This is a sorrowful tale, but one which reaffirms the emotional and spiritual connection we all have to the place we call home, and the power and magic of community.

A fines de la Segunda Guerra Mundial sedebilita el espíritu vanguardista que caracterizó la modernidad. En esta coyuntura nace la posmodernidad como una respuesta a la canonización del movimiento moderno, como una nueva sensibilidad y una reacción que transformó los modelos estéticos y los esquemas vitales. Su influencia fue muy amplia, afectó diversos aspectos de la vida social y modificó la percepción que se tenía de la historia y del tiempo, como el valor que tenía la noción de progreso y (...) la idea de perfectibilidad como un dinamizador de la actividad del hombre hacia el futuro. Fue un movimiento que cuestionó los ideales de la modernidad, la universalización de los gustos, el racionalismo y el pragmatismo que inspiraba la función social del arte, como la funcionalidad que imponía en algunas de las artes un estilo no ornamental. Además, fue un movimiento que desde el eclecticismo borró las diferencias entre las artes, y el abismo que separaba el arte culto y el arte popular. El artículo tiene tres partes: en la primera parte se ocupa de manera general del tema de la posmodernidad, de la ruptura que esta nueva “episteme” generó y de los cambios que se dieron tanto en el pensamiento filosófico como en la forma de entender y asumir la existencia cotidiana, en la experiencia estética como en otros ámbitos de la sociedad. En la segunda parte, de algunas características de la literatura posmoderna. Y, en la tercera, del análisis de dos obras de Elena Poniatowska, “Hasta no verte Jesús mío” y “La noche de Tlatelolco”,que pueden servir de ejemplos o de ilustraciónde algunas de las características ya enunciadas. (shrink)

Independence was a core value of the movement for disability rights. People with disabilities did not have to be dependent, advocates claimed; they were robbed of autonomy by poverty, social prejudice, and architectural barriers. Recently, critics have noted that the emphasis on independence equates personhood with autonomy, reason, and self-awareness, thereby excluding those who are incapable of self-determination. The stigma of dependency is communicated to caregivers whose work is devalued and undercompensated. These values are echoed in the life writing of (...) people with disabilities, which tends to present a singular narrative voice, even when the author requires assistance in the physical or intellectual work of composition. The 1979 Mexican memoir-testimonio Gaby Brimmer, collaboratively authored by the acclaimed journalist Elena Poniatowska, Brimmer, her mother, and her paid caregiver is a notable exception. Consisting of interwoven dialogue among its three informants, Gaby Brimmer enacts dependency at the level of form, while exploring the challenges and opportunities of interdependence in societies that devalue the giving and receiving of care. (shrink)

"Who knows how much longer it will be, but others have crossed over to the US, and have found a job, and have even sent for their families. I am not the only one crossing, I am number 57 out of 72, but we do not walk together, all 72—that would call too much attention to us. We walk at a good pace, each one with their thoughts, we walk from sun to sun without stopping almost; others have done it." (...) These are the words of renowned writer Elena Poniatowska on 72migrantes.com, a virtual altar honoring the 72 migrants massacred in a ranch in San Fernando, a municipality in the border state of Tamaulipas, Mexico, in August 2010. Attempting to recreate the thoughts of unidentified victim number 57 on his trek towards the... (shrink)

