O leitor encontrará, neste volume, o crítico e o pensador arrojado procurando destrinçar questões filosóficas como o irracionalismo, o homem e a técnica, temas políticos e culturais relacionados ao racismo e à atual cultural das gangs, bem como reflexões estéticas acerca da pseudo-arte e do kitsch, para integrá-los plenamente nos seus contextos filosóficos, sociais e humanos.

The decision to undertake this volume was made in 1971 at Lake Como during the Varenna summer school ofthe Italian Physical Society, where Professor Leon Rosenfeld was lecturing on the history of quantum theory. We had long been struck by the unique blend of epistemological, histori cal and social concerns in his work on the foundations and development of physics, and decided to approach him there with the idea of publishing a collection of his papers. He responded enthusiastically, and (...) agreed to help us select the papers; furthermore, he also agreed to write a lengthy introduction and to comment separately on those papers that he felt needed critical re-evaluation in the light of his current views. For he was still vigorously engaged in both theoretical investigations of, and critical not reflections on the foundations of theoretical physics. We certainly did conceive of the volume as a memorial to a 'living saint', but rather more practically, as a useful tool to place in the hands of fellow workers and students engaged in wrestling with these difficult problems. All too sadly, fate has added a memorial aspect to our labors. We agreed that in order to make this book most useful for the con temporary community of physicists and philosophers, we should trans late all non-English items into English. (shrink)

A hypothesis about sensorimotor integration (the λ model) is described and applied to movement control and kinesthesia. The central idea is that the nervous system organizes positional frames of reference for the sensorimotor apparatus and produces active movements by shifting the frames in terms of spatial coordinates. Kinematic and electromyographic patterns are not programmed, but emerge from the dynamic interaction among the system s components, including external forces within the designated frame of reference. Motoneuronal threshold properties and proprioceptive inputs to (...) motoneurons may be cardinal components of the physiological mechanism that produces positional frames of reference. The hypothesis that intentional movements are produced by shifting the frame of reference is extended to multi-muscle and multi-degrees-of-freedom systems with a solution of the redundancy problem that allows the control of a joint alone or in combination with other joints to produce any desired limb configuration and movement trajectory. The model also implies that for each motor behavior, the nervous system uses a strategy that minimizes the number of changeable control variables and keeps the parameters of these changes invariant. Examples are provided of simulated kinematic and electromyographic signals from single- and multi-joint arm movements produced by suggested patterns of control variables. Empirical support is provided and additional tests of the model are suggested. The model is contrasted with others based on the ideas of programming of motoneuronal activity, muscle forces, stiffness, or movement kinematics. (shrink)

ExcerptWeak government is a negation of liberty.Francis LieberAfter the experiences of the past generation, it should be apparent that all too much of liberal internationalist thinking in America is not “internationalist” in any real sense at all. Internationalism, if it is to have any meaning as a word, must mean peace and cooperation between different nations, which by nature will have not merely different interests that must be reconciled but different political systems that must coexist.

The first comprehensive reference resource on comparative constitutional law, the Oxford Handbook provides a road map to the field. Leading experts examine the history and development of the discipline, its core concepts, institutions, rights, and emerging trends.

Dans les sociétés pluralistes, qui n'ont pas en commun un ensemble de valeurs éthiques, sociales et politiques, l'interprétation juridique est sous tension permanente. Les interprétations justes - c'est-à-dire les interprétations qui reflètent une conception partagée de la justice - peuvent être juste des interprétations ; autrement dit, des interprétations qui correspondent seulement aux aspirations et aux intérêts de différents groupes sociaux. Dans ce livre, Michel Rosenfeld s'affronte à cette crise de l'interprétation juridique. Il présente une évaluation critique des principaux (...) courants de la théorie du droit contemporaine aux Etats-Unis et en France et propose une approche différente. L'analyse de Michel Rosenfeld porte aussi bien sur le néo-formalisme, le pragmatisme, la théorie du discours, que la théorie autopoiétique. Elle comporte un examen des thèses des principaux auteurs et notamment de Habermas, Rorty, Posner, Luhmann, Dworkin, Fish et Weinrib. Pour remédier à certaines insuffisances de ces thèses, à propose la théorie du pluralisme compréhensif, fondée sur une conception matérielle du pluralisme. Cette approche transforme le fait du pluralisme en un principe normatif. A partir des intuitions de la déconstruction, il répond à cet appel de Derrida, auquel on n'a pas prêté une attention suffisante, à un engagement à combler la distance entre soi et l'autre, sans sacrifice de l'un ou de l'autre. Michel Rosenfeld montre que la théorie du pluralisme compréhensif permet de surmonter les limitations du libéralisme, du républicanisme et du communautarisme, tout en évitant les apories du monisme et du relativisme. " Les interprétations justes " est un outil pour s'orienter et sortir des labyrinthes théoriques et, à ce titre, il s'adresse à ceux qui s'occupent de théorie du droit, de droit constitutionnel, de philosophie sociale, de science politique ou de théorie critique, comme à ceux qui, à partir de points de vue disciplinaires divers, s'intéressent aux textes, à l'interprétation et qui partagent, dans une perspective postmoderne, le souci de la justice. (shrink)

