This article explores the norms that govern regular users’ acts of sharing content on social networking sites. Many debates on how to counteract misinformation on Social Networking Sites focus on the epistemic norms of testimony, implicitly assuming that the users’ acts of sharing should fall under the same norms as those for posting original content. I challenge this assumption by proposing a non-epistemic interpretation of (mis) information sharing on social networking sites which I construe as infrastructures for forms of life found online. Misinformation sharing belongs more in the realm of rumour spreading and gossiping rather than in the information-giving language games. However, the norms for sharing cannot be fixed in advance, as these emerge at the interaction between the platforms’ explicit rules, local norms established by user practices, and a meta-norm of sociality. This unpredictability does not leave us with a normative void as an important user responsibility still remains, namely that of making the context of the sharing gesture explicit. If users will clarify how their gestures of sharing are meant to be interpreted by others, they will implicitly assume responsibility for possible misunderstandings based on omissions, and the harms of shared misinformation can be diminished.

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This book proposes a philosophical exploration of the educational role that media plays in university study practices, with a focus on the practices of lecturing and academic writing. Are the media employed in university study practices mere accessories, or rather constitutive of these practices? While this seems to be a purely theoretical question, its practical implications are wide and concern whether such a thing as a ‘digital university’ is possible. The 'digital university' has been, for a long time, a theoretical construct. However, in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, moving the university into the digital realm has become a necessity. The difficulties in transitioning to an online university during the 2020 pandemic showed the increased urgency of the questions explored in this book. The book describes lecturing and academic writing through the lens of a phenomenology of gestures and arrives at a description of the experience of university thinking as expanding the subject’s range of experiences about the world and about one’s modes of thinking about the world. The media configuration characteristic for university study practices is a movement of rendering inoperative one medium through another medium so that thinking can emerge, a movement called ‘mediatic displacement’. The question of the digital university becomes then a question whether mediatic displacement is possible on a digital screen. Although this is conceivable, digital technologies are still relatively new, and we are not used to playing with them in a profanatory way as the book discusses through the example of videoconferencing and MOOCs. The promise of the digital university seems to remain utopian until we figure out how to enact the techniques of mediatic displacement currently flourishing at the physical university. Both emerging and established researchers will benefit from this book since it offers an alternative way of discussing the possibility of a digital transformation of the university, starting from a phenomenology of gestures and an understanding of thinking as a collective experience of potentiality and profanation at the same time. By combining two perspectives, media-theoretical and educational-philosophical, this book show a new way of understanding what makes a university and, thus, contributes to the emerging debate on the digital university.@en

The paper explores the potential for improvisational techniques used in ethics tutorials with the aim of fostering moral sensitivity. Recently there has been an increased interest in researching how performance-based techniques can foster certain ethical competencies. In ethics education for engineering, role-playing games have been an example of performance-based technique successfully employed to help students understand the complexities of ethical decision-making. However, role-playing games have several limitations because of the rigid structure of the roles and of choices in the script, which may lead students to act detached from the situation. Based on the idea that we need to foster also practice-based skills in engineering ethics education, not solely analytic skills, we have encountered in the previous literature the hypothesis that improvisation games can help students rehearse what it is like to act morally in an engineering situation. To clarify what is the potential of improvisation in engineering ethics education, we observed and helped with designing a course centred entirely on improvisational techniques for engineering and science students. Drawing from this pedagogical experiment, we noticed that improvisational performance-based techniques managed to stimulate the student’s moral sensitivity. This happened by two effects that we named the spectator effect and the shared space of vulnerability effect that we describe in detail. While role-playing has acquired the status of a “classical” exercise in engineering ethics education, improvisation still needs to be adopted by ethics teachers. Through our experiment, we hope to have shown that there is definitely an untapped potential in this kind of exercise for increasing student’s moral sensitivity and engagement, thus making possible an increased moral agency.@en

Ethical reflection is considered to be an important competency for engineering ethics education. However it has no clear definition, which makes it difficult to effectively incorporate it into engineering ethics education. This paper proposes an operationalisation of ethical reflection into four learning goals which can help educators explicitly and systematically assess ethical reflection when using case-based exercises in the engineering ethics classroom. The four components were adapted from established educational approaches for critical thinking and then expanded to apply to normative propositions, the specific domain of ethical reflection. @en

The COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied on social media by an explosion of information disorders such as inaccurate, misleading and irrelevant information. Countermeasures adopted thus far to curb these informational disorders have had limited success because these did not account for the diversity of informational contexts on social media, focusing instead almost exclusively on curating the factual content of user’s posts. However, content-focused measures do not address the primary causes of the infodemic itself, namely the user’s need to post content as a way of making sense of the situation and for gathering reactions of consensus from friends. This paper describes three types of informational context—weak epistemic, strong normative and strong emotional—which have not yet been taken into account by current measures to curb down the informational disorders. I show how these contexts are related to the infodemic and I propose measures for dealing with them for future global crisis situations.@en

Lecturing is the only educational form inherited from the universities of the middle ages that is still in use today. However, it seems that lecturing is under threat, as recent calls to do away with lecturing in favour of more dynamic settings, such as the flipped classroom or pre-recorded talks, have found many adherents. In line with the post-critical approach of this book, this chapter argues that there is something in the university lecture that needs to be affirmed: at its best, the university lecture functions as a technique for thinking together or for making collective thinking happen in a lecture hall. The lecture offers the set-up, both technological and architectural, to forge a common experience that binds together the listeners and the speakers; that experience can be characterised as visualising ideas or seeing things as if they had taken on a ‘bodily form’. By looking at several examples of lecturing moments experienced by Gadamer as a student and later recounted in his autobiography, we can better understand the paradigmatic experience that characterises the lecture – as an ideal to be sought, even if, perhaps, not always actualised in everyday lectures. @en

This paper focuses on engineering ethics education utilizing Responsible Innovation (RI). As a forward-looking approach aiming to embed ethics within innovation practices, RI strives to align technology development with societal values. However, when teaching the concepts and methods of RI, we face two intertwined challenges. First, RI presupposes we can estimate the consequences of an innovation or design intervention, while evidence shows it is nearly impossible to fully predict the consequences of new technologies. RI acknowledges this by replacing an ambition to predict with a call to anticipate innovation-consequences. However, without a robust account of anticipation this merely kicks the can down the road. Second, RI seems to suggest that we know what is meant by a specific value (e.g., privacy, sustainability) and its relation to a specific technology. While such knowledge is key to an anticipatory perspective, values are often treated superficially and a historically in RI literature. To address these challenges, we argue that RI-focused education – and engineering ethics generally – should be fostering historically informed anticipation as a core competency. To do so, we will define and characterize a set of interrelated virtues essential for engaging in historically informed anticipation: moral sensitivity (an ability to identify values at stake), epistemic humility (an awareness of the limits of one’s understanding), and moral imagination (an ability to envision new perspectives and solutions). We suggest this can be cultivated via a novel teaching method that involves an in-depth historically informed normative analysis of a value technology dynamic (called a value-genealogy of technology).@en

The practice of taking hand-written notes in lectures has been rediscovered recently because of several studies on its learning efficacy in the mainstream media. Students are enjoined to ditch their laptops and return to pen and paper. Such arguments presuppose that notes are taken in order to be revisited after the lecture. Learning is seen to happen only after the event. We argue instead that student’s note-taking is an educational practice worthy in itself as a way to relate to the live event of the lecture. We adopt a phenomenological approach inspired by Vilém Flusser’s phenomenology of gestures, which assumes that a gesture like note-taking is always an event of thinking with media in which a certain freedom is expressed. But Flusser’s description of note-taking focusses on the individual note-taker. What about students’ note-taking in a lecture hall as a collective gesture? Nietzsche considered note-taking ‘mechanical,’ as if students were automatons who mindlessly transcribed a verbal flow, while Benjamin considered it an inaesthetic gesture: at best, boring; at worst, ‘painful to watch.’ In contrast, we argue that the educational potentiality of note-taking—or better, note-making—can be grasped only if we account for its mediaticity (as writing that displaces the voice), together with but distinct from its political potentiality as a collective mediality (as a ‘means without end’). Note-taking enables us to see how collective thinking emerges in the lecture, a kind of thinking that belongs neither to the lecturer nor the student, but emerges in the relation of attention established between the lecturer, students and their object of thought.@en

