Il valore della testimonianza - The Value of Testimony

Stefan Jentsch (1955–2016)

I have to begin with two disclaimers. Firstly, I am not speaking as an expert on the short story. My aim is to provide some introductory remarks about the relationship between gender and genre in the hope that short story afficionados can extrapolate and develop their own particular connections.1 I am speaking from my interest in feminist literary criticism, but here lies my second disclaimer, for feminist criticism which has had so much to say about women writers, about literary production, about questions of style, about the construction of meaning, has had much less to say about genre. The silence is not total: the difficulty for women writers to gain access to the major genres has been the subject of critical discussion. Equally, with the development of cultural studies, there has been a growing interest in popular female forms such as romance fiction, or women's rewritings of male-dominated forms — the detective story or science fiction.2 But at the moment much of the work lacks detail and specificity. Even that most obvious of research areas — women' s place in the development of the novel — is only now beginning to get the close analysis it deserves. As late as 1986 Jane Spencer could introduce her study of this very issue with the words: Eighteenth-century England witnessed two remarkable and interconnected literary events: the emergence of the novel and the establishment of the professional woman writer. The first of these has been extensively documented and debated, while the second has been largely ignored.

Reviewed by: Explorations in Ancient and Modern Philosophy by Myles F. Burnyeat Allison Piñeros Glasscock and Elizabeth C. Shaw and Staff* BURNYEAT, Myles F. Explorations in Ancient and Modern Philosophy, vol. 4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. xii + 395 pp. Cloth, $120.00 The eleven essays in this collection were originally published while Burnyeat was at All Souls College, Oxford (1996–2006) and during his subsequent retirement. Like volume 3 of the same series, the collection was published posthumously, with editorial work undertaken by Carol Atack, Malcolm Schofield, and David Sedley. Part I contains seven essays on topics in ontology and epistemology; part II contains four essays on physics and optics. The figures examined include the usual suspects—Plato and Aristotle (plus an appearance by Aquinas)—but Burnyeat also draws our attention to some less appreciated accomplices to the ancient philosophical project: the Platonist commentator Numenius of Apamea, the Pythagorean Archytas of Tarentum, and Anaxarchus of Abdera, a follower of Democritus. The result is a collection that showcases one of Burnyeat's greatest strengths: his ability to identify the clues left for us in ancient texts and to produce from them compelling and exquisitely detailed accounts of what ancient philosophers were thinking and why. One of the final papers of the volume illustrates Burnyeat's detective acumen. "Archytas and optics" starts from the following question: Why is optics absent from the mathematical curriculum Plato sketches in the Republic? Burnyeat hypothesizes that if mathematical optics existed when the Republic was written, Plato likely excised it from the curriculum on the grounds that the discipline would lead the student to focus on visible things and their appearances. The bulk of the paper is devoted to establishing the antecedent of this conditional. Burnyeat argues that mathematical optics did exist at the time of the Republic's writing, and he posits the noncanonical Pythagorean Archytas as its founder. To recognize the significance of this lacuna in the Republic's curriculum and to provide a persuasive identification of the founder of an entire discipline is already to make a substantial contribution to scholarship. But how Burnyeat arrives at his central conclusion is equally impressive. He takes the reader on a tour of Aristotle, Plato, and Iamblichus, fragment 4 of Archytas, and the Apologia of Apuleius (whom readers might better recognize as the novelist responsible for The Golden [End Page 345] Ass). The result is not only an answer to the paper's central question, but a deeper understanding of the broader intellectual network in which canonical figures like Plato and Aristotle operated. No fragment is too small to catch Burnyeat's notice, nor is any line in a manuscript too faint. Part I of the collection includes Burnyeat's famous paper "Kinēsis vs. energeia: a much-read passage in (but not of) Aristotle's Metaphysics." The central argument is that Metaphysics 9.6.1048b18–35 is out of place. It was written by Aristotle for a different context and should not be printed in book 9. Because this article is so well known, I will not dwell on the details of the argument, but once again Burnyeat's methodology is worthy of comment. The first part of the paper offers a careful examination of the Metaphysics's manuscript tradition that attends both to what is present and to what is absent. For example, we learn that the focus passage is missing from an entire branch of the tradition, which Burnyeat suggests is the result of a learned excision. Later, Burnyeat develops a psychological sketch of the scribe of manuscript Ab beginning from the observation that a faint line is drawn through part of the focus passage. He argues that the scribe's motivation is not disapproval of the passage's contents but a desire to keep his text and commentary in sync. Observations like these provide the foundation for Burnyeat's thesis about the philosophical import of the focus passage, and they demonstrate that the physical record can be just as vital to reconstructions of ancient philosophy as the words that the record preserves. Occasionally, Burnyeat offers more direct admonitions to his readers about how to approach ancient philosophy. A key lesson...