This paper contends that impression management is not inherently a threat to fairness in employment interviews. Rather, regarding impression management as unfair is based on an outdated, narrow view of impression management as conscious, manipulative, and deceptive. A broader, expansive model of impression management is described which sees these behaviors as falling on a continuum from deceptive and manipulative on the one hand, to accurate, positive and beneficial on the other. While organizations may want to eliminate or discount the negative (...) aspect of the impression management continuum, the ability to positively 'sell' oneself is often a desirable attribute both in the employment interview and in later on-the-job settings. This expansive view of impression management contends that organizations can make employment interviews more fair by: viewing impression management as a skill and not a deficit, training interviewers to be wary of manipulative and deceptive impression management, reducing the ambiguity and uncertainty of interview settings and increasing the verifiability of candidate responses by focusing the interview on a candidate's long-term identities and accomplishments rather than their short-term, spur-of-the-moment attempts to please the interviewer. (shrink)

The seeming absence of negative evidence in the input that children receive during language acquisition has long been regarded as a serious problem for non-nativist linguistic theories. Among the solutions that have been suggested for this problem, preemption by competing structures is doubtless the most intensively researched and widely accepted. However, while preemption works well in the domain of morphology, it cannot apply categorically in the domain of syntax, as this would preclude the existence of semantically overlapping constructions, such as (...) the ditransitive and the prepositional dative, which can be used alternatively with many, but not all, verbs of literal or metaphorical transfer. This paper investigates one specific version of preemption briefly entertained by Pinker (Language learnability and language development, Harvard University Pressm, 1984), which would account both for the existence of semantically overlapping constructions and for the fact that these constructions may preempt each other in the case of individual verbs. Typically, such pairs of grammatical constructions differ in their information-structural restrictions and speakers tend to choose the construction that best fits a given discourse context; when speakers use a construction even though there is an alternative that fits the discourse context better, children may take this as evidence that the alternative is not available for the specific verb in question. Two corpus studies are presented, comparing the information-structural profile of prepositional dative constructions containing verbs that may alternate between the dative and the ditransitive with the information structural profile of verbs that are restricted to the prepositional dative. For Pinker's preemptive mechanism to be feasible, there should be a clear and systematic difference in the information-structural profile of these two classes of verbs. However, no such difference can be found in actual usage. (shrink)

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, emerging advances in the biomedical sciences raised insufficiently noticed ethical issues, prompting science reporters to serve as a sort of Early Warning System. As awareness of bioethical issues increased rapidly everywhere, and bioethics itself arrived as a recognized discipline, the need for this early-warning press role has clearly diminished. A secondary but important role for the science journalist is that of investigative reporter/whistleblower, as in the Tuskegee syphilis trials and the government's secret plutonium (...) experiments. Because the general public gets most of its information from the popular media, ways are suggested for journalists and bioethicists to work together. (shrink)

Drawing on the records of an “alcoholism counselling service” launched in the 13th arrondissement of Paris in 1954, this article studies how social work became part of the new scope of psychiatric care for alcohol addiction, at a time when new medical cures were becoming available. The content and structure of patient records, which we analyse in comparison with papers from medical and social work journals, provide an insight into the day-to-day tasks of the social workers, who worked as closely (...) as possible with alcoholic patients and their families. The article shows that the action of the social worker, which became central, although subordinated to that of psychiatric medicine, took on a psychotherapeutic dimension and was characterised by the need to gain the patient’s trust and ensure their adherence to treatment, thus marking a clear inflection in the relationship with beneficiaries. However, social work was still characterised by its constitutive ambiguity; its control and surveillance functions created difficulties, misunderstandings and disputes with the patients and their relatives. (shrink)