Este trabajo da noticia de la existencia de la correspondencia encontrada en los materiales del archivo personal de la escritora María Luisa Mendoza. Se esboza, a su vez, el papel que ocupa la escritura privada en torno a la obra tanto de la destinataria como de cada uno de los remitentes entre los que se encuentra Carlos Fuentes, Carlos Monsiváis, José Carlos Becerra, Elena Poniatowska y Sergio Pitol; para señalar algunas coordenadas de lectura de esta cartografía epistolar.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bilingual Aesthetics:A New Sentimental EducationJane DuranBilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education, by Doris Sommer. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004, 254 pp.Doris Sommer's new work Bilingual Aesthetics is the sort of book that takes one by surprise—and for good reason. Filled with punning twists, and itself a valorizer of word games and magic, this work has not a lot to do with bilingualism (in the standard sense), not (...) a lot to do with aesthetics (again, in the standard academic sense), but a great deal to do with both. Whether the title is read (and Sommer's point is to forward the notion of alternate readings) as the aesthetics of bilingualism or as an account of what a bilingual might make of aesthetics, there is a startling amount of content in the work.Briefly, Sommer essays to make the case that our multicultural society is distinctly better off for being multicultural and multilingual (or at least, in some threatening sense, emergently bilingual) because the literal bilingual has a distinct advantage over her or his monolingual counterpart. The bilingual can play language games, and those games shock, amuse, or jolt—whatever it is that they do, they rouse us out of any state of intellectual torpor into which we might have fallen and they serve to make us all individuals who, in Du Bois' memorable phrase, have "double consciousness."Thus Sommer does in fact mean for her title to be read in at least two ways: Her work attempts to valorize and vindicate a sort of unofficial bilingualism (one of the blurbs on the back of the paperback edition begins by saying "Knowing a second language entails some unease... "), while she also attempts to let us in on the notion that there is an aesthetic that develops from the use of more than one code. Sommer plays remarkably on all these concepts: She is familiar with the standard, overt scholarship on bilingualism—she can cite work by sociolinguists and others. At the same time, as an author known for previous work on literature, especially with regard to Latin America, she is also familiar with much of the standard historical work in aesthetics, including Kant. Citing thinkers such as Kenji Hakuta, William J. Bennett, Wittgenstein, and Elena Poniatowska, Sommer leaves the reader somewhat bedazzled and breathless but better off for having read her work.Her overall thesis, if one may attempt to employ such a phrase, is that bilingualism and code-switching create for us the same sort of uneasiness and inevitable access to the unconscious that works of art and literature produce—and that the edginess that is a concomitant of code-switching is beneficial. Her first chapter "Choose and Lose" reminds Americans that the United States has always been a multilingual place and focuses on how much can be gained from attempting to forward the notion. If there is any difficulty to Sommer's work, it is that she practices what she preaches. Every page demands much of the reader, since every page itself engages in the [End Page 121] sort of rapid-fire twisting and switching that Sommer is trying to support as the ground for a new aesthetic consciousness.Early on, Sommer gives us the following:Complaints about the danger to national coherence [of multi- or bilingualism] can be downright funny.... [One irate journalist wrote:] "How can immigrants identify with America if they can't read Lincoln's words in the language in which they were spoken?(out of many, one) to a multicultural boarding house,...?" No need to be upset at this harangue. It's obviously a joke, even if the author missed it (a common asymmetry in bilingual humor). Notice that the translation from Latin assumes that English-only citizens don't understand the very slogan they hold dear.(p. 26)But of course the joke is to some extent on Sommer and on all of us, as she no doubt intends. It is highly unlikely that the journalist did get the humor, and the only funny part of the entire tirade is that we—assuming we have enough formal education—may be able to make something out of it... (shrink)

New work on women thinkers often makes the point that philosophical conceptual thought is where we find it, examples such as Simone de Beauvoir and the nineteenth century Black American writer Anna Julia Cooper assure us that there is ample room for the development of philosophy in literary works but as yet there has been no single unifying attempt to trace such projects among a variety of women novelists. This book articulates philosophical concerns in the work of five well known (...) twentieth century women writers, including writers of color. Duran traces the development of philosophical themes - ontological, ethical and feminist - in the writings of Margaret Drabble, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Toni Cade Bambara and Elena Poniatowska presenting both a general overview of the author's work with an emphasis on traditional philosophical questions and a detailed feminist reading of the work. (shrink)