The Soul You Lose May Be Your OwnHistorical Considerations on Theology and Culture1 Fr. Augustine Thompson OP (bio) Keywords theologian, role, historical, culture, magisterium, apologetics, Cano, catechesis I. Introductory Remarks About twenty years ago when I was living in Bologna, Italy, the then-Cardinal Ratzinger came to speak at one of the “Evenings of St. Dominic,” as they were called. You may remember that at that time he had become famous for the series of interviews published as the Ratzinger Report, which amounted to a fairly critical evaluation of the trajectory of Catholic life in the post-Vatican II period. The subject of his lecture, given in the grandiose Renaissance salon called the Sala del Cinquecento, was “The Office of the Theologian.” In the talk, he described the theologian as mediating between the lived experience of Christians and the Church’s ongoing tradition. It was very much a reprise of the visions of the theologians who influenced the documents and spirit of the Council Fathers: De Lubac, Congar, Chenu, and others. There was little evidence that the cardinal was influenced by Karl Rahner, or had appropriated much modern philosophy in the mode of Edward Schillebeeckx or Bernard Lonergan. There was certainly no hint of liberation theology or “deconstruction” of a postmodern sort. It seemed to me a [End Page 69] somewhat old-fashioned talk, and I do not mean that as negative, nor even faint praise. I do not think it would be a caricature to summarize the cardinal’s understanding of the theologian’s office this way: the theologian’s task is to interpret and articulate the Christian experience of God’s action in the world, in the light of the Scriptures and the Church’s tradition, under the corrective guidance of the magisterium. I would have supposed that the prominent role of Scripture and tradition in this formula, as well as the explicit inclusion of Vatican oversight in it, should have played well in the Bologna environment, where the Ratzinger Report was the current refectory reading. But I was wrong. The next morning, after Lauds, when I found my way into the little nook where the friars usually stood around breakfasting on stale bread in bowls of caffe latte, I found a sizeable group of the Dominican faculty, perhaps the majority, and including the academic dean, Padre Alberto Galli, denouncing the cardinal’s heresies of the night before. The consensus was that his understanding of the theological project simultaneously denuded it of objectivity by founding it on the shifting sands of personal experience, while rendering it authoritarian and fideistic through the institutionalization of what amounted to an oracular magisterium. I would not say that the cardinal was the object of the proverbial odium theologicum, but to say the friar professors were unhappy would be putting it mildly. It seems I had chanced on what was perhaps the last sizeable group of neo-scholastics in charge of theological formation—at least it was the only one I can remember encountering. For Padre Galli and theologians like him, the objectivity of theology was founded on the objectivity of its first principles. Again, I do not think that it would be a parody to describe their understanding of the theologian’s office this way: the theologian is responsible for defending and elaborating the “Deposit of the Faith,” a series of propositions about God, Christ, and the Church, found in Scripture and tradition, and defined by the councils and popes as normative. This elaboration takes place by a logical method, whereby, through syllogistic arguments, [End Page 70] new propositions are propounded, and then offered to the magisterium for canonization as articles of the Faith. The magisterium does not exist without the theologians. Indeed, in the words of one Bolognese friar, the magisterium would have nothing to declare de fide if the theologians did not propound new propositions from old. Not only was this enterprise “objective,” a nonbeliever could probably pursue it, fashioning new propositions, logically consistent with a set of first principles that he might very well reject. No shifting sand here. And frankly, whatever one might think of this kind of theology, the cardinal’s version did look...