In this chapter we argue that emotions are mediated in an incomplete way in online social media because of the heavy reliance on textual messages which fosters a rationalistic bias and an inclination towards less nuanced emotional expressions. This incompleteness can happen either by obscuring emotions, showing less than the original intensity, misinterpreting emotions, or eliciting emotions without feedback and context. Online interactions and deliberations tend to contribute rather than overcome stalemates and informational bubbles, partially due to prevalence of anti-social emotions. It is tempting to see emotions as being the cause of the problem of online verbal aggression and bullying. However, we argue that social media are actually designed in a predominantly rationalistic way, because of the reliance on text-based communication, thereby filtering out social emotions and leaving space for easily expressed antisocial emotions. Based on research on emotions that sees these as key ingredients to moral interaction and deliberation, as well as on research on text-based versus non-verbal communication, we propose a richer understanding of emotions, requiring different designs of online deliberation platforms. We propose that such designs should move from text-centred designs and should find ways to incorporate the complete expression of the full range of human emotions so that these can play a constructive role in online deliberations.@en

The ongoing flood of misinformation in online social media is a pervasive feature of digital communications. However, the current conceptualisations of misinformation are not nuanced enough to deal with the online medium by treating online misinformation as the same species of offline misinformation. Because of this lack of differentiation between kinds of misinformation, we are missing out on a chance to clarify what is the epistemic role of the technological medium in turning information or misinformation into belief. This presentation consists of two parts: the first part criticises the classical approaches to online misinformation which are based on the semantic view of information as "well-formed meaningful data" (Floridi, 2010). Following this perspective, misinformation would be just false meaningful data. Since the truth and falsity of the data does not hinge on the medium as such, this approach to misinformation in not robust enough to differentiate between examples of online from offline misinformation. I will show several shortcomings of this approach illustrating with some cases of online misinformation. In the second part of the presentation, I will propose a new conceptualisation of misinformation as the experience of unfounded belief which is promoted by certain informational environments, and show that this particular experience can be designed alongside other types of user experience; I will show examples of how certain user interface design choices prime their users for seeking and propagating misinformation. By shifting the attention from the semantic content of the information to the design features of the online informational environment, this presentation proposes to shift the weight from the epistemic concept of misifnormation to an approach more based on philosophy of technology and mediation theory.@en

This article proposes a phenomenological interpretation of nostalgia for communism, a collective feeling expressed typically in most Eastern European countries after the official fall of the communist regimes. While nostalgia for communism may seem like a paradoxical feeling, a sort of Stockholm syndrome at a collective level, this article proposes a different angle of interpretation: nostalgia for communism has nothing to do with communism as such, it is not essentially a political statement, nor the signal of a deep value tension between governance and the people. Rather, I propose to understand this collective feeling as the symptom of a deeper need at a national level for solidarity and ultimately about recapturing a common feeling of identity in solidarity. This hypothesis would be in line with a phenomenological approach to memory as a process of establishing shared codes by rewriting the past in such a way as to strengthen social bonds and make possible a reimagining of a common future. Nostalgia for communism does not need to be ultimately an uncritical stance as it has been depicted, instead one could interpret it as a form of critical reflexion about our current forms of life. Instead of seeing communism nostalgia as a specific form of being stuck in the past, one could explore its potential for pointing at the things that are still not working in the current neo-liberal regime. @en