Este trabajo critica la categoría blanquitud, en la corriente iniciada por Bolívar Echeverría. El método que se utiliza es el transdisciplinario, como pretensión de disolución de las parcelas de conocimiento. Se toma tres campos filosóficos: la Teología de la liberación; la Filosofía de la liberación y la Filosofía indígena. En el análisis lingüístico se utiliza como herramienta, la poesía y novela de Rosario Castellanos, Elena Poniatowska, Gioconda Belli y Ernesto Cardenal. El lugar de enunciación es el pueblo kichwa Saraguro. (...) Se postula que el Sumak Kawsay es un más allá de los derechos de la naturaleza; como uno de los antónimos de la blanquitud. Empero, la blanquitud no es solamente el color del capitalismo; es decir, si las personas son las que construyen las instituciones, entonces, son estos sujetos quienes cargan con lo blanco. La blanquitud es también un fenotipo del racismo: complejo de superioridad e inferioridad. Racismo que se traduce en posesión o acaparamiento económico, académico, político, etc. La reversión filosófica o descolonización de lo blanco se postula desde una educación sin dominación, a través de la concreción, cuidado y reproducción de la vida Sumak Kawsay. (shrink)

A macroscope is proposed and tested here for the discovery of the unique argumentative footprint that characterizes how a collective manages differences and pursues disagreement through argument in a polylogue. The macroscope addresses broader analytic problems posed by various conceptualizations of large-scale argument, such as fields, spheres, communities, and institutions. The design incorporates a two-tier methodology for detecting argument patterns of the arguments performed in arguing by an interactive collective that produces views, or topographies, of the ways that issues are (...) generated in the making and defending of standpoints. The design premises for the macroscope build on insights about argument patterns from pragma-dialectical theory by incorporating research and theory on disagreement management and the Argumentum Model of Topics. The design reconceptualizes prototypical and stereotypical argument patterns for characterizing large-scale argumentation. A prototype of the macroscope is tested on data drawn from six threads about oil-drilling and fracking from the subreddit Changemyview. The implementation suggests the efficacy of the macroscope’s design and potential for identifying what communities make controversial and how the disagreement space in a polylogue is managed through stereotypical argument patterns in terms of claims/premises, inferential relations, and presentational devices. (shrink)

A common approach for measuring the effectiveness of an education system or a school is the estimation of the impact that school interventions have on students’ academic performance. However, the latest trends aim to extend the focus beyond students’ acquisition of knowledge and skills, and to consider aspects such as well-being in the academic context. For this reason, the 2015 edition of the international assessment system PISA incorporated a new tool aimed at evaluating the socio-affective variables related to the well-being (...) of students. It is based on a definition focused on the five dimensions proposed in PISA theoretical framework: cognitive, psychological, social, physical and material. The main purpose of this study is to identify the well-being components that significantly affect student academic performance and to estimate the magnitude of school effects on the well-being of students in OECD countries, the school effect being understood as the ability of schools to increase subjective student well-being. To achieve this goal, we analyzed the responses of 234,000 students from thirty-five OECD countries to PISA 2015 questionnaires. Specifically, we considered non-cognitive variables in the questionnaires and student performance in science. The results indicated that the cognitive well-being dimension, composed of enjoyment of science, self-efficacy and instrumental motivation, as well as the test anxiety all had a consistent relationship with student performance across countries. In addition, the school effect, estimated through a two-level hierarchical linear model, in terms of student well-being was systematically low. While the school effect accounted for approximately 25% of the variance in the results for the cognitive dimension, only 5-9% of variance in well-being indicators was attributable to it. This suggests that the influence of school on student welfare is weak, and the effect is similar across countries. The present study contributes to the general discussion currently underway about the definition of well-being and the connection between well-being and achievement. The results highlighted two complementary concerns: there is a clear need to promote socio-emotional education in schools, and it is important to develop a rigorous framework for well-being assessment. The implications of the results and proposals for future studies are discussed. (shrink)

