Adorno and Horkheimer adoted the notion of the fetishism of commodities for the analysis of art and culture. Material, physical goods are not identical to symbolic ones. In spite of being predominant cultural industry can not be taken as the prototype of all analyses of culture. One can not reduce all cultural productives of the period of market economy to market products. The plurality of artistic and cultural practices present in countries like Brazil, does make questionable the indiscriminate use of (...) the Frankfurtian framework.Adorno e Horkheimer adotaram a noção de fetichismo da mercadoria para a análise da arte e da cultura. Bens materiais e físicos não são idênticos aos simbólicos. Apesar de dominante, a indústria cultural não pode ser tomada como protótipo de toda análise da cultura. Não se pode reduzir toda a produção cultural da época da economia de mercado a produtos de mercado. A pluralidade de práticas artísticas e culturais, à qual se assiste em países como o Brasil, torna problemático o uso indiscriminado do referencial frankfurtiano. (shrink)

Our ability to deal with abstract concepts is one of the most intriguing faculties of human cognition. Still, we know little about how such concepts are formed, processed, and represented in mind. Current views are presented in their most recent and advanced form in this special issue, and directly compared and discussed in a lively debate, reported at the end of each chapter. The main results are reported in the editors’ introduction.

A concepção teatral de Brecht não é radicalmente oposta à de Aristóteles. A estética brechtiana, em muitos aspectos, é herdeira das idéias de Aristóteles. O teatro épico proposto por Brecht tem em seu horizonte de combate o teatro de matriz naturalista e o drama psicológico. Mimese e catarse não significam identificação do público com a cena e com o herói.

This article is introduced with a summarized discussion on the "theater's metaphor" as considered by Plato. It goes on considering several turning points in the literature history and investigating the different uses of the metaphoric process in Guimarães Rosa "Grande sertão: veredas" and "Pirlimpsiquice". Firt of all, in "Grande sertão" life is considered as a simbolic equivalent to actors performance in the stage: theater and life are seen, therefore, as concerning fields which identities can be stated upon christian religious doctrine (...) and Plotino's philosophy. On the other hand, in "Pirlimpsiquice", Guimarães Rosa points that the limits between life and theater fields can be sharply identified, leading to the conclusion that the different degrees of use of the metaphoric process is due to historical and cultural practices. Based on the theoric controversy between Hegel's and Plato's points of view on art's philosophy, the author concludes that the notions of "performance in the stage" and "performance in life" are sintetized under the continuous dialectic movement of history and culture.Este artigo inicia-se com uma exposição sucinta da metáfora do teatro, tal como aparece em Platão. Em seguida, após levantamento dos momentos capitais da literatura, investiga-se a metáfora em Guimarães Rosa, no Grande sertão: veredas e no conto Pirlimpsiquice. No Grande sertão, a atuação no palco é tomada como equivalente ao desempenho na vida. Teatro e vida são, portanto, domínios que se identificam. Para isto, concorrem a religião cristã e o pensamento de Plotino. Em Pirlimpsiquice, o Autor investiga por menorizadamente os limites e aproximações entre teatro e vida, sendo que o grau mínimo da metáfora é conferido pelas práticas histórica e cultural. Por fim, retomando a polêmica de Hegel com o platonismo, conclui-se que a representação e a vida estão amalgamadas, numa constante dialetização entre história e cultura. (shrink)

Words are not just labels for conceptual categories. Words construct conceptual categories, frame situations and influence behavior. Where do they get their meaning? This book describes how words acquire their meaning. The author argues that mechanisms based on associations, pattern detection, and feature matching processes explain how words acquire their meaning from experience and from language alike. Such mechanisms are summarized by the distributional hypothesis, a computational theory of meaning originally applied to word occurrences only, and hereby extended to extra-linguistic (...) contexts. By arguing in favor of the cognitive foundations of the distributional hypothesis, which suggests that words that appear in similar contexts have similar meaning, this book offers a theoretical account for word meaning construction and extension in first and second language that bridges empirical findings from cognitive and computer sciences. Plain language and illustrations accompany the text, making this book accessible to a multidisciplinary academic audience. (shrink)

A review of the achievements of Fr. Busa over the course of his 60 years of work in the area of computational linguistics: internal hypertexts, the systematization of allographs, lemmatization, homographs and typologies; the lexical system; the laws of economy for graphemes, for semantic typology, for heterogeneity among terms, and of the two lexical hemispheres. Finally, the project of disciplined languages is mentioned, a response to the linguistic challenge resulting from informational globalization.