This paper argues that the creation and propagation of misinformation in online environments, particularly in social media, is confronted with specific challenges which are not to be found in offline communication. Starting from the widely accepted definition of misinformation as 'deliberate production and distribution of misleading information' (Floridi, 2013) which we designate as the semantic view of misinformation, we aim to provide a different definition of misinformation based primarily on the pragmatics of communication and on the role of the technological environment. While misinformation in online environments is also false and misleading, its main characteristic is the truncated way in which it is perceived and re-interpreted and, we will argue, this way of processing information belongs foremost to the online environment as such rather than to a defective way of information-processing from the side of the epistemic agent. From this pragmatic perspective, sometimes misinformation is true information which is interpreted and propagated in a biased way. One of the major features of the online environments which makes it for a medium prone to mis-interpretation and bias concerns a way of leading to impoverished sensory information processing. Assuming an embodied cognition view – in its compatibilist version, see (Varela et al., 1991; Clark, 1997) - then the environment in which we exercise our cognitive abilities has a deciding role for our ability to function as epistemic agents because through our bodies and we acquire cognitive states dependent on the environment to which our bodies are exposed. Following this embodied cognition assumption, then the online environment presents itself as a challenge through the ways in which it prioritises certain senses while obliterating others: the visual senses are primordial to the detriment of other senses such as touch, smell, and even hearing; moreover, we interact with others in online environments through text messages which favor explicit meanings while tacit communication and other pragmatic aspects of communication relying on body-language and non-verbal signs are lost. This presentation will describe the constellation of aspects which characterise the pragmatics of communication in online environments and then show why this kind of communicational situation is biased leading to what we will call an 'incomplete pragmatics' of communication. In online environments, we will argue, misunderstandings are the rule and not the exception, because of the dis-embodied and text-biased forms of communication. We will illustrate our theory of incomplete pragmatics of online communication with several case studies of online misinformation based on factually true information which is systematically misunderstood. References Clark, A. (1997). Being There: Putting Brain Body and World Together Again. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Clark, A. and Chalmers, D. (1998). The extended mind. Analysis, 58, 7-19. Floridi, Luciano. The philosophy of information. OUP Oxford, 2013. Varela, F., Thompson, E., Rosch, E. (1991). The Embodied Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.@en

Online social media are platforms designed to foster different functions for their users such as relating, providing entertainment and also bring in advertising revenue. In spite of its initial intent, people use social media (SM) increasingly for epistemic purposes: information gathering and sharing and belief formation. Since SM were not designed to function as journalistic platforms, with no fact-checking and no editorial overseeing, their epistemic functions are far from virtuous, often leading to undesirable phenomena such as echo-chambers and trapping their users in filter-bubbles. Recent disinformation campaigns have led to the increasing polarisation of users into isolated communities of believers, instead of open communities of inquiry. If, following Jason Baehr, inquiry is taken to be an intellectual virtue, it is worth researching whether SM are actively promoting epistemic vices in their users. Hence the main research question of this presentation: to what extent is SM leading to virtuous or vicious epistemic environments through their design features? The focus of this presentation is restricted to online debates: how do users reason and argue for their point of view on SM? What features of SM foster critical engagement in debates? Are there specific epistemic virtues or vices which are fostered by SM? And, furthermore, are there specific epistemic virtues that need to be promoted online? Starting from the concept of cognitive affordances as developed by Andy Clark, we will argue that in the case of SM we should look into the concept of negative scaffoldings which are features of the environment inhibiting the normal functioning of cognitive human functions. This concept of negative scaffoldings will then be related to the epistemic virtue theory. While classical virtue ethics places the responsibility of the virtue on the agent herself, in this presentation we want to shift the perspective from the agent-centred view to a complementary perspective, by emphasising also the role that the community plays in fostering an agent’s acquiring of virtues and, furthermore, for the case of online social media, we will also argue that the medium through which a community exercises its influence on the epistemic virtuous agent also matters to a large extent. Our angle of research is not meant to exonerate the individual users from their responsibilities, but to disclose the previously neglected role that media play in debates.@en

This article brings forth a new perspective concerning the relation between stupidity and thinking by proposing to conceptualise the state of non-thinking in two different ways, situated at the opposite ends of the spectrum of thinking. Two conceptualisations of stupidity are discussed, one critical which follows a French line of continental thinkers, and the other one which will be called educational or ascetic, following the work of Agamben. The critical approach is conceptualised in terms of seriality of thinking, or thinking captured by an apparatus, whereas the asceticeducational approach is discussed by tracing the links between studying and stupidity. Both accounts assume that stupidity as non-thinking is a condition for thinking, either placed before thinking emerges or as an after-thought. However, the political implications concerning the role of philosophy in the public realm are divergent: for the critical approach, the task of the philosopher is to criticise the world, whereas for the ascetic approach, the task is to work on one’s own self and hope that the world will be changed through thinking. The wider aim of this article is to contribute to the debate concerning the public role of the intellectual starting from the assumption that there is a duty to think publicly and then clarifying what this duty entails in relation to the self and the others. @en