This open access book features essays written by philosophers, biologists, ecologists and conservation scientists facing the current biodiversity crisis. Despite increasing communication, accelerating policy and management responses, and notwithstanding improving ecosystem assessment and endangered species knowledge, conserving biodiversity continues to be more a concern than an accomplished task. Why is it so?The overexploitation of natural resources by our species is a frequently recognised factor, while the short-term economic interests of governments and stakeholders typically clash with the burdens that implementing conservation (...) actions imply. But this is not the whole story. This book develops a different perspective on the problem by exploring the conceptual challenges and practical defiance posed by conserving biodiversity, namely: on the one hand, the difficulties in defining what biodiversity is and characterizing that “thing” to which the word ‘biodiversity’ refers to; on the other hand, the reasons why assessing biodiversity and putting in place effective conservation actions is arduous. (shrink)

This paper investigates Negative Concord, arguing that it results from a systematic lexical ambiguity: the items that participate in Negative Concord ("n-words" in Laka's 1990 terminology) are ambiguous between negative polarity items and their genuinely negative counterparts. I try to show that on empirical grounds the proposed account compares favorably with other analyses that shy away from ambiguity. I furthermore suggest that the ambiguity is not implausible conceptually because it can be viewed as reflecting an intermediate stage of the Jespersen (...) Cycle. Negative Concord can be observed in many languages. The data discussed here are taken from Romance, primarily Spanish. (shrink)

This essay discusses the ethical challenges and dilemmas in allocating scarce medical resources during the COVID-19 pandemic, using the German legislative process as a starting point. It is guided by the right to non-discrimination of people with disability and generally contrasts utilitarian and rights-based principles of allocation. Three approaches that were suggested in the German discussion, are presented, the lottery principle, the first come first served principle and the probability to survive principle. Arguments in favour and against each principle are (...) discussed. The focus is on the utilitarian probability to survive principle, which was adopted in German legislation in 2022, and its discriminatory potential against people with disability. The essay suggests ways to mitigate the concerns of discrimination related to the probability to survive principle. It concludes that resolving the triage dilemma requires a balanced approach between utilitarian and rights-based concerns, which promotes both maximising the number of patients surviving and the right not to be discriminated against and be treated equally. It calls for a further debate on how many ethical values such as equity, fairness and non-discrimination we are willing to sacrifice for a higher number of survivors and when we are willing to sacrifice survivors to secure ethical values. (shrink)

Some authors have claimed that Hegel's ‘determinate negation’ should be distinguished from ‘logical’ or ‘formal’ negation, that is, from a view of negation as a contradictory forming operator. In contrast, I argue that dialectical determinate negation involves a view of negation as a contradictory forming operator, and can therefore count as formal negation in every respect. However, as it is clear in contemporary glutty semantics of negation, one may distinguish between different accounts of the relationship between negation, contradiction and content. (...) I suggest that, differently from classical negation, and as glutty negation, dialectical negation has partial content. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss a proposal for reform in the teaching of Euclidean geometry that reveals the symbiotic relationship between axiomatics and pedagogy. We examine the role of intuition in this kind of reform, as expressed by Mario Pieri, a prominent member of the Schools of Peano and Segre at the University of Turin. We are well aware of the centuries of attention paid to the notion of intuition by mathematicians, mathematics educators, philosophers, psychologists, historians, and others. To set (...) a context for Pieri’s proposal, we only seek to open a small window on views of the pedagogical role of intuition, from primary education to university study that may have informed early 20th century efforts to improve the teaching of geometry at the secondary school level. Pieri addressed the topic of intuition in many of his axiomatizations, including those in projective geometry which was his main area of concentration in foundations. We focus here primarily on his axiom systems for elementary geometry, which embraced the transformational approach of Felix Klein’s vision for the subject. Our goal is to convey Pieri’s thoughts on how to integrate two types of intuition, denoted as sensible and rational, in his endeavors to improve the teaching of the geometry of Euclid. We show how Pieri’s views on geometric intuition and pedagogical reform were either ignored or misrepresented in several notable publications at the turn of the 20th century. In particular, we give Pieri a voice in response to specific comments made in the early 1900s by Federigo Enriques, Ugo Amaldi, and Florian Cajori in widely circulated publications inspired by Klein. (shrink)