Prispevek predstavi sklop evholoških besedil na čast svetemu Hieronimu: od prvih omemb v Gelazijevem zakramentarju do prenovljenega rimskega misala Pavla vi. Orisan je potek kompozicije temeljnih zakramentarjev in misalov rimskega obreda, ki so vir, iz katerega se je bogato razširil obstoječ misal. Predstavljeni so vidiki, ki bi jih za zvest prenos misli, izraženih v latinski evhologiji, v drug jezik, lahko upoštevali. Razširjeni konteksti umeščenega besedila namreč v bogoslužju omogočajo liturgičnemu besedilu, da lahko postane učinkovit dogodek vere. Njihovo neupoštevanje pa učinkovitost (...) besedila omejuje. Zaradi pretežno filološke metode prevedeno evhološko besedilo uporabnika lahko doseže šele s katehezo, homilijo ali komentarjem. Tak pristop je neprimerljivo hitrejši in zaradi še neizdelanih študij za vsak posamezni formular se ohranja vtis, da je zahtevni proces inkulturacije rimskega obreda nujno potrebno centralno nadzorovati. Predstavljena so tudi obvezujoča navodila, s katerimi Cerkev že desetletja usmerja prevajanje in iz katerih postaja še bolj očitna teža in preroškost odločitev, ki jih je v korist vernikov naredila na drugem vatikanskem koncilu. (shrink)

The cerebellum probably obeys the rules of sensorimotor integration common in the nervous system. One such a rule is formulated: the nervous system organizes spatial frames of reference for the sensorimotor apparatus and produces voluntary movements by shifting their origin points. We give examples of spatial frames of reference for different single- and multi-joint movements including locomotion and also illustrate that the process of motor development and learning may depend critically on the formation of appropriate frames of reference and the (...) organism's ability to manage them. We suggest that a solution to the problem of sensorimotor integration may not be trivial and may actually change the mental and experimental paradigms used in the understanding of the cerebellum and other brain structures, [HOUK et al.; SIMPSON et al.; SMITH; TIIACH]. (shrink)

Husserl’s analyses of time consciousness have proved to be one of the more intricate challenges of his phenomenology. The article addresses his writings on time consciousness not with the aim of discussing or solving the epstemological problems that arise, but instead is interested in the descriptive procedure with which Husserl approaches them. The concept of ›Darstellung‹ serves as a starting point for this, a concept which Husserl takes up in order to describe the unified constitution of temporal objects ›vis à (...) vis‹ the continuity of their temporal givenness. Thus importing a traditionally poetological-rhetorical vocabulary – in rhetoric ›Darstellung‹ denotes vivid representation in language – into the analysis of temporal consciousness, it points to Husserl’s own descriptive project as potentially working in a similar manner. In Husserl’s writings, a ›Verlaufspoetik‹ (transitory poetics) comes into view, in which the textual flow of the descriptive process seems to match the stream of experience of temporal consciousness. (shrink)

Early vision provides general information about the environment that can be used for motor control or navigation and more specialized information that can be used for object recognition. The general information is likely to be insensitive to cognitive factors, but this may not be entirely true for the information used in model-based recognition.

The prevalence of the term post-truth suggests that we have, in the last few years, moved from being members of societies dedicated to truth to being members of ones that cannot agree on truth’s parameters and, even worse, have given up trying. But is this really what has happened? The author argues that, under the sway of the Enlightenment, truth has actually been unstable and a source of contention in public life ever since the founding moment for modern democracies in (...) the late eighteenth century; the ‘post’ in ‘post-truth’ elides this complex history even as it accurately describes some of the conditions of our moment. What that means, though, is that rather than attempt to turn the clock back to past models and practices for restoring the reign of truth, we should be looking for new, post-Enlightenment paradigms for how to define and locate truth in the context of democracy, as well as new mechanisms for making this possible. (shrink)