure to do so, will aggravate the (postcolonial) asymmetries of power in global health and local systems. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe quality of medicines is generally adequately assured by manufacturers and regulatory authorities for well-resourced settings, while the implementation of existing quality standards is challenged in many low- and middle-income countries. This situation of multiple pharmaceutical standards raises the question whether it could ever be ethically justified to compromise on the quality assurance of medicines depending on what individuals, communities, or societies can afford. In this paper, we contend that ethically, any unjustified exceptions to medicines’ quality assurance represents a violation (...) of the principles of beneficence and non-maleficence. Exceptions are only acceptable in exceptional and temporary circumstances, if based on a meaningful quality risk assessment, guided by a rigorous ethical framework built on the principles of independence, technical competence, transparency, and accountability. We also discuss how such exceptional and temporary circumstances should be defined/justified.... (shrink)

The essay analyses utopia as a key concept to investigate modern politics. It argues that looking at the works of Machiavelli and More in order to retrace the utopia-realism nexus permits to develop a valuable analytical tool to interpret the outset of political modernity.

Current research on choice overload has been mainly conducted with choice options not associated with specific brands. This study investigates whether the presence of brand names in the choice set affects the occurrence of choice overload. Across four studies, we find that when choosing among an overabundance of alternatives, participants express more positive feelings (i.e., higher satisfaction/confidence, lower regret and difficulty) when all the options of the choice set are associated with familiar brands, rather than unfamiliar brands or no brand (...) at all. We also find that choice overload only appears in the absence of brand names, but disappears when all options contain brand names—either familiar or unfamiliar. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. (shrink)

This article focuses on the assessment of mechanistic relations with specific attention to medicine, where mechanistic models are widely employed. I first survey recent contributions in the philosophical literature on mechanistic causation, and then take issue with Federica Russo and Jon Williamson’s thesis that two types of evidence, probabilistic and mechanistic, are at stake in the health sciences. I argue instead that a distinction should be drawn between previously acquired knowledge of mechanisms and yet-to-be-discovered knowledge of mechanisms and that both (...) probabilistic evidence and manipulation are essential with respect to newly discovered mechanisms. (shrink)

This contribution claims that the two fundamental notions of causation at work in the health sciences are manipulative and mechanistic, and investigates what kinds of evidence matter for the assessment of causal relations. This article is a development of our 2007 article, ‘Plurality of Causality’, where we argue for a pluralistic account of causation with an eye to econometrics and a single medical example. The present contribution has a wider focus, and considers the notion of evidence within a whole range (...) of disciplines belonging to the health sciences. Section 1 addresses the relations between kinds of evidence and causal accounts, and it is shown how different notions of causation can be employed in various medical cases. Section 2 calls attention to issues crucial for any adequate epistemological theory of causation, such as the distinctions between types and tokens, observational and experimental regimes, explanation and prediction. Lastly, the notion of context is articulated, highlighted in its role in the assessment of causal links. All these issues are tackled in the framework of what we label a ‘bottom–up’ epistemology. (shrink)

We define a potentialist system of ‐structures, i.e., a collection of possible worlds in the language of connected by a binary accessibility relation, achieving a potentialist account of the full background set‐theoretic universe V. The definition involves Berkeley cardinals, the strongest known large cardinal axioms, inconsistent with the Axiom of Choice. In fact, as background theory we assume just. It turns out that the propositional modal assertions which are valid at every world of our system are exactly those in the (...) modal theory. Moreover, we characterize the worlds satisfying the potentialist maximality principle, and thus the modal theory, both for assertions in the language of and for assertions in the full potentialist language. (shrink)

This book examines the role of note-taking in ancient education as a pedagogical method, by taking readers on a stimulating analysis of lectures by ancient philosophers that were recorded by their students.

