“They Collected What Was Left of the Scraps”: Food Surplus as an Opportunity and Its Legal Incentives

For many years the problem of food security has been addressed only in relation to developing countries, due to the fact that people in developed nations had a relatively abundant supply of food. This is not anymore true both because of the economic crisis and an increasing demand of food at the global level. Therefore, food surplus in the food chain both at the production level and at household consumption could become a resource. In this respect, legal rules (e.g., the Good Samaritan Act in the United States) may provide incentives to economic agents for recovering food surplus. This paper examines in a comparative way legal remedies provided by United States and European Union to address food surplus. Some suggestions are provided to further improve the systems as well

Communicative strategies in the Italian of Igbo-Nigerian immigrants in Italy: a contact-linguistic approach

Copyright © 2009 by Akademie Verlag GmbH.This paper reports on communicative strategies employed by Igbo-Nigerian immigrants living in the city of Padova (North-Eastern Italy). It proposes a new approach to the analysis of non-guided Second Language Acquisition (henceforth SLA). This approach treats immigrant speakers qua effective communication achievers. It focuses on communicative interaction, treating individual linguistic strategies as language innovations potentially initiating language change. It also sees non-guided SLA as a contact phenomenon and adopts a unified contact approach which puts all contact phenomena under the same umbrella

Giustizia sociale e misconoscimento

Negli Stati costituzionali del secondo ‘900, il sistema dei “diritti fondamentali” – all’indomani delle positivizzazioni internazionali e costituzionali fiorite dopo la sconfitta dei totalitarismi – posto al vertice della gerarchia delle fonti, ha assunto il ruolo di inviolabile presupposto del riconoscimento della dignità individuale e sociale degli esseri umani. Ma proprio per il loro forte ruolo simbolico di mediazione delle relazioni di riconoscimento sociale e intersoggetivo e di orientamento della prassi comune, la loro implementazione interpretativa nel sistema di ogni società ‘aperta’ dipende da concrete aspettative di giustizia derivate da pratiche sociali di misconoscimento dei gruppi minoritari e quindi dalla risposta ‘integratrice’ del sistema in sede legislativa o (più spesso) giurisdizionale, con le tecniche di bilanciamento dei principi ad opera delle Corti Costituzionali. Nel saggio si intende quindi evidenziare come a) nella cornice costituzionale di ogni società democratica, la ‘lotta per il diritti’ non deve essere strategia conservativa di status ma lotta per l’eguaglianza e la parità di trattamento di soggetti discriminati; b) affinché i diritti fondamentali costituiscano il fondamento morale della democrazia bisogna prepararsi a fornire argomentazioni sulla loro validità in base a ragioni giustificabili dal punto di vista di tutti gli esseri umani (Habermas, Benhabib)

Civil society, Islamism and democratisation: the case of Morocco

The positive role that an active civil society plays in processes of democratisation is often highlighted in the literature. However, when it comes to the Middle East and North Africa, such activism is considered to be detrimental to democratisation because the predominant role is played by Islamist groups. The explanation for this rests with the perceived ‘uncivil’ and undemocratic Islamist ethos of such groups. This paper challenges this assumption and argues that Islamist associations can be a potential force for democratisation for three reasons. First, they are capable of political learning; secondly, they generate secular civil society activism as a response to their activities, increasing the number of actors in the political and social system; and finally, they can cooperate with other civil society groups on a number of issues, given that they are all subject to the same authoritarian constraints. The paper focuses in particular on the case of Morocco and the Islamist group Jamiat al-Adl wal-Ihsan

L’orgoglio identitario e lo ‘spirito di Dante’ nella musica italiana postunitaria

