Foucault and Derrida react in two different ways to the new paradigm imposed by structuralism. Foucault uses structuralism to overcome phenomenology, in fact structuralism shows the naivety of phenomenology, in its claim to rely on conscience to constitute meaning. Instead, Derrida on the contrary immediately nurtures a certain distrust of structuralism, especially in its philosophical ambitions and uses the resources of phenomenology to criticize it, showing the metaphysical implications operating in it. We want to show how this opposing position is (...) generated by the specific way in which the two philosophers have responded to the open problems and bequeathed by Husserlian phenomenology. In particular, the theme of “passive genesis,” which was raised in the French debate by Tran-Duc-Thao and Merleau-Ponty, is central. In the first writings it emerges how Foucault has received Merleau-Ponty’s theses and it is precisely to overcome them that he inaugurates an archaeological analysis to try to distance himself from the normalizing anthropological discourse present in the passive synthesis. Derrida reads passive genesis in a radically different way from Merleau-Ponty (and therefore Foucault): the radical nature of Husserl’s phenomenology has opened a space to question the transcendental genesis of philosophical discourse and its possibility of transcending its historical, social and psychological genesis and therefore the sciences that preside over these dimensions. Consequently, showing the naivety of structuralism, Derrida’s research of the sixties is configured as post-structuralist. (shrink)

Despite a strong plea for integrating sustainability goals into traditional corporate bonus schemes, a comprehensive implementation of these systems has been lacking until recently. This article explores four illustrative cases from the Netherlands, where several multinationals started to pioneer with sustainable bonuses in the past few years. The article examines the setups and the different elements of bonus programmes used, in terms of performance criteria (focusing in particular on external vs. internal benchmarking), their link to specific stakeholders, type and size (...) of bonuses, target levels and transparency. While sustainable bonuses signal corporate awareness of responsibility vis-à-vis society and stakeholders, credibility varies considerably depending on these elements. Our case evidence sheds some light on the extent to which sustainable bonuses may be a credible sign of corporate responsibility or rather just another perverse mechanism meant to keep up bonus levels (window dressing). A definite assessment is hampered by the emergent state and lack of full transparency—while ‘justified’ by companies for competitive reasons, this raises questions. Insights are offered to appraise current and future systems and provide directions for further research. (shrink)

Plural Temporality traces out a dynamic historical relationship between the texts of Spinoza and of Althusser. It interrogates Spinoza's text through Althusser and vice versa regarding the question of materialism.

Background The 2020-2021 coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic is just the latest epidemic event that requires us to rethink and change our understanding of health. Health should no longer be conceived only in relation to human beings, but in unitary terms, as a dimension that connects humans, animals, plants, and the environment (holistic view, One Health). In general, alterations occurring in this articulated chain of life trigger a domino effect. Methodology In this paper, we review the One Health paradigm in the light (...) of the Covid-19 pandemic and distinguish two approaches within it that might be dubbed the Prudent one and the Radical one. Each approach is structured in three levels – epistemological, medical, and ethical. Results In this way, we show how we humans can better address the pandemic today and how, in the future, we can treat the whole living system better, by renouncing our anthropocentric perspective on health. Conclusion We hold that the Prudent approach can be very helpful, and we discuss the medical and ethical issues related to it. We also consider the Radical view and the epistemological turn it requires compared to the Prudent one. (shrink)

Il saggio offre una ricostruzione sintetica delle più recenti acquisizioni del­le neuroscienze cognitive con l’intento di sollecitare lo sviluppo di un ap­proc­cio multidisciplinare e aperto a uno dei problemi filosofici per ec­cel­lenza: chi siamo? La scoperta della base neurale condivisa – i neuroni spec­chio – che si attiva in ciascuno di noi sia quando siamo attori sia quando sia­mo testimoni di esperienze analoghe, e del fatto che la sua attivazione non è mai identica ma mo­du­lata sulla unicità di ogni essere (...) umano, costi­tuisce una fertile base di dialogo con le discipline psi­cologiche e con quelle riflessioni filosofiche – come la fenomenologia e la teoria del de­si­derio mi­metico – che danno risalto alla radice intercorporea dell’intersoggettività e della relazione.This paper gives a brief summary of the most recent advances of cognitive neuroscience, in order to promote a multidisciplinary approach addressing one of the most ancient philosophical questions: who are we? The dis­cove­ry of a common neural basis – mirror neurons – can be very useful: mirror neurons are in fact activated both when we live an experience as witnesses and as protagonists. Their activation is never identical but shaped in a dif­ferent way for every person, and this fact constitutes a possible starting point in the dialogue with psychology and some areas of philosophy . Both these disciplines in fact stress the bodily roots of intersubjectivity and human relationship. (shrink)

