As empathy gains importance within academia, we propose this review as an attempt to bring clarity upon the diverse and widely debated definitions and conceptions of empathy within the medical field. In this paper, we first evaluate the limits of the Western mainstream medical culture and discuss the origins of phenomena such asdehumanizationanddetached concernas well as their impacts on patient care. We then pass on to a structured overview of the debate surrounding the notion of clinical empathy and its taxonomy (...) in the medical setting. In particular, we present the dichotomous conception of clinical empathy that is articulated in the debate aroundcognitive empathyandaffective empathy. We thus consider the negative impacts that this categorization brings about. Finally, we advocate for a more encompassing, holistic conception of clinical empathy; one that gives value to a genuine interest in welcoming, acknowledging and responding to the emotions of those suffering. Following this line of reasoning, we advance the notion of ‘empathic concern’, a re-conceptualization of clinical empathy that finds its source in Halpern in Med Health Care Philos (2014) 17:301–311engaged curiosity. We ultimately advance Narrative Medicine as an approach to introduce, teach and promote such an attitude among medical trainees and practitioners. (shrink)

Recent democratic theorists have drawn on the work of the late Pierre Bourdieu to make the case that patterned inequalities in the social capacity to engage in deliberation can undermine deliberative theory’s democratic promise. They have proposed a range of deliberative democratic responses to the problem of cultural inequality, from enabling the marginalised to adopt the communicative dispositions of the dominant, to broadening the standards that define legitimate deliberation, to strengthening deliberative counter‐publics. The author interprets Bourdieu’s theory of the linguistic (...) habitus to prompt an even more radical critique of deliberative democracy than these theorists acknowledge, one to which the proposed solutions fail adequately to respond. Her argument suggests that empirical work on deliberative democracy should expand to address specifically the problems of cultural inequality that Bourdieu’s work highlights. (shrink)

Large-scale whole genome sequencing (WGS) studies promise to revolutionize cancer research by identifying targets for therapy and by discovering molecular biomarkers to aid early diagnosis, to better determine prognosis and to improve treatment response prediction. Such projects raise a number of ethical, legal, and social (ELS) issues that should be considered. In this study, we set out to discover how these issues are being handled across different jurisdictions.

This study investigated how young Italian people experienced the period of peak spread of COVID-19 in their country by probing their emotions, thoughts, events, and actions related to interpersonal and community bonds. This approach to the pandemic will highlight social dimensions that characterized contextual interactions from the specific perspective of Community Psychology. The aim was to investigate young people's experiences because they are the most fragile group due to their difficulty staying home and apart from their peers and because they (...) are, at the same time, the most potentially dangerous people due to their urge to gather in groups. The research involved 568 university students, 475 females, and 93 males, with an average age of 21.82 years. The collected data were analyzed with the Grounded Theory Methodology, using the Atlas 8.0 software. From the textual data, representative codes were defined and grouped into 10 categories, which reflect the individuals' prosocial attitudes, behaviors, and values. These categories formed three macro-categories, called: “Collective Dimensions,” which includes Connectedness, Solidarity, Italian-ness, Social Problems, and Collective Mourning; “Prosocial Orientation,” which includes Trust and Hope; and “Collective Values,” which includes Values of Freedom, Respect of Social Rules, and Civic-Mindedness. All these macro-categories are indicative of the shared feelings experienced by Italians during the first time of the pandemic. Further practical implications of these results will be discussed, including a consideration of the risk of developing distress and improving well-being, as well as promoting preventive behaviors. (shrink)

Delusions are typically regarded as beliefs of a certain kind, both by psychiatrists and by lay people. In “Double Bookkeeping and Doxasticism about Delusion,” Porcher formulates and assesses two kinds of arguments against doxasticism about delusions, the theoretical stance according to which delusions are a kind of belief. Those arguments, which Porcher calls “the argument from action guidance and the argument from phenomenology” are motivated by a phenomenon sometimes associated with delusions: double bookkeeping, a kind of ambivalence of patients, who (...) “often appear to be living in two parallel but separate worlds: consensual reality and the realm of their hallucinations and delusions” (Sass, 1994, p.... (shrink)

O PAPEL DA CRÍTICA HERMENÊUTICA DO DIREITO: SOBRE AS RELAÇÕES ENTRE FILOSOFIA, TEORIA DO DIREITO E A ATUAÇÃO DO JUDICIÁRIO.