In our contemporary age, where a combination of individualism and mutual distrust is unhappily common among people and society is “liquid” and disoriented, so-called intermediate units are a precious resource that promotes positive coexistence within organizations and in local communities, too. The present contribution describes an example of such an intermediate unit, the Talent Club, located in a peripheral neighborhood of a metropolitan area in northern Italy. This case study shows the development of positive living and working together in organizations (...) and their transformation in the tool for community development and good coexistence. Qualitative and quantitative data show that the relational aspect is crucial because it promotes authentic exchange among people, supporting participation and social cohesion against self-referential habits and isolation. Although at present the Talent Club is mostly functioning in a affiliating coexistence among members, seeds of a more generativ... (shrink)

Based on in-depth interviews, this article examines a sample of 48 Canadian women’s feelings about their changed postpartum bodies, their sense of self, and the factors that affect both. Our findings suggest that understanding women’s postpartum feelings requires contextualizing them in the work of infant care and women’s life circumstances, as well as ideologies about mothering and feminine appearance. Motherhood afforded the women in this study a new appreciation of their bodies, and a positive embodied sense of themselves, but only (...) if they felt their bodies performed maternal functions well. Concerns about appearance persisted and became especially salient when women faced the return to paid work. Moreover, varied life circumstances influenced women’s overall feelings about their changed bodies as insecurities were displaced onto women’s body images. (shrink)

This article examines how specific realist and projectivist versions of manipulability theories of causation deal with the problem of objectivity. Does an agent-dependent concept of manipulability imply that conflicting causal claims made by agents with different capacities can come out as true? In defence of the projectivist stance taken by the agency view, I argue that if the agent’s perspective is shown to be uniform across different agents, then the truth-values of causal claims do not vary arbitrarily and, thus, reach (...) a satisfactory level of objectivity. My argument connects Price’s considerations on the situation of deliberation, whose structure, common to all agents, is the same with respect to both decision making and causal claims on a concept inspired by Douglas’s classification of objectivity of thought processes: the perspective of the detached agent. I further argue that, despite his agent-independent concept of intervention, Woodward’s claim of a stronger objectivity standard cannot be achieved, as the relativity of causal concepts to a variable set brings about the issue of the agent’s choice of variables. Consequently, a more permissive objectivity standard applies to both views. (shrink)

The article examines science-policy conversations mediated by social science in attempts to govern, or set up terms for, scientific research. The production of social science research accounts about science faces challenges in the domains of emerging technosciences, such as nano. Constructing notions of success and failure, participants in science actively engage in the interpretation of policy notions, such as the societal relevance of their research. Industrial engagement is one of the prominent themes both in policy renditions of governable science, and (...) in the participants’ attempts to achieve societally relevant research, often oriented into the future. How do we, as researchers, go about collecting, recording, and analyzing such future stories? I examine a series of recent interviews conducted in a number of US universities, and in particular at a university campus on the West Coast of the United States. The research engages participants through interviews, which can be understood as occasions for testing the interpretive flexibility of nano as “good” scientific practice and of what counts as societal relevance, under what circumstances and in view of what kind of audiences. (shrink)