The Ministry of Housing, Territorial Equality and Rurality and Gridauh joined forces to examine the contributions provided by Title IV of the ALUR law on urban planning. To this end, after introductory remarks Ms. Dupuy-Lyon, assistant director of the ministry, and a general introduction by Professor Yves Jégouzo, the symposium’s work got under way with four round tables devoted to major aspects of the reform, respectively, the development of intercommunality which is making a place for itself as an essential level in territorial planning, densification of cities whose sprawl is being slowed, the development of land supply which should be helped by the reforms in the rules for preemption and subdivisions, and new development tools giving rise to negotiations and consultations with development operators. Academics and practitioners took part in these roundtables and drew up a text reflecting their discussions and certain points therein. These texts have been gathered together in the 2015 Dauh folder.

Francis Slade offers a view of modern philosophy through the prism of political philosophy, thereby departing from the more traditional interpretive route of epistemology. For Slade, reason understood as rule proves the key to the unity of the modern project of philosophical idealism. Modernity's political form, the state, is an ideal entity that is constituted by the rule of a pure, disembodied, and sovereign reason, paralleling the same employment of reason that generates the epistemological cogito of Descartes, the moral legislator of Kant, and the “disinterested and benevolent spectator” of Mill. The rule of modern reason effects what Slade calls the political, epistemological, and moral ideal subjects of modernity.

LEONARDO PADURA FUENTES AND THE CONTEMPORARY CUBAN DETECTIVE NOVEL: MODERN, POSTMODERN, OR A COMBINATION THEREOF? by Janet Pérez Texas Tech University BRIAN McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction (1987)1 distinguished succinctly between the modern and postmodern: “the dominant of modernist fiction is epistemological [. . . it] deploys strategies which foreground questions such as ‘How can I interpret this world of which I am a part?’ [. . .] .‘What is there to be known? Who knows it? How do they know it?’” (9). This logic is that of the detective story, the “epistemological genre par excellence,” argues McHale, noting that characters in these stories (and many classic Modernist texts) sift through the evidence provided by several witnesses of varying degrees of credibility in order to reconstruct and solve the enigma, mystery or crime. McHale lists various Modernist or epistemological themes, structures and devices including the focalization of evidence through a single consciousness. Epistemological difficulties are transferred to readers via strategies of “impeded form” (dislocated chronology, withheld information) and the “modernist tradition of radically unreliable narrators [producing] a text of enormous epistemological uncertainty” (9-10). By contrast, the “dominant of postmodernist fiction is ontological” deploying strategies which foreground questions such as “Which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it?” (10). Differentiation is less simple, because “at some point epistemological uncertainty becomes ontological [. . .] plurality or instability” (11). Unsurprisingly , all of the foregoing remarks apply to the whole or to parts of the detective fiction of Leonardo Padura Fuentes. Impeded form, dislocated chronol61 ogy, and withheld information, while present throughout, multiply in Padura’s more recent, post-tetralogy works, as will be shown, increasing epistemological uncertainty to that point mentioned by McHale where it becomes ontological instability or morphs into the Postmodern. Linda Hutcheon, in The Politics of Postmodernism2 includes a chapter on “The Politics of Parody,” especially relevant to Padura Fuentes’s works, as implied political commentary and sociological critiques occur in varying degrees throughout his fiction. Under the subheading of “Parodic Postmodern Representation ,” Hutcheon equates parody with ironic quotation, pastiche, appropriation , or intertextuality (93), all constants in Padura’s narratives. She argues that the “notion of the original as rare, single and valuable [. . .] is called into question” (93-94), an affirmation applicable to Padura’s representations of the Castro regime, the Cuban economy and more. Hutcheon notes that “parody works to foreground the politics of representation” (94), and Padura’s novelette , Adiós, Hemingway, a focus of this paper, exemplifies that process. In The Poetics of Postmodernism3 Hutcheon terms the “basic postmodernist stance [. . .] a questioning of authority” (202), which conveniently sums up Padura’s most enduring attitude. Lyotard’s questioning of metanarratives of legitimation and emancipation led to his arguing that Modernity could not be separated from notions of universality and unity, i.e., metanarratives, while Postmodernity questions all such narratives. He nonetheless argued in The Postmodern Condition4 that narrative is still the quintessential way of representing knowledge , for which reason Lyotard defined the postmodern condition as that which is defined by an active distrust of master narratives, a point especially applicable to the question of modern and postmodern in Padura and clearly visible in Adiós, Hemingway as regards political (Socialism, Marxism) and cultural metanarratives. Another point noted by several writers, stemming from the questioning of language itself and whether it really “communicates anything,” leads to the general Postmodernist rejection of the concept of ultimate truths, increasingly evident in Padura’s more recent work. This paper postulates an ongoing process of development in Padura’s novels over the nearly two decades since he began the Conde series, a process reflected in the trajectory of his protagonist and reminiscent of the personal liberation through art or writing whereby many youths of bourgeois or upperclass backgrounds rejected conformity, adopting Bohemian lifestyles, typically accompanied by political radicalization (i.e., rejection of the political Establishment , its values and metanarratives). Observing Padura’s (and Conde’s) trajectories from the beginning to the present, the emerging pattern is at first predominantly Modernist through the end of the tetralogy “Las cuatro estaciones ” (1989-1997), followed by a brief period of transition with increasing Postmodern elements in the pivotal year of 2001...

