Religious Symbols Made in Italy

While Italian pundits and politicians purport a world of cultural-religious friction, systematic monitoring of the Italian mediascape and extensive ethnographic fieldwork illuminate a far more complex picture. Ambiguous everyday encounters coexist with structural inequality and exclusionary discourses. The periodic controversies dominating the popular media—over religious symbols, migration, and “Islam”—chart moral (and even theologically laden) political visions that function to inculcate new mechanisms of social control and boundary making in Italy

Staging Cosmopolitanism

Intercultural dialogue and cosmopolitanism are increasingly becoming a public policy focus. Art festivals, concerts, and a variety of public events explicitly promoting such agenda have been flourishing in southern European countries of recent immigration. Drawing on the Italian case, the author explores the performing arts’ cosmopolitan potential, asking how hierarchies are challenged and recreated when majorities request minorities to engage in cosmopolitan dialogue, on and off stage

The Ethics of Interconnectedness: Charles Taylor, No-Self, and Buddhism

My aim in this paper is to chart what I see as parallels between the ontology of self in Charles Taylor’s work and that of various Buddhist ‘no-self’ views, along with parallels between Taylor’s commitment to reviving republican ideas and some aspects of Buddhist ethics. I see key resemblances and overlaps at the level of metaphysics as well as ethics. For Taylor, the sorts of atomistic accounts of self that have come to be accepted as natural and unquestionable in the West are deeply misguided. The dominant Hobbesian-Lockean procedural picture of selfhood blinds us to the intrinsic relatedness of self to others and has profoundly negative consequences for the kinds of shared conceptions of the good necessary for viable and functioning democracies to survive and flourish. For Taylor, we thus need to retrieve and rearticulate a more accurate understanding of the self (Taylor 1985a, c, d, 1989, 1995a, b, 2003). This conception acknowledges that the self is located in a web of locution, conversation, and social interconnectedness, a sense that gives rise to an expanded notion of our moral and political duties. I argue that such an understanding of the self and ethics has strong resemblances to the kinds of views of the self and ethics as articulated by various schools of Buddhism. Conceptions of anātman or no-self and pratītyasamutpāda (interconnectedness) similarly broaden the scope and domain of our moral concern to be more inclusive by interrogating perspectives that conceive of the self as a separate and isolated individual. This is illustrated by many Buddhist schools of philosophy, which argue that a more accurate understanding of the self as empty of inherent and separate existence leads to adopting a more compassionate ethical stance towards others. I would suggest that, along the same lines, this understanding is required for a sustainable future for not only our communities, but that of an increasingly interrelated and interdependent world

Unity between God and mind? A study on the relationship between panpsychism and pantheism

The author thanks the John Templeton Foundation and The Pantheism and Panentheism Project for sponsoring this paperA number of contemporary philosophers have suggested that the recent revival of interest in panpsychism within philosophy of mind could reinvigorate a pantheistic philosophy of religion. This project explores whether the combination and individuation problems, which have dominated recent scholarship within panpsychism, can aid the pantheist’s articulation a God/Universe Unity. Constitutive holistic panpsychism is seen to be the only type of panpsychism suited to aid pantheism in articulating this type of unity. There are currently no well-developed solutions to the individuation problem for this type of panpsychism. Moreover, the gestures towards a solution appear costly to the religious significance of pantheism. This article concludes that any hope that the contemporary panpsychism might aid pantheists in articulating Unity is premature and possibly misplaced.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

What’s Behind a Marathon? Process Management in Sports Running Events

The repercussion of urban running competitions such as marathons is tremendous, and the planning of these races involves a large number of strategic decisions. For this reason, this study analyzes the processes of organizing large marathons in Spain. The aim is to propose a systematic and sustainable model of excellence for the organization of sports events based on process management. To design the model, we followed a qualitative methodology using information obtained in 18 semi-structured interviews. The interviewees were experts in charge of the five most significant marathons in Spain (Barcelona, Madrid, Malaga, Seville and Valencia). The final contribution of the study is the proposal of a process map developed by identifying the main areas of competence and tasks, the relationships among the areas, and the timeline of these relationships. The process map unifies the processes established based on the preceding information and classifies them as management, core and support processes. The specific tool proposed is therefore based on the process management approach, which enables the improvement of the organization of sports running events. The tool will help the managers of the events to take decisions from a strategic perspective, and will be useful in making these events sustainable in the long term

Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, Selfhood: a Reply to some Critics

Review of Philosophy and Psychology has lately published a number of papers that in various ways take issue with and criticize my work on the link between consciousness, self-consciousness and selfhood. In the following contribution, I reply directly to this new set of objections and argue that while some of them highlight ambiguities in my (earlier) work that ought to be clarified, others can only be characterized as misreadings