A matéria-prima do espetáculo de circo é o corpo do artista, ora sublime, ora grotesco. O corpo sublime, no chão ou nas alturas, desafia, em forma de espetáculo, as leis naturais. No momento seguinte, o espetáculo é “interrompido” e o público é acometido pela descontração e pelo grotesco dos palhaços. O espetáculo circense, assim, se desloca, com facilidade e maestria, entre o riso e a morte.

This article presents an exploratory analysis of the metaphoric structure of five artistic paintings within “Think aloud” protocols, in which a group of 14 English speakers with a low self-rated level of expertise in art and history of art expertise were asked to verbalize all their thoughts, ideas and impressions of the artworks. The main findings of this study can be summarized as follows: (1) multiple interpretations for the same artwork are possible, (2) the interpretations of the metaphorical structures described (...) by the participants often diverge from those advanced by the researchers. These findings challenge the methods by which metaphor identification and analysis in pictorials is currently approached. As a matter of fact, most of the research in pictorial metaphors tends to reduce stimuli such as artistic paintings to unique metaphoric interpretations generally produced by a single researcher by means of introspection. By addressing this methodological problem in metaphor research, this article contributes to the development of a theoretical and operational participant-based framework that takes into account the role of metaphoric conceptualization within the domain of art and art cognition. (shrink)

The distinction between abstract and concrete concepts is fundamental to cognitive linguistics and cognitive science. This distinction is commonly operationalized through concreteness ratings based on the aggregated judgments of many people. What is often overlooked in experimental studies using this operationalization is that ratings are attributed to words, not to concepts directly. In this paper we explore the relationship between the linguistic properties of English words and conceptual abstractness/concreteness. Based on hypotheses stated in the existing linguistic literature we select a (...) set of variables and verify whether they are statistically associated with concreteness ratings. We show that English nouns are rated as more concrete compared to other parts of speech, but mass nouns are rated as less concrete than count nouns. Furthermore, a more complex morphological structure is associated with abstractness, and as for etymology, French- and Latin-derived words are more abstract than words of other origin. This shows that linguistic properties of words are indeed associated with the degree of concreteness that we attribute to the underlying concepts, and we discuss the implications that these findings have for linguistic theory and for empirical investigations in the cognitive sciences. (shrink)

Platão tem uma visão negativa da arte e da tragédia. A “irracionalidade” da prática artística está na base dessa negação. Sua visão é contrária ao perspectivismo humanista de Eurípedes e dos sofistas. Na filosofia renascentista, o sujeito observador (temporal e racional) pressupõe o múltiplo e o infinito. O perspectivismo está na base dessa orientação e Shakespeare é a melhor expressão artística desse pressuposto defendido na filosofia por Giordano Bruno.

Metaphors can provide a conceptual framework for understanding complex topics and as such, they have frequently been used in COVID-19 discourse. As previous research indicates that conceptual metaphors can influence how people reason about complex topics, the metaphors used to communicate about the pandemic can influence how it is understood and how people respond. This paper investigates the influence of metaphorical framing on emotions and reasoning. An experimental study compares BATTLE and JOURNEY metaphor frames in a hypothetical text (adapted from (...) previous studies) about the pandemic. Our aim is to examine the influence of these frames on readers’ affective state, inferences about the attitudes of others and suggestions to stop the virus from spreading. The results suggest that compared to JOURNEY metaphors, BATTLE metaphors can negatively influence affective state and may influence people to suggest more restrictive solutions to reduce the spread of the virus. Yet, metaphors were not found to influence reasoning about the attitudes of others. We interpret these results in relation to previous studies, suggesting that metaphors may influence emotions and reasoning in some ways only. The results have implications for public communication surrounding the pandemic. Limitations and avenues for future research are discussed. (shrink)