Evidence of a social gradient in health literacy has been found in all reported national population surveys in Europe. This workshop will examine the explanations for this social gradient and explore ways to optimise the contribution that health literacy makes in mediating the causes and effects of established social determinants of health. This will include consideration of practical approaches to improving health literacy in socially disadvantaged populations as a contribution to reducing health inequities within and across European countries. The workshop will explore the concept of critical health literacy and the potential to improve public awareness of and capacity to act on the wider social determinants of health. It will also draw upon existing evidence from interventions that demonstrate the feasibility of improving health literacy among higher-risk and diverse populations. This will include consideration of approaches to improving frontline professional skills and support; approaches to organizational and systems health literacy, working directly with people to develop critical skills in accessing, understanding and applying health information; and ensuring that in public health policy, priority is proportionate to need - reaching and engaging the population groups disproportionately affected by low health literacy. Recognising that research remains underdeveloped and the effects of interventions on health inequity are largely untested, the workshop will also consider where the most important research gaps exist and where future health literacy research should be prioritised. The workshop chair will provide introductory and summary remarks to the workshop. The co-chair will manage the panel discussion and audience participation in the workshop. The individual panel members will make 3-minute introductions to key issues from different perspectives examining the mediating and moderating role of health literacy in addressing the social determinants of health. The panel is made up of individuals from academic and policy roles and at different career stages who can offer complementary perspectives on these issues. Following the presentations, the co-chair will present some follow-up questions to the panel before engaging directly with the workshop participants for an open discussion scheduled to last for 30 minutes of the workshop. Key messages • Improving health literacy is not a panacea for entrenched inequities in health but can help moderate the impact on health of other social determinants and provide an important practical response. • Public health policy and practice intended to improve health literacy should prioritise reaching and engaging the population groups disproportionately affected by low health literacy. Speakers/Panelists Gill Rowlands Newcastle University, Newcastle, UK Stephan Van den Broucke Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium Ana Rita Pedro NOVA National School of Public Health, Lisbon, Portugal Christina Dietscher Austrian Ministry of Health, Vienna, Austria Susie Sykes London South Bank University, London, UK

