1,720,977 research outputs found
Questioning Spinoza on Positive Freedom. A Reconstruction of the Berlin-West Debate
Full text linkSpinoza’s political philosophy is generally considered a cornerstone of modern liberalism, for it promotes a democratic system in which the warranty of tolerance and freedom should not just be ensured a posteriori by the state, but represents the proper purpose whereby the commonwealth itself is established. Nonetheless, in his examination of the concepts of positive and negative freedom, Isaiah Berlin recognized in the author of the Theological-Political Treatise the germ of a possible authoritarian and paternalistic drift, due to his consideration of political freedom in the former sense. In response to this accusation, in a 1993 article appeared on Political Studies, professor David West argued in favour of a softer consideration for Spinoza’s politics. Analysing the Spinozian notion of positive freedom in a broader sense (namely, enriching it with some moral and ontological considerations drawn from Ethics) he gets to sustain that it doesn’t necessarily lead to the tyrannical paternalism which Berlin generally associates to rationalist political theories, like those of Plato, Hegel, Fichte and Marx. The aim of this paper is to illustrate the debate, examining both the Berlin-West crosstalk and the political chapters of the Treatise in order to understand whether and to which extent Spinoza’s accusation is justified
Fiat veritas, pereat populus?
No full textRecensione a Johan Farkas, Jannick Schou, "Post-Truth, Fake News and Democracy. Mapping the Politics of Falsehood", New York, Routledge, 2019, pp. 166. Per quanto sopito dall’irruzione sulla scena di questioni ben più pressanti (prima tra tutte, la crisi pandemica), l’incendio della post-verità pare non essersi del tutto spento. È pur vero che, cinque anni dopo il nefando 2016, i cori apocalittici che denunciavano la «fine dei fatti» e la «crisi della verità» hanno perso parte del loro trasporto. Nondimeno, la crisi della democrazia, a esse collegata, è qui per restare
Segnico, simbolico, politico: Note sulla teoria della significazione di Ernesto Laclau e Chantal Mouffe
Full text linkThis article explores some central features of the theory of signification put forward by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, taking into account both Hegemony and Socialist Strategy and some further reflections developed by Laclau alone. Through the analysis of the concepts of discourse, empty signifier, dislocation and antagonism it is argued that, in the discourse-theoretical framework, the Saussurean “arbitrariness of the sign” can be limited only through the symbolic unification of a discourse and the drawing of antagonistic frontiers, and that these latter processes rest on contingent decisions, that is operations pertaining to the order of the political
Early Home Therapies against Covid-19. An Italian Case of Politicisation of Science?
Full text linkSince February 2020, strategies aimed at containing and managing the Covid-19 syndemic have been developed by the governments of European countries. Among these measures, the possibility of an early treatment of the disease has been considered of fundamental importance, both for curing the disease and governing the syndemic. Despite their potential, early therapies received a somehow unexpected treatment in Italy and the debate around them gave rise to a very evident conflict between proponents and opponents of those treatments, to the point that some of the former organised a properly political movement in order to promote the integration of early home therapies in the official health protocols. Not surprisingly, the issue of early therapies has been considered an exemplary case of politicisation of science. However, the assimilation of the early therapy controversy to the frame of politicisation of science cannot fully explain why these protocols were discarded by political and health authorities. Rather, the consideration of health protocols as socio-technical objects shifts the attention on the vast range of cultural, political and economic factors that contributed to the general resistance towards those treatments. Therefore, we aim to analyse the media coverage of the phenomenon, and investigate the protocols of home treatment of Covid-19, paying attention to the interaction of the factors that contributed to the exclusion of home therapies into national guidelines
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
L’incontro con l’Altro per l’Educazione alla Cittadinanza Globale. Riflessioni dalla valutazione d’impatto del caso “DIMMI di storie migranti”
No full textThe Author suggest methodological proposals for the evaluation of complex interventions experimented in a field evaluation. The paper begins introducing some key elements of the strategy for Global Citizenship Education. Then, after presenting the case, methodological implications of the complexity of these impacts are discussed. Complex dimensions are specifically identified in the dynamics of program implementation and the related causal processes. Lastly, the adopted solutions to deal with this complexity are shown and some impact evidence are presented
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
- …