In the decade following hepatitis B vaccine’s 1981 approval, U.S. health officials issued evolving guidelines on who should receive the vaccine: first, gay men, injection drug users, and healthcare workers; later, hepatitis B-positive women’s children; and later still, all newborns. States laws that mandated the vaccine for all children were quietly accepted in the 1990s; in the 2000s, however, popular anti-vaccine sentiment targeted the shot as an emblem of immunization policy excesses. Shifting attitudes toward the vaccine in this period were (...) informed by hepatitis B’s changing popular image, legible in textual and visual representations of the infection from the 1980s through the 1990s. Notably, the outbreak of AIDS, the advent of genetically engineered pharmaceuticals, and a Democratic push for health reform shaped and reshaped hepatitis B’s public image. Hepatitis B thus became, in turn, an AIDS-like scourge; proof of a new era of pharmaceuticals; a threat from which all American children had a right to be protected; and a cancer-causing infection spread by teenage lifestyles. The metamorphosis of the infection’s image was reflected in evolving policy recommendations regarding who should receive the vaccine in the 1980s, and was key to securing broad uptake of the vaccine in the 1990s. (shrink)

El presente artículo tiene como objetivo reconstruir la ética de la resistencia que Nietzsche propone en _El Anticristo _partiendo de la imagen que se ofrece en el prólogo a modo de declaración de intenciones: “preferible _vivir en medio del hielo_”. Dicha ética le exige al individuo la superación de la psicología de la convicción o de la fe y recurre, como método, a la Filología entendida como “_ephexis _en la interpretación”. La apropiación nietzscheana de ese término procedente del pirronismo obliga (...) a medir la utilidad de las enseñanzas escépticas para un individuo que aspira a autorrealizarse, _a llegar a ser el que es_. Con este fin ha de poner entre paréntesis los lugares comunes y asegurarse una posición hermenéutica propia que quiere evitar la_ des-simismación_ y que renuncia, por ello, a implicarse en la rutina democrática de las sociedades modernas. En sintonía con la sensibilidad pirrónica que anima a cultivar la distancia y la indiferencia, se acabará mostrando, en primer lugar, que Nietzsche se dirige exclusivamente a una comunidad de lectores afines y que, en segundo lugar, suspende la vocación política de su propuesta. (shrink)

800x600 Normal 0 21 false false false RO X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Review of Mihaela Frunză, Expertiza etică și bioetica. Studii de caz (Ethical Expertise and Bioethics. Case Studies). Cluj-Napoca, Limes Publishing House, 2010.

Name der Zeitschrift: Zeitschrift für kritische Sozialtheorie und Philosophie Jahrgang: 4 Heft: 1-2 Seiten: 177-208.

An exchange of letters among proper names and natural-kind terms, dealing with various identity and individuation problems (rigid designation, use-mention ambiguities, translation) from their point of view.

At the beginning of the 19. century the call for a general reform of the State rose in Prussia: after the collapse of the German Empire in 1806, the need for reform became still more pressing. A fundamental part of this renovation process was the reform of the Prussian army, to which men like Clausewitz, the general von Scharnhorst, the war ministers von Stein and later von Boyen contributed. All they were convinced that a new way of making war was (...) necessary for freeing Prussia from the French invader: only that the military reform should be founded on a spiritual renovation of the political and military life. In particular, a new conception of the soldier as human being and of the war as spiritual event should be established and trained by means of a new organization of the military forces and of the cultivation of a shared national feeling. The purpose of the present essay is to point out the position of Fichte towards both the problems connected to the war, the Napoleonic invasion and the crisis of the traditional State and the proposals formulated by the reform party in order to solve those problems. In this way it is possible to achieve a better comprehension of Fichte’s political thought in the last period of his life, the so called “national” period, by highlighting the correspondences existing between his thought and the political context of his time. Am Anfang des xix. Jahrhunderts stand Preu.en im Zentrum einer gewaltigen Reformbewegung, die jeden Bereich des staatlichen Lebens neu gestalten wollte. Nach dem Sturz des Reiches im Jahre 1806, als das Reformbedurfnis des Staates mit noch gro.erer Dringlichkeit empfunden wurde, erwarb die Reform des Heeres eine zentrale Stelle. Zu dieser trugen Personlichkeiten bei wie Carl von Clausewitz und der General von Scharnhorst in Zusammenarbeit mit den Ministern von Stein und spater Hermann von Boyen. Die ihrem Engagement zugrunde liegende Uberzeugung war es, dass eine neue Art der Kriegsfuhrung unausweichlich, jedoch nur auf der Basis einer neu gedachten Anthropologie zu verwirklichen sei. In dem Ma.e, in dem die Reformbewegung sich nicht auf eine verwaltungsorientierte Neugestaltung des Staates bzw. des Heeres beschrankte, sondern auf einer grundlegenden Erneuerung des nationalen Geistes beruhen sollte, muss sie in einen weiteren, nicht nur politischen, sondern in erster Linie geistigen, kulturellen und philosophischen Zusammenhang eingeordnet werden. Der vorliegende Beitrag setzt sich zum Ziel, die Stellung Fichtes im Zusammenhang der preu.ischen Reformbewegung hervorzuheben, mit der Absicht, die gegenseitigen Einflusse und die Ubereinstimmungen zwischen Fichtes politischen und padagogischen Ansichten einerseits und dem Reformgeist, seinen politischen Anspruchen und militarischen Vorschlagen andererseits klar herauszustellen. (shrink)