The Question of Truth in Pedro da Fonseca: the Problem of the simplex apprehensio and the Foundation of Logical Identities. This article deals with the theory of truth in Pedro da Fonseca (1528-1599) as it is presented in his commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics (1577-1612). The first part of the paper is dedicated to Fonseca’s definition of intellective truth within the doctrinal topography of the Aristotelian tradition. The Author especially points out Fonseca’s attempt to justify the notion of a “simple” truth (...) of the “simple apprehension”, based on a specific use of Cajetan’s distinction between “signified act” and “exercised act” as well as on a (partially) nominalist account of the relationship between “simple” and “enunciative” concepts. The second part deals instead with Fonseca’s definition of transcendental truth, understood as the conformity between the intellect and the esse realis of the res, and as the conformity of the latter with exemplars in God’s mind. Here the Author also reconstructs Fonseca’s theory of divine ideas and his theory of logical identities. (shrink)

This article explores the category of biopolitics through the use Roberto Esposito and Giorgio Agamben make of two Greek words, bios and ōē. In particular, I argue that the separation of bios and ōē as introduced in Homo Sacer has no "natural" nor "lingual" relevance. The exposition of such a fabulous antinomy simply ruins the historical matter of Agamben's discourse on biopolitics. Here, Esposito's research could be read as an attempt to found the category of biopolitics anew without repeating the (...) fiction of a bifurcation between ōē and bios. However, Esposito, in his own celebration of biopower, undermines the very power of language and, thus, ignores the variation of the invariant that is history. Esposito's and Agamben's difficulties lead us back to the possible ambition of all politics to absorb all life, as it was already expressed by Aristotle. In this sense, "modern biopolitics" becomes a case study for the totalitarian temptation of political order. (shrink)

L’article analyse la grève des camionneurs au Brésil, à partir de la centralité de la logistique en tant que terrain de lutte et d’accumulation dans le capitalisme contemporain. Dans le cas du Brésil, l’interruption complète de la provision d’intrants de base et l’occupation de routes dans tout le pays signifiaient la fin d’un cycle politico-économique basé sur la fausse alternative entre le néolibéralisme et le développementisme progressiste. La lutte des camionneurs, bien que ambiguë et contradictoire, révèle l’urgence pour nouvelles formes (...) de protection sociale et concrète, de valorisation des revenus et de la vie dans le cadre des luttes de la logistique. (shrink)

What happens when humans and birds engage each other through a collaboration-as-fantasy mediated by computers? Could such an exercise be modelled in a way that helps us to transcend the techno-ocularcentric fetishes for precision and certainty which demarcate our time? From Edgar Wind’s notion of 'incarnation' – as the place where empirical experience and metaphysical foundation meet in the single cognitive and experiential act – this article bridges the analogue with the digital, navigating nature’s strategies to embody inherited and learned (...) complex behaviours in the design of nests, in what I call data-nests. (shrink)

In this article, we explore the concept of a “right not to know” on a population rather than individual level. We argue that a population level “right not to know” is a useful concept for helping to define the appropriate boundaries of public engagement initiatives in the emerging public health genomics context.

