DADU

This paper presents the status of research underway on the increasing number of participatory experiences in designing and producing cultural events, and particularly those initiatives leading to the realization of exhibit-events. This phenomenon is part of a broader context of having gone beyond certain aspects of the consumer society through initiatives linked to the social economy. The paper analyzes this trend's repercussions in cultural management and its impact on the current debate on design.

This paper will present a modest theoretical contribution, from an historical perspective, trying to underline the fact that our knowledge on visual communication has deep roots in fields that reside under the domain of others non visual disciplines. By doing so, we hope that this short jump into the past may result useful to face contemporary communication challenges.

In 1316 the town-republic of Sassari issued its 'Statuti', a collection of regulations describing the city's legal and administrative matters. Although the contents of the document vividly present many traits of the city's XIV century's life, the original form in which it came to us-in Latin and vernacular Sardinian-make it very inaccessible to the general public. In the 700's anniversary of the Statuti the local Historic Archives started a vast dissemination project involving us on the grounds of our expertise in communication design. Over the following year our research unit was engaged in the production of an experimental informative platform in which various artifacts-three animated short films, an illustrated booklet, and a website, among the others-explore ways to enhance the degree of accessibility of such an important historical account to the general public. A key step along this process was the understanding that as different users have varying abilities in processing the available information, to provide actual access to it implies varying degrees of interpretation of the text per se, which clearly raises questions of historical accuracy. This brought to the development of a model in which a series of artifacts based on various degrees of 'proximity'-and therefore of interpretation-to the original text, can represent different access points for the understanding of an otherwise very inaccessible text.

The evolution of multimedia formats and the appearance of an ecosystem of open source solutions for digital communication promotes a process in which the construction of knowledge, once confined to very specific institutions, opens up to the contributions from a variety of new actors. A recent dissemination project for our University's Historical Scientific Museum has allowed us to confront with this emerging scenario. This paper presents the strategies we adopted for empowering the visitor's experience to a small exhibition space intended as an introductory step to the scientific collections of the University of Sassari. The project may be considered as an attempt to communicate complexity, exploring different ways for disseminating contents, tailoring goals, targeting audiences, to a very specific context and set of resources, in the direction of developing an integrated framework of tangible and digital elements from a locally based cosmopolitan perspective.

La presente ricerca tratta di come comunità e conoscenze trovano modo di dare vita a spazi fisici e di come il design può contribuire a questo fenomeno intervenendo sia nella definizione funzionale degli spazi che nelle dinamiche di questi processi di aggregazione. Nonostante l’enfasi con cui oggi sempre più spesso si sottolinea la natura impersonale ed intangibile del sapere – e la crescente immaterialità dei supporti con cui se ne distribuiscono le codificazioni – gli spazi specificamente attrezzati per la divulgazione e per la creazione di esperienze culturali continuano ad essere vivaci luoghi di incontro e di dialogo. Secondo Z. Bauman, viviamo una epoca in cui la società si caratterizza per rappresentare i propri membri come individui e dove l’appartenenza ad una determinata comunità non è data dal luogo, dalla genealogia o dalla tradizione ma è il frutto di una scelta personale, spesso di carattere transitorio. In questo contesto l’esistenza di dinamiche di aggregazione socia...

A considerable number of studies in epidemiology and biomedicine investigate the etiology of complex diseases by considering (self-identified) race as a relevant variable and focusing on the differences in risk among racial groups in the United States; they extensively draw on a genetic hypothesis - viz. the hypothesis that differences in the risk of complex diseases among racial groups are largely due to genetic differences covarying with genetic ancestry - that appears highly problematic in the light of both current biological evidence and the theory of human genome evolution. Is this reason for dismissing self-identified races? No. An alternative promising use of self-identified races exists, and ironically is suggested by those studies that investigate the etiology of complex diseases without focusing on racial differences. These studies provide a large amount of empirical evidence supporting the primacy of the contribution of non-genetic as opposed to genetic factors to the risk of complex diseases. We show that differences in race – or, better, in racial self-identification – may be critically used as proxies for differences in risk-related exposomes and epigenomes in the context of the United States. Self-identified race is what we need to capture the complexity of the effects of present and past racism on people’s health and investigate risk-related external and internal exposures, gene-environment interactions, and epigenetic events. In fact patterns of racial self-identifications on one side, and patterns of risk-related exposomes and epigenomes on the other side, constantly coevolve and tend to match each other. However, there is no guarantee that using self-identified races in epidemiology and biomedical research will be beneficial all things considered: special attention must be paid at balancing positive and negative consequences.

L'architettura è un campo in cui l’intervento umano sul mondo provoca conseguenze rilevanti e durature, spesso materialmente persistenti per centinaia e centinaia di anni. Sarebbe quindi naturale aspettarsi che gli architetti riflettano in abbondanza, per abitudine consolidata, su quali siano i propri obblighi morali nei confronti delle generazioni future . È sorprendente constatare che non è così. L'architettura – come disciplina, come area di ricerca scientifica, come cultura professionale, come pensiero consostanziale ad un agire – non prende solitamente in effettiva considerazione il problema dei nostri obblighi verso le generazioni future. Questo articolo cerca di fare il punto sui modi in cui potrebbe farlo, se volesse.