For a given inner model N of ZFC, one can consider the relativized version of Berkeley cardinals in the context of ZFC, and ask if there can exist an “N-Berkeley cardinal.” In this article we provide a positive answer to this question. Indeed, under the assumption of a supercompact cardinal $\delta $, we show that there exists a ZFC inner model N such that there is a cardinal which is N-Berkeley, even in a strong sense. Further, the involved model N (...) is a weak extender model of $\delta $ is supercompact. Finally, we prove that the strong version of N-Berkeley cardinals turns out to be inconsistent whenever N satisfies closure under $\omega $ -sequences. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the possible values of the cofinality of the least Berkeley cardinal. Berkeley cardinals are very large cardinal axioms incompatible with the Axiom of Choice, and the interest in the cofinality of the least Berkeley arises from a result in [1], showing it is connected with the failure of. In fact, by a theorem of Bagaria, Koellner and Woodin, if γ is the cofinality of the least Berkeley cardinal then γ‐ fails. We shall prove that this (...) result is optimal for or. In particular, it will follow that the cofinality of the least Berkeley is independent of. (shrink)

This paper shows the state of the art regarding the possibilities of intervention for the economic and social inclusion of young people Not engaged in Employment, Education, or Training through Massive Open Online Courses in the countries of the European Union, in order to identify and compare good practices and didactic models aimed to contrast the social and economic vulnerabilities of young people. The systematic review, carried out on both generalist and more properly educational databases, has revealed the poor relationship (...) between the two topics in literature, each one moreover only recently made the subject of articulated research. The field of study is therefore open and invites further reflection on its possible developments. Matching NEETs’ needs and business companies’ requirements, students’ motivation during the learning path, keeping balance between e-learning and face-to-face lectures, tutors’ involvement along the course, and relationships with stakeholders remain the main issues identified in the various papers reviewed. (shrink)

A partire dal corpus degli Scritti sulla donna, l'articolo intende mostrare come nel pensiero di Edith Stein vi sia il ricorrere di alcuni nuclei tematici soggetti a un sempre maggiore lavoro di scavo e di approfondimento, nella consapevolezza - maturata alla scuola di Husserl -della inesauribilitÀ della realtÀ. In particolare, dopo aver ricordato la funzione ontologica della filosofia nell'indagine sull'essere umano, che consente di parlare di specie e di individualitÀ, vengono qui toccate le questioni del rapporto fra specie e tipo, (...) della mutabilitÀ o meno della specie, della peculiaritÀ dell'anima femminile, e viene evidenziato come esse o siano il risultato di ricerche condotte in precedenza o contengano in nuce elementi di una riflessione portata avanti dalla filosofa tedesca in tempi e opere successivi. (shrink)

In this article, I deal with the concept of aesthetics in its broader sense: the ability of feeling, thinking, and creating. My theory is that this aesthetics was born 40,000 years ago in the Paleolitical caves and that it has been characterizing human creativity from its remote origins up to now. Following this theory, we should not define human creativity as a greater cleverness than that of other living species; however, we should think of it as a refined aesthetic ability (...) of mind in connecting different worlds, enacting different levels of communication, and creating images and symbols. (shrink)

A theater that heals is not a theater that offers answers and ?medicines? that guarantee to cure weaknesses and fragilities people meet but it is an open organization, which questions itself, which brings out ambivalence and ambiguity, diversity, weaknesses, and which leaves room for possible interpretations and narratives, the play of imagination, and the development of innovative and creative processes of people in society.

This paper studies the influence of an organization’s time perspective on triple bottom line deployment through sustainable innovativeness. Although academics increasingly consider sustainable innovation to be an essential element in deploying the triple bottom line, the degree of an organization’s sustainable innovativeness remains limited. Using ten inductive case studies based on the triangulation of data from multiple-respondent interviews and secondary data, this study shows that an organization’s time perspective plays a crucial role in explaining the organization’s degree of sustainable innovativeness (...) and improvement of triple bottom line outcomes. Specifically, organizations with a longer planning horizon, higher tolerance of uncertainty, and greater ability to learn from the past develop a higher and increasing degree of sustainable innovativeness, allowing trade-offs between triple bottom line dimensions to be mitigated. (shrink)

This paper uses a partially ordered set of syntactic categories to accommodate optionality and licensing in natural language syntax. A complex but well-studied data set pertaining to the syntax of quantifier scope and negative polarity licensing in Hungarian is used to illustrate the proposal. The presentation is geared towards both linguists and logicians. The paper highlights that the main ideas can be implemented in different grammar formalisms, and discusses in detail an implementation where the partial ordering on categories is given (...) by the derivability relation of a calculus with residuated and Galois-connected unary operators. (shrink)