Improved access to generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) platforms and technologies has prompted greater awareness of their potential application in health communication. This workshop will examine this potential alongside the practical challenges and risks of using generative AI in health communication in the broader context of the European Union AI Act. The workshop will explore the implications for the concept of digital health literacy in ways that reduce or mitigate existing digital health inequities across and within Europe. Chatbots and conversational AI platforms such as ChatGPT have opened opportunities for people to find, understand and use health information in significantly different ways. Public health professionals are already using these technologies to simplify health and medical information and to make it available in different languages. AI assisted technologies are also being used to create interactive and engaging learning experiences that provide the public with real-time feedback and insights about their health as well as prompting and reinforcing actions they can take to improve health. These developments have fundamental implications for our understanding of digital health literacy and the methods we use to support people in optimising the potential benefits of AI. Different communities in Europe vary considerably in their - access to digital technology, - skills to discriminate the accuracy and reliability of information, and - trust and responsiveness to what digital technologies have to offer. Building these fundamental digital health literacy skills is a critical priority if we are to ensure that all people benefit equitably from the potential offered by AI. Those of us engaged in improving health literacy have an important role to play in influencing the future direction of AI in health communication, including and especially by engaging in research and development activities that build evidence of effectiveness and support the development of digital health literacy skills in parallel with the expansion of access to AI-assisted digital technologies. The workshop chairs will provide introductory and summary remarks, moderate the panel discussion, and facilitate audience participation in the workshop. The individual panel members will make 3-minute introductions to key issues from different perspectives on the emerging practical applications of generative AI in health communication as well as the implications for strategies to improve digital health literacy in different population groups. The panel is made up of individuals in different roles and at different career stages who can offer complementary perspectives on these issues. Following the presentations, the co-chair will present some follow-up questions to the Panel before engaging directly with the workshop attendees for an open but structured discussion scheduled to last for 30 minutes of the Workshop. Key messages • We will examine how generative artificial intelligence has opened new both new opportunities and risks in the ways people find, understand and use health information. • We will consider how we can optimise the benefits of generative AI in a way that is equitable through the development of digital health literacy within and between communities in Europe. Speakers/panelists Catherine Jenkins London South Bank University, London, UK Diane Levin-Zamir Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel Christopher Le Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Innlandet, Norway Miguel Telo de Arriaga Direção-Geral da Saúde, Lisbon, Portugal

The 14th Bethune Round Table Conference on International Surgery1. Sustainable partnerships and local capacity building: Ukraine–Canada experience.2. COSECSA, achievements and challenges in improving global surgery.3. The VCU international trauma system development program in Central and South America.4. Establishing a contextually appropriate laparoscopic program in resource restricted environments: experience in Botswana.5. Collaborative care to reduce maternal deaths from postpartum hemorrhage.6. Building

The discovery of the laws of nature has long been considered a principal aim of science. Of course, many laws that science discovers are not commonly designated “laws.” Alongside Boyle’s law, the law of universal gravitation, and the law of supply and demand, there are Archimedes’ principle, Maxwell’s equations, and the formulas of stoichiometry. Philosophy does not aim to account for the use of the term “law” or to discover the natural laws. Rather, philosophy strives to understand what it is that scientists discover when they discover laws. Philosophers have generally distinguished laws from “accidents” (that is, from contingent facts that are not matters of law) on several grounds. First, laws stand in especially intimate relations to subjunctive conditionals and counterfactual conditionals. Second, laws can explain why various facts hold. Third, laws help to give causes their powers to produce their effects. Fourth, laws restrict what is possible in nature; laws are universal and cannot be violated. (They possess “natural necessity.”) Fifth, laws specify the properties characteristic of various natural kinds. Sixth, when scientists confirm that some general hypothesis makes accurate predictions regarding each of the unexamined cases there might be, lying in a vast range, scientists are often basing their inductive reasoning on the presupposition that this hypothesis may be a law. Thus, laws are central to a wide range of core topics in metaphysics and epistemology. A philosophical account of natural law must refine these various respects in which laws are supposed to differ from accidents. It must then specify what laws are such that they are capable of playing their distinctive scientific roles. A wide variety of rival accounts of law has been proposed. Some philosophers defend “non-Humean” accounts, according to which laws are constituted by irreducible necessities, subjunctive facts, essences, or causal powers—or laws are themselves fundamental rather than reducible to other sorts of facts. Other philosophers defend “Humean” accounts, according to which the laws are reducible entirely to some non-modal features of the universe’s actual past, present, and future history, together perhaps with some features of scientists, their theories, or their practices. Yet other philosophers deny that the category of “laws of nature” is helpful for understanding science or reality. Some philosophers investigate the extent to which laws arise in the biological and social sciences. Although the nature of natural law was of great interest to early modern philosophers, this article is confined to works of analytic philosophy after 1945.