As a consequence of Hume’s famous is-ought problem, it may seem that no rational justification of a moral statement can ever be inferentially provided, and no argument typically used in applied ethics would ever deserve the title of rational justification.
This paper aims to propose a fallibilist, non-foundationalist account of rational justification of a moral standpoint based on rational argumentation. This account will be developed within a noncognitivist theory of morality – a framework that seems to constitute the most challenging context for a similar attempt.
First, the paper shows how we can have a good rational justification of a moral claim also if its (necessary) moral premises are neither indubitable nor properly inferentially justified, as long as we adopt what is called a Popperian solution to the “problem of prescriptive basic statements”. Second, it argues that a good rational justification of a moral claim does not need to be deductively valid. Using the idea that implicit presumptions introduced by invalid inferences can be monitored by a number of related critical questions, the article distinguishes between fallacious and non-fallacious invalid arguments, and examines how a use of an invalid non-fallacious argument can count as a rational justification of a moral position in applied ethics.
However, applied ethics must do its part, and must be explicitly based on rational argumentation.

This paper claims that the reconstruction of the Italian bioethical debate provided by Giovanni Fornero [G. Fornero, M. Mori, laici e cattolici in bioetica (2012)] is correct; nonetheless the conceptual dichotomy catholic/secular (" cattolico/ laico "), which the reconstruction relies on, is neither necessary nor required by facts or phenomena. Since true descriptions of the same facts can be obtained by relying on alternative systems of categories, a more useful set of categories is proposed, consisting in two independent dichotomies: dogmatic/antidogmatic (" dogmatico/laico ") – relating to reasoning and arguing – and pro-sanctity-of-life/pro-quality-of-life – relating to moral positions concerning bioethical issues. Fornero's distinction between a strong and a weak sense of secularity (" laicità debole/forte ") is accordingly rejected.

In Milan Kundera’s novel Farewell Waltz, Doctor Skreta, a consultant at a
Czechoslovakian centre for the treatment of female infertility, violates many of his patients’ rights: he is indifferent to their needs, neglects confidentiality, and is a manipulator who conducts his career as a doctor in a seriously ethically dubious way. This article claims that the cause of Skreta’s unethical conduct is his tendency to generalization and holism. He projects his moral concerns onto the wrong ontological level, paying no attention to single individuals but to an abstraction called ‘humanity.’ The same fundamental flaw in Dr. Skreta will be germane to criticisms of utilitarianism and eugenics. In fact, Skreta reveals himself to be a secret promoter of eugenics. Kundera’s novel maintains that a very ethically-involved branch of medicine could be a trap, in the case where one is unable to have the well-being of single individuals at heart, and is only morally concerned about abstract super-individual entities like ‘humanity.’

In his film Hable con Ella (2002) Pedro Almodóvar features the character of Benigno, a nurse who is in permanent charge of Alicia, a young patient in a persistent vegetative state. Benigno talks continuously to Alicia. Almodóvar wants the audience to be torn between diagnosing insanity and rationality; and obtains his result in equipping Benigno with good arguments supporting his behaviour. I try to show that Benigno’s “talking to her” is not less reasonable than the doctors’ treating Alicia, since both acts can be found to be grounded in the same kind of Pascalian wager concerning the possibility of Alicia’s awakening.
Benigno also loves Alicia, and rapes her. Again, Almodóvar supply the audience with conflicting moral arguments, and tempts it to arrive at this frightening conclusion: Benigno may be not guilty. In fact, as an individual whose higher-brain is apparently dead, Alicia has lost forever her capacity to be conscious. If such capacity is constitutive of being a person, then Alicia properly is an ex-person – just as any dead body is. Since ex-persons cannot be harmed or wronged, it seems we cannot say that Benigno either harms or wrongs Alicia. May be we cannot even say that he rapes her, since the concept of rape may not apply to non-persons. But do all our moral feelings align with these conclusions? Indeed rival rational arguments seem to contrast them too. Almodóvar tries to render acceptable the idea of both moral condemnation and innocence of Benigno, and the film actually is a rational, open ethical discussion where opposite arguments collapse.

In this paper I focus on the question whether there are new ethical problems arising in nanotechnology, as opposed to mere new instances of old ethical problems. Firstly, I show that we cannot do without the general distinction between being an instance of a new ethical problem and being a new instance of an old one. Secondly, I propose one possible way of interpreting the distinction, and accordingly I give a definition of “being a new ethical problem”. Thirdly I examine whether we have good reasons to claim that there are, or there are going to be, new ethical problems in nanotechnology. My answer is negative: there is no new type of ethical problem in nanotechnology, and rather there are just new occurrences of some well-known types of ethical problems. Fourthly I consider three arguments by van de Poel (2008) against my conclusion. I argue that my negative answer is consistent with the claim that some ethical issues arising in nanotechnology may require new normative standards, or new analytical tools. I conclude that it is likely that some ethical issues arising in nanotechnology will have a deep impact on our ethical theories and values – and that ethical reflection on nanotechnology will be one of the mother lodes of future ethical research – in spite of the fact that no ethical problem in nanoethics will actually be “new”.

If we accept causal exclusion, property dualism and physical determinism, mental epiphenomenalism follows. According to Yablo (1992), we can save mental causation by rejecting causal exclusion and considering the mental/physical relation as an instance of the determinable/determinate relation. In this paper I examine Crane’s argument (2008) against the causal relevance of determinables, and I argue that we still have good reasons to think that determinables may be causally efficacious. As mental properties can be also considered as exhaustive disjunctions of physical realizers, the causal relevance of mental properties is also questioned by the widely shared opinion that disjunctive properties can not be causally efficacious. I consider Clapp’s arguments (2001) in favor of the causal relevance of disjunctive properties, and I conclude that disjunctive properties may survive both Armstrong’s famous objections (1978).