This paper focuses on the literary, narrative and cultural function performed by Michele Ardengo’s model of corporeity in Gli indifferenti, intended as a tool for probing the inner life of the ...character and of an entire social class. I will underline how the internal and external representation of the character are closely connected according to a still early twentieth century vision, whereby the evils of the soul are reflected on those of a physical type. I will also investigate the role that Michele’s pre-existentialist body image plays within the novel and the relationship first with Leo Merumeci and his sister Carla and then with the male characters of the adolescent trilogy, formed by Inverno di malato, Agostino and La disubbidienza.
How much income would a woman living alone require to attain the same standard of living that she would have if she were married? What percentage of a married couple's expenditures are controlled by ...the husband? How much money does a couple save on consumption goods by living together versus living apart? We propose and estimate a collective model of household behaviour that permits identification and estimation of concepts such as these. We model households in terms of the utility functions of its members, a bargaining or social welfare function, and a consumption technology function. We demonstrate generic non-parametric identification of the model, and hence of a version of adult equivalence scales that we call "indifference scales", as well as consumption economies of scale, the household's resource sharing rule or members' bargaining power, and other related concepts.
•The proposed approach is robust, intuitive and easy to understand.•It utilizes Laplace’s indifference principle as firm common grounding.•The mean function in the new approach is parameter-free (no ...weights required).•The boundary objects’ impacts are competitive, not cumulative like in other RKM.•The impacts of lower approximations are higher than the impacts of boundaries.
Clustering is one of the most widely used method in data mining with applications in virtually any domain. Its main objective is to group similar objects into the same cluster, while dissimilar objects should belong to different clusters. In particular k-means clustering, as member of the partitioning clustering family, has obtained great popularity. The classic (hard) k-means assigns an object unambiguously to one and only one cluster. To address uncertainty soft clustering has been introduced using concepts like fuzziness, possibility or roughness. A decade ago Lingras and West introduced a k-means approach based on the interval interpretation of rough sets theory. In the past years their rough k-means has gained increasing attention. In our paper, we propose a refined rough k-means algorithm that utilizes Laplace’s principle of indifference to calculate the means. As we will discuss this provides a sounder justification for the impacts of the objects in the approximations in comparison to established rough k-means algorithms. Furthermore, the weighting in the mean function is based on individual objects rather than on aggregated sub-means. In experiments, we compare the refined algorithm to related approaches.
The expression of certainty within a Gestalt clinical praxis has been unhelpfully discouraged. Expressing certainty has been aligned with abuses of power, while maintaining uncertainty has become a ...shibboleth of Gestalt thinking. This is theoretically unsound and potentially therapist-privileging, contributing to an amoral practitioner neutrality rather than an implicated, ethical responsibility. From a specific clinical encounter in which certainty is expressed, a basis is built to support how a Gestalt access to certainty might be understood and achieved with regard to knowledge and truth, beyond irrelevant imperatives of being right, or of implying permanence. Certainty is conceptualized to befit Gestalt’s field-theoretical paradigm, and the key theory of creative indifference is employed to critique the unipolar prioritizing of uncertainty. With support from Wittgenstein, it is argued that inhabiting certainty can demonstrate commitment and be an authentic manifestation of responsibility in a field paradigm, contributing to an ethical practice and a successful clinical outcome.
Envisioning the future of positive psychology (PP) requires looking at its past. To that end, I first review prior critiques of PP to underscore that certain early problems have persisted over time. ...I then selectively examine recent research to illustrate progress in certain areas as well as draw attention to recurrent problems. Key among them is promulgation of poorly constructed measures of well-being and reliance on homogeneous, privileged research samples. Another concern is the commercialization of PP, which points to the need for greater oversight and quality control in profit-seeking endeavors. Looking ahead, I advocate for future science tied to contemporary challenges, particularly ever-widening inequality and the pandemic. These constitute intersecting catastrophes that need scientific attention. Such problems bring into focus "neglected negatives" that may be fueling current difficulties, including greed, indifference, and stupidity. Anger, which defies easy characterization as positive or negative, also warrants greater scientific study. Going forward I advocate for greater study of domains that likely nurture good lives and just societies - namely, participation in the arts and encounters with nature, both currently under study. Overall, my entreaty to PP is to reckon with persistent problems from its past, while striving toward a future that is societally relevant and virtuous.
Workplace relationships are a cornerstone of management research. At the same time, there remain pressing calls for work relationships to be front and center in management literature, demanding an ...organizationally specific “relationship science.” This article addresses these calls by unifying multiple scholarly fields of interest to develop a comprehensive understanding of interpersonal workplace relationships. Specifically, in this review, we move beyond the tendency to pit positive and negative relationships against each other and, instead, spotlight theory and research associated with ambivalent and indifferent relationships, which are prevalent and impactful yet persistently understudied. We organize our review into four streams: sources, outcomes, dynamics, and measurement. We then advance existing workplace relationships literature by integrating the social functions of emotions perspective. In doing so, we move beyond the positive–negative dichotomy by implicating discrete emotions and their interpersonal functions for workplace relationships. We conclude by offering an agenda for future scholarship.
After her visit to Germany in 1949/50 Hannah Arendt wrote the essay The Aftermath of Nazi-Rule. Report of Germany (1950) in which she collects her reflections on post-war German society. Starting ...from this analysis, the present article aims to investigate the causes of the inexplicable indifference to Nazi crimes that Arendt observes in the German people. While Arendt emphasizes the inability to think (and feel) provoked by the regime, A. and M. Mitscherlich focus on the failure to process the traumatic ‘loss of the Führer’. In both cases, a mechanism of reality distortion gets triggered, resulting in the repression of the past and the denial of one’s own guilt and responsibility. The studies by Bar-On, Pohl and Welzer (et al.) show how these repression processes are also active in later generations, even today, representing a threat to a successful reworking of the past, to the preservation of collective memory and to the recognition of one’s own responsibility not only for the past, but also for the present and future.
Focusing on the significance of the term "indifference," I argue that in her 1938 essay Three Guineas Virginia Woolf proposes strategies for resistance to fascism and war that anticipate Emmanuel ...Levinas's ethics of alterity. Starting with the issue of women's difference from men, Woolf develops a specifically feminist critique of enlightenment thought that stresses the potential of women as "outsiders," and thereby challenges existing political positions. In this article, I trace the origins of indifference back to John Locke and other eighteenth-century thinkers to reveal the ethical and aesthetic potential of Woolf's call for women's critically disengaged response to the status quo. I emphasize the paradoxical nature of the "society of outsiders" to suggest that Woolf lays the groundwork for a queer and feminist modernist aesthetics, one that radically undermines the supposed split between progressive politics and high modernist form in the 1930s. Reaching beyond readings of Three Guineas that focus on the importance of affect, I argue instead for a full understanding of the political power of indifference.
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