This article brings forth a new perspective concerning the relation between stupidity and thinking by proposing to conceptualise the state of non-thinking in two different ways, situated at the opposite ends of the spectrum of thinking. Two conceptualisations of stupidity are discussed, one critical which follows a French line of continental thinkers, and the other one which will be called educational or ascetic, following the work of Agamben. The critical approach is conceptualised in terms of seriality of thinking, or thinking captured by an apparatus, whereas the ascetic-educational approach is discussed by tracing the links between studying and stupidity. Both accounts assume that stupidity as non-thinking is a condition for thinking, either placed before thinking emerges or as an after-thought. However, the political implications concerning the role of philosophy in the public realm are divergent: for the critical approach, the task of the philosopher is to criticise the world, whereas for the ascetic approach, the task is to work on one’s own self and hope that the world will be changed through thinking. The wider aim of this article is to contribute to the debate concerning the public role of the intellectual starting from the assumption that there is a duty to think publicly and then clarifying what this duty entails in relation to the self and the others.@en

In the age of web 2.0, the university is constantly challenged to re-adapt its ‘old-fashioned’ pedagogies to the new possibilities opened up by digital technologies. This article proposes a rethinking of the relation between university and (digital) technologies by focusing not on how technologies function in the university, but on their constituting a meta-condition for the existence of the university pedagogy of inquiry. Following Ivan Illich’s idea that textual technologies played a crucial role in the inception of the university, we will first show the structural similarities between university thinking and the text as a profanation of the book. Secondly, we describe university thinking as a type of critical thinking based on the materiality of the text-on-the-page, explaining why the text has been at the centre of university pedagogy since the beginning. In the third part, we show how Illich came to see the end of the culture of the text as a challenge for the university, by describing the new features of the text-as-code incompatible with the idea of reading as study. Finally, we challenge this pessimistic reading of Illich’s and end with a call for a profanatory pedagogy of digital technologies that could mirror the revolutionary thinking behind the mediaeval invention of the text.

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This article aims to question the anti-individualist stance in Carl Schmitt’s concept of the political by uncovering the historical bias of Schmitt’s anti-individualism, seen here as one of the main driving forces behind his argument. For Schmitt, the political can take place only when a collectivity is able to declare war to another collectivity on the basis of feeling existentially threatened by the latter. As such, Schmitt’s framework implies the inescapable possibility of war, as the condition which makes possible the political. Acknowledging the previous criticisms of Schmitt raised by John Rawls and Iris Marion Young, this article takes a different path by pointing to certain historically tacit assumptions in 1927 Germany which Schmitt took for granted, but which are not suitable for a contemporary political theory. The demonstration is done first by showing how the structure of interruption functions in the works of Schmitt, then showing how he conceives of the individual as a possible interruption of the political in history, and then placing this structure of interruption in the historical context of Schmitt’s writing.@en

This article aims to question the anti-individualist stance in Carl Schmitt’s concept of the political by uncovering the historical bias of Schmitt’s anti–individualism, seen here as one of the main driving forces behind his argument. For Schmitt, the political can take place only when a collectivity is able to declare war to another collectivity on the basis of feeling existentially threatened by the latter. As such, Schmitt’s framework implies the inescapable possibility of war, as the condition which makes possible the political. Acknowledging the previous criticisms of Schmitt raised by John Rawls and Iris Marion Young, this article takes a different path by pointing to certain historically tacit assumptions in 1927 Germany which Schmitt took for granted, but which are not suitable for a contemporary political theory. The demonstration is done first by showing how the structure of interruption functions in the works of Schmitt, then showing how he conceives of the individual as a possible interruption of the political in history, and then placing this structure of interruption in the historical context of Schmitt’s writing.@en

This paper aims to reconstruct a possible answer to the classical Newman’s objection which has been used countless times to argue against structural realism. The reconstruction starts from the new strand of structural realism - informational structural realism - authored by Luciano Floridi. Newman’s objection had previously stated that all propositions which comprise the mathematical structures are merely trivial truths and can be instantiated by multiple models. This paper examines whether informational structural realism can overcome this objection by analysing the previous attempts to answer this objection, attempts which either try to save the ramseyfication of mathematical propositions or give up on it. The informational structural realism way is to attempt a third way, the neo-Kantian way inspired by the work of Ernst Cassirer, but also to change the formalism from a mathematical to an informational one. This paper shows how this original combination of neo-Kantianism, informational formalism and the method of levels of abstraction provide the tools to overcome Newman’s objection.@en