In tracing the history of the reception of Dante in music, program music, especially for orchestra or piano, appears as a most fertile ground. The successful ‘culture of interpretation’ made some Dantesque topics into an aesthetic source of inspiration. This production intensifies in 1865, the six hundred Dante anniversary, rejoining the idea of a Dantesque poetry regenerating the social and cultural life of unified Italy. But the search for a national identity was nevertheless fragmentary and many manifestations often acquired a political significance loaded with certain irredentist meaning. Particularly articulated where the ones in Florence, Italy’s new capital, from 14-16 May. The musical performances of most of the festivities took place under the supervision of Teodulo Mabellini, who stimulated much choral music on the basis of foreign festivals. Several pieces of patriotic content were performed by hundreds of people. He composed on the occasion the cantata Lo spirito di Dante. The first performance of a new symphony inspired by the Divine Comedy, composed by Giovanni Pacini on a theme by Abrano Basevi, was also held.Ripercorrendo la storia della ricezione di Dante nella musica, si nota che il terreno più fertile è stato quello della musica ‘a programma’, specialmente per orchestra o per pianoforte: grazie alla la fortuna della ‘cultura dell’interpretazione’, determinati luoghi danteschi diventano fonte d’ispirazione, a livello di suggestioni estetiche. La produzione s’infittisce intorno al 1865, anno del sesto centenario dantesco, collegandosi all’idea della capacità della poesia dantesca di rigenerare la vita sociale e culturale di un’Italia finalmente unificata, ma di fatto ancora frammentaria e alla ricerca di un’identità nazionale. Le numerose manifestazioni acquisirono spesso un significato politico e si caricarono talora di significati irredentistici. Particolarmente articolate furono quelle tenute a Firenze, neocapitale italiana, tra il 14 e il 16 maggio. Parte rilevante dei festeggiamenti, le iniziative musicali furono poste sotto la supervisione di Teodulo Mabellini, che, sulla scorta dei festival stranieri, incentivò la musica corale: numerosi brani di contenuto patriottico furono eseguiti da masse di centinaia di persone. Mabellini offrì per l’occasione il suo contributo con la partitura della cantata Lo spirito di Dante. Si tenne inoltre la prima esecuzione di una nuova sinfonia ispirata alla Divina Commedia, composta da Giovanni Pacini, su tema proposto da Abramo Basevi

Alfredo Civita filosofo della mente

This brief paper focuses on Alfredo Civita’s contribution to the philosophical reflection on the mind, with particular attention to his most meditated and coherent work, Saggio sul cervello e la mente (Guerini, 1993). From this book the ability to make three ingredients interact equally emerges as a characteristic of the still very current Civita’s thought: originality, methodological rigor and convergence between theoretical reflection and clinical practice

A review of executive function deficits in autism spectrum disorder and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder

Executive dysfunction has been shown to be a promising endophenotype in neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). This article reviewed 26 studies that examined executive function comparing ASD and/or ADHD children. In light of findings from this review, the ASD + ADHD group appears to share impairment in both flexibility and planning with the ASD group, while it shares the response inhibition deficit with the ADHD group. Conversely, deficit in attention, working memory, preparatory processes, fluency, and concept formation does not appear to be distinctive in discriminating from ASD, ADHD, or ASD + ADHD group. On the basis of neurocognitive endophenotype, the common co-occurrence of executive function deficits seems to reflect an additive comorbidity, rather than a separate condition with distinct impairments

Mercantilism and Class Struggle: Italy in the International Economy, 1960-1990

The outbreak of the world-wide economic crisis in 2008 and its later worsening brought the topic of Italy’s ‘economic decline’ to the forefront of public debate The most common explanations of this decline revolve round the inability of Italian society to adapt to the new conditions caused by the advent of the ‘second wave of globalisation’ after the 1970s. Emphasis falls on the burden of public debt, the inadequacy of the reforms of Italy’s economic and social institutions (privatisation, flexibility in the labour market, market liberalisation and deregulation) and on the need for investment in education. Here, we adopt a different outlook, one which hinges on class interests and the conflict between them. The chapter covers the development of the Italian economy from 1945 to the 1990s, focusing in particular on the period starting with the crisis which put an end to the ‘economic miracle’ in 1963 and ends in 1992, when the lira left the European Monetary System. This was a period of sustained, and unprecedented, growth for the Italian economy, during which Italy caught up with other advanced industrial economies. At the same time, those were the years in which we can find the roots of the problems which have afflicted the Italian economy in the last two decades

Action, objective, intersubjectivity: towards a theory of social action

The reflection on intersubjectivity is a central question in the contemporary philosophical debate. In this field, current practical philosophy faces one of the most difficult challenges. Apparently, the research for a foundation of the intersubjective level seems to lead inevitably towards the abandonment of the logical-foundation theory on which the philosophy had been based up until Hegel. In this report, however, I would like to attempt something different. That is, I would like to explore the possibility of inserting the subject of intersubjectivity right into the heart of Hegelian thinking, with an aim to outline the foundation of a social action theory capable of exhibiting reasons stronger than those deriving from simple dialogic validation. It is possible, as Ho sle believed, that Hegel himself did not take this aspect of the profound dynamics of his thought too seriously, and that he had not prepared the notional categories to be able to think about it in depth. Nevertheless, the theoretical foundations of intersubjectivity, brought back to its Hegelian roots, is the fundamental cornerstone upon which to build the logical-rational foundations of social actio