As is well known, Descartes proposed treating the mind and the body as two different substances. The cost of modern philosophy having split the universe into two different substances was the blocking of any empirical investigation about consciousness and mind. As a matter of fact, the physical world is not only causally closed but is also directly involved in all other processes of our world at any level of complexity. This does not mean that mind cannot be considered as an emergent phenomenon. In the following, both the physical and the mental will be considered as relevant.After some introductory remarks, some philosophical positions are examined. Thereafter, a solution to the problem is proposed: to consider three kinds of interactions and interconnections: mind–physical world, mind–brain, brain–physical world. The consequence of this proposal is a new understanding of the integration of mind and body. Then, some philosophical questions are raised.

Introductory remarks at the round table discussion on fracture at the 13th international congress of theoretical and applied mechanics

There is an urgent need to further integrate climate, health, and equity across knowledge, practice and policy, to ensure joint solutions to interlinked problems. This workshop, developed by EuroHealthNet and the European Environment Agency (EEA), will be framed by cutting-edge research and opportunities for policy and action highlighted in the new Lancet Countdown - EEA publication on “Responding to the health risks of climate change in Europe”, as well as the recent INHERIT Horizon 2020 initiative, coordinated by EuroHealthNet. It will seek to explore the four COP26 goals (Mitigation, Adaptation, Finance and Collaboration), specifically discussing solutions to mainstream health and equity considerations within these four actions, and to tackle the already occurring and projected impacts of climate change on human health. The added value of the workshop lies in the bridging of different sectors and actors, and in the emphasis not just on the links between health and the environment, but also health and environmental inequalities. From a knowledge integration perspective, the workshop will explore the role and value of the new European Climate and Health Observatory, ensuring that EPHC participants learn about this important initiative. From a practice perspective, speakers and participants will be invited to present effective solutions to reduce the climate-related impacts on human health, discussing how joint actions can improve health equity as well as restore the environment. From a policy perspective, the workshop will prepare recommendations for actions, related to the goals and outcomes of COP26. The workshop will be organised as a roundtable discussion with 5 panellists. Each panellist will provide short introductory remarks, after which the Chair will moderate an interactive discussion with participants. The speakers will touch on knowledge, practice and policy evidence, solutions and guidance to address health, environmental and justice issues from the different perspectives of the European Environment Agency, the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment of the Netherlands, the municipality of Lahti in Finland (European Green Capital 2021), the Wellbeing Economy Alliance, and the Fridays for Future movement. Finally, the workshop will also serve to prepare recommendations and questions for EPHC Plenary 5 on Climate change, justice and public health, as well as a joint EuroHealthNet-EEA-EUPHA statement reflecting on COP26 in light of the views and actions raised by speakers and participants from both the workshop and the Plenary. Speakers/Panelists Aleksandra Kazmierczak European Environment Agency, Copenhagen, Denmark Brigit Staatsen RIVM, Bilthoven, Netherlands Jenni Simkin City of Lahti, Lahti, Finland Amanda Janoo Wellbeing Economy Alliance, Glasgow, UK Clara Mayer Fridays for Future, Berlin, Germany Key messages There is an urgent need to implement integrated environment/health/equity actions to address joint challenges and effectively respond to climate change impacts on health. The workshop provides actionable solutions across knowledge, practice and policy to leverage on the opportunity to deliver interventions that maximise health, equity and environmental benefits.

This is the final session of the Fifth International Workshop Maturation Phenomenon in Cerebral Ischemia and we will have a Round Table. I’ve invited 3 of our prominent speakers and members to help chair the discussion and there are a number of topics. Perhaps we’ll start with John Hallenbeck making some introductory remarks. We want to cover what we think are the important issues that have been presented in the various talks. We then want to open this up to some round table discussion to see what the problems are and what the promise might be.