A new class of visuomotor neuron has been recently discovered in the monkey’s premotor cortex: mirror neurons. These neurons respond both when a particular action is performed by the recorded monkey and when the same action, performed by another individual, is observed. Mirror neurons appear to form a cortical system matching observation and execution of goal-related motor actions. Experimental evidence suggests that a similar matching system also exists in humans. What might be the functional role of this matching system? One (...) possible function is to enable an organism to detect certain mental states of observed conspecifics. This function might be part of, or a precursor to, a more general mind-reading ability. Two different accounts of mind-reading have been suggested. According to “theory theory‘, mental states are represented as inferred posits of a naive theory. According to “simulation theory‘, other people’s mental states are represented by adopting their perspective: by tracking or matching their states with resonant states of one’s own. The activity of mirror neurons, and the fact that observers undergo motor facilitation in the same muscular groups as those utilized by target agents, are findings that accord well with simulation theory but would not be predicted by theory theory. (shrink)

This study aimed at investigating depression, anxiety, and stress symptoms among healthcare workers and examine the role of expressive flexibility and context sensitivity as key components of resilience in understanding reported symptoms. We hypothesized a significant and different contribution of resilience components in explaining depression, anxiety, and stress. A total sample of 218 Italian healthcare workers participated in this study through an online survey during the lockdown, consequently to the COVID-19. The Depression Anxiety Stress Scales-21 was used to measure depression, (...) anxiety, and stress; the Flexible Regulation of Emotional Expression scale was used to measure the ability to enhance and suppress emotional expression; the Context Sensitivity Index was used to measure the ability to accurately perceive contextual cues and determine cue absence. Demographic and work-related data were also collected. DASS-21 cut-off scores were used to verify the mental status among the respondents. Correlational analyses examined relationships between DASS-21, FREE, and CSI, followed by three regression analyses with depression, anxiety, and stress as dependent variables, controlling for age, gender, and work experience. Enhancement and suppression abilities, cue presence, and cue absence served as independent variables. The results showed a prevalence of moderate to extremely severe symptoms of 8% for depression, 9.8% for anxiety, and 8.9% for stress. Results of correlational analysis highlighted that enhance ability was inversely associated with depression and stress. Suppression ability was inversely associated with depression, anxiety, and stress. The ability to perceive contextual cues was inversely associated with depression and anxiety. The regression analysis showed that the ability to enhance emotional expression was statistically significant to explain depression among healthcare workers. In predicting anxiety, age, and the ability to accurately perceive contextual cues and determine cue absence made substantial contributions as predictors. In the last regression model, age, work experience, and the ability to suppress emotional expression were significant predictors of stress. This study’s findings can help understand the specific contributions of enhancement and suppression abilities and sensitivity to stressor context cues in predicting depression, anxiety, and stress among healthcare workers. Psychological interventions to prevent burnout should consider these relationships. (shrink)

Concepts are the elementary units of reason and linguistic meaning. They are conventional and relatively stable. As such, they must somehow be the result of neural activity in the brain. The questions are: Where? and How? A common philosophical position is that all concepts—even concepts about action and perception—are symbolic and abstract, and therefore must be implemented outside the brain’s sensory-motor system. We will argue against this position using (1) neuroscientific evidence; (2) results from neural computation; and (3) results about (...) the nature of concepts from cognitive linguistics. We will propose that the sensory-motor system has the right kind of structure to characterise both sensory-motor and more abstract concepts. Central to this picture are the neural theory of language and the theory of cogs, according to which, brain structures in the sensory-motor regions are exploited to characterise the so-called “abstract” concepts that constitute the meanings of grammatical constructions and general inference patterns. (shrink)

In this article we provide a unifying neural hypothesis on how individuals understand the actions and emotions of others. Our main claim is that the fundamental mechanism at the basis of the experiential understanding of others' actions is the activation of the mirror neuron system. A similar mechanism, but involving the activation of viscero-motor centers, underlies the experiential understanding of the emotions of others.

My initial scope will be limited: starting from a neurobiological standpoint, I will analyse how actions are possibly represented and understood. The main aim of my arguments will be to show that, far from being exclusively dependent upon mentalistic/linguistic abilities, the capacity for understanding others as intentional agents is deeply grounded in the relational nature of action. Action is relational, and the relation holds both between the agent and the object target of the action , as between the agent of (...) the action and his/her observer . Agency constitutes a key issue for the understanding of intersubjectivity and for explaining how individuals can interpret their social world. This account of intersubjectivity, founded on the empirical findings of neuroscientific investigation, will be discussed and put in relation with a classical tenet of phenomenology: empathy. I will provide an 'enlarged' account of empathy that will be defined by means of a new conceptual tool: the shared manifold of intersubjectivity. (shrink)