While the realm of bioethics has traditionally focused on the rights of the individual and held autonomy as a defining principle, public health ethics has at its core a commitment to the promotion of the common good. While these two domains may at times conflict, concepts arising in one may also be informative for concepts arising in the other. One example of this is the concept of a “right not to know.” Recent debate suggests that just as there is a (...) “right to know” information about one's genetic status, there is a parallel “right not to know” when it comes to genetic information that if communicated, could be detrimental to an individual's social or psychological well-being. As new genetic technologies continue to change the nature of genetic testing and screening, it is crucial that normative frameworks to guide and assess genetic public health initiatives be developed. In this context, the question of whether a “right not to know” may also be said to exist for populations on a public health level merits attention. (shrink)

The Resilience Scale for Adolescents is a highly rated scale for measuring protective factors of resilience. Even though the READ has been validated in several different cultural samples, no studies have validated the READ across samples in German from Switzerland and Germany. The purpose of this study was to explore the construct validity of the German READ version in two samples from two different countries and to test the measurement invariance between those two samples. A German sample and a German-speaking (...) Swiss sample of seventh graders completed the READ, Hopkins Symptom Checklist, Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, General Self-Efficacy Scale, and Satisfaction with Life Scale. The expected negative correlations between READ and HSCL-25 and the positive correlations between RSE, self-efficacy, and SWL were supported. Furthermore, the results of the measurement invariance demonstrated that the originally proposed five-dimensional structure is equal in the German and Swiss samples, and it can be assumed that the same construct was assessed by excluding one item. The five-factor, 27-item solution is a valid and reliable self-report measure of protective factors between two German-speaking samples. (shrink)

Despite the significant contribution of cognitive-behavioral therapy to effective treatment options for specific syndromes, treatment progress has been stagnating, with response rates plateauing over the past several years. This stagnation has led clinical researchers to call for an approach that instead focuses on processes of change and the individual in their particular context. Process-based therapy is a general approach representing a model of models, grounded in evolution science, with an emphasis on idiographic methods, network models of case conceptualization, and enhancing (...) wellbeing. In this paper, we describe the theory underlying PBT and present a case study for how to apply PBT tools and principles to deliver process-informed and person-centered evidence-based treatment. In addition, we discuss lessons learned from our case and provide suggestions for future considerations when implementing PBT in clinical settings. (shrink)

Four instances of how science fiction contributes to the elucidation of novelty in the context of discovery are considered by extending existing discussions on temporal and use-novelty. In the first instance, science fiction takes an already well-known theory and produces its own re-interpretation; in the second instance, the scientific account is usually straightforward and whatever novelty that may occur would be more along the lines of how the science is deployed to extra-scientific matters; in the third instance, science fiction takes (...) an idea that appears impossible within the delimitations of reality and produces a universe where such a possibility becomes feasible; and in the fourth instance, science fiction extends from an idea already known at the time of the work’s production to simulate a possibility that could emerge should the extension be experimentally viable. However, the article will not end with a mere evaluation of these instances, but also proposes instances on how science fiction could contribute to new ways of experiencing, discerning, and working with scientific knowledge. (shrink)

The paper analyzes the ontological meaning of mood in Heidegger’s conception of Attunement, in order to relate this notion of Stimmung specifically to our “attunement” to a form of life, as conceived in Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language. It claims that moods spell out the constitutive impossibility to grasp and found the human experience as such. However, this impossibility is not a lack of human knowledge, but rather corresponds to the necessary opacity, indeterminability and groundlessness of every human experience, which make (...) it possible as such. The paper argues that the ontological mood of anxiety in Heidegger’s thought cannot be understood as a dark feeling, since it points to a constitutive sense of disorientation, which involves the impossibility to found and ensure the very familiarity of our ordinary experience. Moreover, the paper claims that the same impossibility is also involved in our “attunement” to language and to a form of life, as described by Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations. By analyzing the mood of trust sketched out by Wittgenstein in On Certainty, the paper suggests that the ontological mood of trust, as the groundless certainty of our praxis, points to the very impossibility to found and ensure every human experience. From this perspective, moods reveal the groundlessness of human experience and make us acknowledge it. (shrink)

This article brings into conversation two important literatures in contemporary political theory that have, for the most part, failed to engage one another: work spanning more than two decades on multiculturalism and identity politics, and neo-republican work on nondomination. The authors take as their starting-point two widely endorsed claims: that identities are constructs and that state actors play a crucial role in their construction. Their question is how democratic states should shape identity, and their central claim is that states should (...) do so in ways that promote what they call democratic nondomination. This ideal, they stress, is multifaceted. It has both an action-level and a system-level component. In addition, it has both an inter-agentive and an impersonal dimension. Attending to democratic nondomination in its complexity is crucial to the project of evaluating alternative possible forms of state identity construction. (shrink)