Biological conservation has a long story, but what distinguishes Conservation Biology from previous conservation fields is its multidisciplinary scope and its character as a mission-oriented crisis discipline. These characteristics suggested the introduction of the metaphor of biological conservation as a sort of surgery. This paper is about the initial stages of such surgery. Firstly, some data about the so-called “Big Sixth”—the disease—will be presented together with some information about Conservation Biology—the surgeon. Then epistemic and epistemological difficulties in extinction assessment and (...) conservation prioritization, and triage in particular, will be pointed out. It will be argued that, while data deficiency arising from empirical and practical constraints can in principle be overcome, a different order of difficulties stems from the competition among several species concepts. In this case, it will be suggested that the extent of complications is of such significance to require a thorough re-assessment of the very nature of the patients, i.e., outside the metaphor, of the concept of species. (shrink)

In recent decades, affective scientists have begun using concepts and tools from dynamical systems theory (DST) to characterise emotional processes. This article considers how the concept of emergence might be used to develop this approach. Emotions are explicated as ‘emergent products’ that diachronically constrain the operations of their parts in virtue of feedback loops (a classical feature of nonlinear dynamical systems). The explication is shown to be broadly consistent with what is sometimes called ‘pattern’ emergence. Casting emotions as emergent patterns (...) is shown to shed light on a major conceptual and empirical challenge emotion theorists have faced over the past century: identifying and measuring the presence of emotional episodes (Lindquist et al., 2012; Hollenstein & Lanteigne, 2014), dubbed here the ‘boundary problem’ (following Colombetti, 2014). In particular, the explication suggests seeing the emotional ‘signatures’ thought to accompany emotional episodes as fragile and context-bound: likely to hold under a relevant class of interventions (Woodward, 2005), but not without exception beyond that class. This in turn may suggest a need to significantly revise the statistical methods currently used to measure the presence of emotional ‘signatures’. The casting of emotions as emergent patterns also functions as a further case study supporting the value of ‘pattern emergence’ (Winning & Bechtel, 2019) as a powerful vehicle for characterising the objects of investigation — compound and context-sensitive — ubiquitous in the biological sciences. (shrink)

Non sempre il pensiero politico di Karl Jaspers ha ricevuto l’attenzione che merita.

Hallucination lies at an intriguing border between psychiatry and philosophy. Although Behrendt & Young (B&Y) tie their proposal to Kantian transcendental idealism, other philosophical positions are equally consistent. Cognition is underconstrained by reality not only in hallucination but also in autism and dreaming. Sensory underconstraint is insufficient to encompass schizophrenia. There is also a breakdown in integrative capacity on the cognitive side. From a wider clinical perspective than schizophrenia, there can be underconstraint or overconstraint in sensory and cognitive functionalities.