Simulation theories of social cognition abound in the literature, but it is often unclear what simulation means and how it works. The discovery of mirror neurons, responding both to action execution and observation, suggested an embodied approach to mental simulation. Over the last years this approach has been hotly debated and alternative accounts have been proposed. We discuss these accounts and argue that they fail to capture the uniqueness of embodied simulation (ES). ES theory provides a unitary account of basic (...) social cognition, demonstrating that people e their own mental states or processes represented with a bodily format in functionally attributing them to others. (shrink)

We study by means of a laboratory experiment the role of individuals’ empathy in the Vote-with-the-Wallet Game. Our main purpose is to analyze the impact of the ability to empathize on participants’ behavior when asked to choose between two specific types of product: a cheaper conventional good and a more expensive one which, however, produces a positive externality for the other participants. We consider three manipulations: a) a redistribution mechanism where the expensive product is subsidized by the buyers of the (...) cheaper one; b) a framed version of the game where the expensive good is described as produced by a socially responsible company; c) a treatment where information about other participants’ behavior are made public. We find that all the manipulations increase the rate of contribution to the public good with respect to the baseline treatment and that the effects are stronger among participants who show higher levels of empathy. (shrink)

We consider the notions of static and dynamic reasonableness of requests by an authority in a trust game experiment. The authority, modeled as the experimenter, systematically varies the experimental norm of what is expected from trustees to return to trustors, both in terms of the level of each request and in terms of the sequence of the requests. Static reasonableness matters in a self-biased way, in the sense that low requests justify returning less, but high requests tend to be ignored. (...) Dynamic reasonableness also matters, in the sense that, if requests keep increasing, trustees return less compared to the same requests presented in random or decreasing order. Requests never systematically increase trustworthiness but may decrease it. (shrink)

ObjectiveGonadotoxicity is considered one of the most distressing side effects of cancer treatment. Although fertility preservation can be a valid solution, it also involves a challenging process. A clear understanding of the features of women who decide to pursue fertility preservation after cancer diagnosis is missing. The purpose of the present study was therefore to analyze the personality profile of female patients referred to oncofertility prior to gonadotoxic treatment.MethodsFifty-two female cancer patients took part in the study. The Temperament and Character (...) Inventory-Revised, the Response Evaluation Measure-71, the Beck Depression Inventory, and the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory-Y Form were administered to examine personality characteristics, defense mechanisms, depression and anxiety symptoms.ResultsCompared with reference data of the Italian population, our sample reported significantly lower scores in Harm Avoidance and trait anxiety, and significantly higher levels of mature defense mechanisms. Most of the patients reported low scores in immature defense mechanisms, depression, and trait anxiety, and medium scores in state anxiety.ConclusionsOur findings suggest that these women display functional personality traits and defensive style, in association with low levels of depression and trait anxiety. These features may enable a proactive attitude to cancer and the ability to make long-term plans. This may favor psychological adjustment to cancer and a projection toward the future. (shrink)

The complex organization of syntax in hierarchical structures is one of the core design features of human language. Duality of patterning refers, for instance, to the organization of the meaningful elements in a language at two distinct levels: a combinatorial level, where meaningless forms are combined into meaningful forms; and a compositional level, where meaningful forms are composed into larger lexical units. The question remains wide open regarding how such structures could have emerged. The aim of this paper is to (...) address these two aspects in a self-consistent way. First, we introduce suitable measures to quantify the level of combinatoriality and compositionality in a language, and we present a framework to estimate these observables in human natural languages. Second, we show that a recently introduced multi-agent modeling scheme, namely the Blending Game, provides a mathematical framework to address the problem of how a population of individuals can bootstrap combinatoriality and compositionality. Theoretical predictions based on this model turn out to be in good agreement with empirical data. It is remarkable that the two sides of duality of patterning emerge simultaneously as a consequence of a pure cultural dynamics in a simulated environment that contains meaningful relations, provided a simple constraint on message transmission fidelity is also considered. (shrink)

Summary The politeia established in Athens in 317 after a covenant between Cassander and Demetrius of Phalerum was variously described by ancient authors as a tyranny, an oligarchy, and a democracy. Even among modern scholars there is no agreement about its definition. A close study of the architecture of the so-called regime of Demetrius and a comparison with the almost contemporary constitution of Cyrene, imposed on the African town by Ptolemaeus I, lead us to characterize it as a mixed constitution, (...) which balanced elements from the three principal types of political organisation. This experiment had a strong impact on the Hellenistic and Roman political traditions, as testified by Cicero, who recalled Demetrius as the last great Athenian lawgiver and inventor of the blended constitution. (shrink)