Este artigo, no qual analisamos a novela de Hilda Hilst Com meus olhos de cão (1986), tem como objetivo principal apontar os aspectos paratópicos na obra selecionada. Paratopia é um conceito formulado por Dominique Maingueneau e trata, basicamente, do não-lugar criado e ocupado por algumas literaturas e seus autores. Para isso, estudaremos a linguagem literária desenvolvida pela autora na obra, como também os personagens, o espaço e o tempo da narrativa, os quais acabam por deslocá-la do lugar mais comum do (...) cânone literário.Palavras-chave: Paratopia. Hilda Hilst. Não Lugar. Paratopia. AbstractThis article, in which we analyze Hilda Hilst’s novella Com meus olhos de cão [With my eyes of Dog] (1986), has as its main objective to point out the paratopyc aspects in the selected work. ‘Paratopy’ is a concept formulated by Dominique Maingueneau and it basically deals with the non-place created and occupied by some literatures and their authors. In order to do that, we study the literary language developed by the author, as well as the characters, space and time in her narrative, which, in the end, displace it from the most common place in the literary canon.Keywords: Paratopy. Hilda Hilst. Non-place. Paratopy. (shrink)

This essay is part of a special issue celebrating 50 years of Political Theory. The ambition of the editors was to mark this half century not with a retrospective but with a confabulation of futures. Contributors were asked: What will political theory look and sound like in the next century and beyond? What claims might political theorists or their descendants be making in ten, twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years’ time? How might they vindicate those claims in their future contexts? How (...) will the consistent concerns of political theorists evolve into the questions critical for people decades or centuries from now? What new problems will engage the political theorists (or their rough equivalents) of the future? What forms might those take? What follows is one of the many confabulations published in response to these queries. (shrink)

Since Norbert Wiener presented a new research field called the study of control and communication in the animal and the machine, the biological and the artificial universes are each time more integrated as pieces of a game that involves science, philosophy, technology, arts, architecture and several other fields. It is astonishing to take a look at an imaginary non-linear timeline where it is possible to see the ancient Ars Mnemonica inspiring the Leibniz combinatoria and how all these virtual knowledge structures (...) inspired the development of a communication and control machine called the computer. A machine that is quite an exploded black box artificial systems integrated into biological systems in a cybernetic structure through which most diverse kinds of information flows. We are living in times in which the logic of this machine becomes the core of our post-biological era in its essence, the era in which the biological and artificial realms are immersed in one another. An era in which we see [] humans in fact integrating with the fiction of their imagination as conjured up digitally by the computer, and in which the digital arts emanating from the cosmology of number are also a link between digital finality and infinity imagination, defending man in his impossibility to be simulated (Weibel 1999: 222). Considering this panorama in the contemporary artistic context, it could be stimulating to think about interactive digital art installations as systems in which the elements are both organic and artificial, both physical and virtual, interconnected like they were performing a cybernetic ballet. The aim of the present research is to study this choreography using the complex sciences framework. Following this objective, a series of parameters based on systemic measures of organization and complexity were structured. Our intention is, obviously, not to say that the work of art is more or less systemic, more or less complex or organized, but to help in understanding and to conceive the installation as a system: a complex adaptive system (CAS). (shrink)

Despite the entangled universe cannot be considered merely as an enormously complex system, as it is reactive to actions and observations, references on quantum entanglement in living systems may help find ways in which quantum effects can move from the microscopic to the macroscopic, in realms where the mind/brain behave as a quantum object and is sensitive to the dynamic state of the entire universe. Taking up vision from a synaesthetic perspective as a perfusion of senses, and putting together a (...) myriad of references around this perception phenomenon, the idea is to work in the building of artistic experiences where vision takes up a tactile function, emerging from a tension between the movements governed by the interaction of the attractors. (shrink)