Concreteness ratings are frequently used in a variety of disciplines to operationalize differences between concrete and abstract words and concepts. However, most ratings studies present items in isolation, thereby overlooking the potential polysemy of words. Consequently, ratings for polysemous words may be conflated, causing a threat to the validity of concreteness‐ratings studies. This is particularly relevant to metaphorical words, which typically describe something abstract in terms of something more concrete. To investigate whether perceived concreteness ratings differ for metaphorical versus non‐metaphorical (...) word meanings, we obtained concreteness ratings for 96 English nouns from 230 participants. Results show that nouns are perceived as less concrete when a metaphorical (versus non‐metaphorical) meaning is triggered. We thus recommend taking metaphoricity into account in future concreteness‐ratings studies to further improve the quality and reliability of such studies, as well as the consistency of the empirical studies that rely on these ratings. (shrink)

In this paper we examine the functional anatomy of volition, as revealed by modern brain imaging techniques, in conjunction with neuropsychological data derived from human and non-human primates using other methodologies. A number of brain regions contribute to the performance of consciously chosen, or ‘willed', actions. Of particular importance is dorsolateral prefrontal cortex , together with those brain regions with which it is connected, via cortico-subcortical and cortico-cortical circuits. That aspect of free will which is concerned with the voluntary selection (...) of one action rather than another critically depends upon the normal functioning of DLPFC and associated brain regions. Disease, or dysfunction, of these circuits may be associated with a variety of disorders of volition: Parkinson's disease, ‘utilization’ behaviour, ‘alien’ and ‘phantom’ limbs, and delusions of ‘alien control’ . Brain imaging has allowed us to gain some access to the pathophysiology of these conditions in living patients. At a philosophical level, the distinction between ‘intentions to act', and ‘intentions in action’ may prove particularly helpful when addressing these complex disturbances of human cognition and conscious experience. The exercise and experience of free will depends upon neural mechanisms located in prefrontal cortex and associated brain systems. (shrink)

We report a magnetization, magnetostriction, electrical resistivity, specific heat and neutron scattering study of a UNi 2/3 Rh 1/3 Al single crystal, a solid solution of an antiferromagnet UNiAl and a ferromagnet URhAl. The huge uniaxial magnetic anisotropy confining the principal magnetic response to the c axis in the parent compounds persists also for the solid solution. The magnetization curve at 1.6 K has a pronounced S shape with an inflection at 12 T. The temperature dependence of magnetic susceptibility exhibits (...) a maximum around 10 K and is magnetic history dependent at lower temperatures where the resistivity increases linearly with decreasing temperature. The low-temperature „ anomaly is removed in a magnetic field applied along c , which yields a large negative magnetoresistance amounting to m 46 z in 14 T . The C/T values exhibit a minimum around 12 K and below 8 K they become nearly constant , which is strongly affected by magnetic fields. Neutron scattering data confirm a non-magnetic ground state of UNi 2/3 Rh 1/3 Al. The bulk properties at low temperatures are tentatively attributed to the freezing of U magnetic moments with antiferromagnetic correlations. The additional intensities detected on top of nuclear reflections in neutron diffraction in a magnetic field applied along c are found to be proportional to the field-induced magnetization, which reflects field-induced ferromagnetic coupling of U magnetic moments. This scenario is corroborated also by finding low-temperature magnetostriction data that also scale with the square of magnetization. (shrink)

The paper proves that a historical method in Marxism is not identified to a dialectical method. The logic of history and the logic of its analysis in Marxism do not always coincide. The Logical coincides with the Historical only in eternity as it actually occurs in the works by G.V.F. Hegel. Eternity which has already witnessed everything does not know history any more. In the same way, history also begins there where the eternity comes to an end. Therefore, artificial identification (...) of the Logical with the Historical in Marxism led sometimes to actual mistakes. It is no wonder that it has always caused discussions in Marxism. They are mainly explained by the fact that the deductive, abstract-to-concrete method in which the “General” appears before the “Concrete” is an anti-historical method in its Nature. In real human history the “General” which is generalization of many “Concrete” could not appear before the latter in any way. For this reason, the real historical materialism needs an inductive method of knowledge. Only in that case historical materialism will cease to remain the soviet “histmat” and becomes the real form of a new world outlook. The author is of the opinion that the Party spirit of the Soviet philosophy promoted preservation of the anomalies mentioned in Marxism. The open discussion could help to find valid but not inherited from Hegel relation of historical and logical methods in Marxism. (shrink)