The essay focuses on the Italian evolutionist Tito Vignoli, whose work is the result of a fruitful contamination between philosophy, history of religion, linguistics, ethnography, anthropology, psychology, zoology and physiology. His most regarded book, Mito e scienza (1879), and some of his minor writings deal with the theory of myth, art and aesthetics in the new framework of Darwin's ideas.

Receiving another person’s gestures is an aesthetic production and an ethical pursuit. Cuffari finds support for this claim in Merleau-Ponty’s sustained comparisons between speaking, writing, and painting and in his concepts of reversibility and encroachment in The Prose of the World. She considers complex instances of gesture reception in interactions occurring in family life, poetic response to racist speech, and a robotic art exhibition. Gestures signify according to a logic of appropriative disclosure, wherein gesturing bodies select and stylize features of (...) shared space and history in an effort to say something new. Gesture receivers complete acts of meaning making by confronting and co-inhabiting the coherent deformations of another’s stylized and expressive action. Cuffari calls for efforts to perceive ourselves perceiving as a conscious practice of artistic stance towards conversational meaning co-construction. Recevoir les gestes d’une autre personne est une production esthétique et une recherche éthique. Cuffari trouve un soutien à cette thèse dans les comparaisons de Merleau-Ponty entre parler, écrire et peindre, et dans ses concepts de la réversibilité et de l’entrelacement dans La prose du monde. Elle prend en considération des instances complexes de réception de gestes dans des interactions qui se produisent dans la vie familiale, la réponse poétique à un discours raciste, une exposition d’art robotique. Les gestes signifient selon une logique du dévoilement et de l’appropriation, où les corps gesticulants sélectionnent et stylisent les caractères de l’espace partagé et de l’histoire dans un effort de dire quelque chose de nouveau. Ceux qui reçoivent les gestes accomplissent des actes de signification en confrontant et en co-habitant les déformations cohérentes d’une action stylisée et expressive d’un autre. Cuffari appelle à des efforts pour nous percevoir nous-mêmes en percevant, en tant que pratique consciente artistique à l’égard de la co-construction conversationnelle du sens.Ricevere il gesto di un’altra persona implica una produzione estetica ed una ricerca etica. Cuffari poggia la sua tesi sul confronto che Merleau-Ponty stabilisce tra parlare, scrivere e dipingere e sul concetto di reversibilità e di intreccio ne La prosa del mondo. L’autrice esamina la complessa questione della ricezione del gesto in diversi contesti: interazioni della vita famigliare, risposta poetica al discorso raziale e una mostra di arte robotica. I gesti significano in base ad una logica di disvelamento e appropriazione, in cui i corpi che performano i gesti individuano e stilizzano i caratteri di uno spazio condiviso e di una storia nello sforzo di esprimere qualcosa di nuovo. I riceventi del gesto vengono a completarne il significato confrontando e coabitando le deformazioni coerenti dell’azione stilizzata e espressiva di un altro. Cuffari ci chiama così a percepirci noi stessi nell’atto di percepire in quanto pratica artistica cosciente rispetto alla co-costruzione discorsiva del significato. (shrink)

This book provides an answer to the question: «Where does the point-of-view shot come from?» It investigates the emergence of this filmic form as the product of a culture and its history, unravelling the difference between a point-of-view shot and a character's subjective viewpoint.

Mammals have a very complex, tightly controlled, and developmentally regulated process of dosage compensation. One form of the process equalizes expression of the X‐linked genes, present as a single copy in males (XY) and as two copies in females (XX), by inactivation of one of the two X‐chromosomes in females. The second form of the process leads to balanced expression between the X‐linked and autosomal genes by transcriptional upregulation of the active X in males and females. However, not all X‐linked (...) genes are absolutely balanced. This review is focused on the recent advances in studying the dosage compensation phenomenon in mammals. (shrink)