We are mastering engineering behaviour on a molecular level. A growing number of researches investigating the relationship between microbiota, human brain and behaviour examine the impacts of manipulating specific microbial colonies in human hosts. To enable discussing and understanding communicational phenomena that occur in scales not visible to the naked eye, we propose the term Molmedia – a metaphorical reference to the concept of mole, denoting here not exclusively the quantitative amount of substance but the information exchange processes (taking the (...) substances as messages) that are going on at elementary entities level such as atomic, subatomic and molecular, within a given system that can be a living organism. We take media (plural of medium) as an intervening agency, means or instrument. Interacting emitters and receivers in this system are the microbiota and the organism actual cells. Within this self-organizing structure, the ongoing informational processes produce, as an emergence, the self and behavioral patterns that can be appreciated, manipulated and cannibalized. The art and science installation Transplanting the Self: Microbiome Anthropophagy is presented as an explorative exercise of the concept and related possibilities in science concerning gut–brain communication and the use of neuroregenerative nutrition in treatments for neurologic conditions. (shrink)

The literature on deep brain stimulation (DBS) and adaptive DBS (aDBS) raises concerns that these technologies may affect personality, mood, and behavior. We conducted semi-structured interviews with researchers (n = 23) involved in developing next-generation DBS systems, exploring their perspectives on ethics and policy topics including whether DBS/aDBS can cause such changes. The majority of researchers reported being aware of personality, mood, or behavioral (PMB) changes in recipients of DBS/aDBS. Researchers offered varying estimates of the frequency of PMB changes. A (...) smaller majority reported changes in personality specifically. Some expressed reservations about the scientific status of the term ‘personality,’ while others used it freely. Most researchers discussed negative PMB changes, but a majority said that DBS/aDBS can also result in positive changes. Several researchers viewed positive PMB changes as part of the therapeutic goal in psychiatric applications of DBS/aDBS. Finally, several discussed potential causes of PMB changes other than the device itself. (shrink)

The relationship between stress and unethical behaviour amongst non-tenured research staff in academia is a relatively unexplored phenomenon. The research reported herein was therefore carried out with the aim of exploring the relationship between stress, the socio-organisational factors which contribute to it, job satisfaction, perceptions of job instability, and the occurrence of unethical behaviour in research. 793 Italian researchers participated in the research—all of whom were working on fixed-term contracts—after being individually requested to complete an online questionnaire. The data indicate (...) that unethical behaviours occur with alarming frequency. The stress level reported is quite high, as is the level of perceived job insecurity, both of which impact upon levels of job satisfaction. Perceived stress levels also seem to play a role in the commission of unethical behaviours, but this relationship is irrelevant when one considers the role of social and organisational factors that are known to induce it. Indeed, it seems that there are various socio-organisational determinants of stress that have an obvious direct negative influence on the commission of unethical behaviours more than the stress level per se. This research paints a worrying picture in relation to the psycho-physical state of non-tenured researchers as a result of the working conditions in which they find themselves in Italian universities. (shrink)

The view that corporate psychopathy played a significant role in causing the global financial crisis, although insightful, paints a reductionist picture of what we present as the broader issue. Our broader issue is the tendency for psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism to cluster psychologically and culturally as ‘dark leadership’ within global financial institutions. Strong evidence for their co-intensification across society and in corporations ought to alarm financial regulators. We argue that an ‘ethical revival’ of prudence within prudential regulation ought to be (...) included in any package of solutions. Referencing research on moral muteness and the role of language in framing thoughts and behaviours, we recommend that regulators define prudence in an explicitly normative sense, an approach that may be further strengthened by drawing upon a widely appealing ethic of intergenerational care. An ethical revival of prudence, we argue, would allow the core problems of greed and myopia highlighted by corporate psychopathy theory to be addressed in a politically sensitive manner which recognises the pitfalls of regulating directly against corporate psychopathy. Furthermore, it would provide a viable conceptual framework to guide regulators along the treacherous path to more intrusive cultural regulation. (shrink)