Two experiments, one on school-aged children and one on adults, explored the mechanisms underlying responses to an image prime followed by graspable objects that were, in certain cases, dangerous. Participants were presented with different primes and objects representing two risk levels . The task required that a natural/artifact categorization task be performed by pressing different keys. In both adults and children graspable objects activated a facilitating motor response, while dangerous objects evoked aversive affordances, generating an interference-effect. Both children and adults (...) were sensitive to the distinction between biological and non-biological hands, however detailed resonant mechanisms related to the hand-prime gender emerged only in adults. Implications for how the concept of “dangerous object” develops and the relationship between resonant mechanisms and perception of danger are discussed. (shrink)

Antropologia do espaço, de Filomena Silvano, é umlivro comvocaçãomarcadamente didáctica, mas que constitui uma notável síntese (deveríamos dizer ummapa?) de uma disciplina (a antropologia) que tem vindo a ganhar (pelos motivos que Jameson enunciava) uma.

In public communication contexts, such as when a company announces the proposal for an important organizational change, argumentation typically involves multiple audiences, rather than a single and homogenous group, let alone an individual interlocutor. In such cases, an exhaustive and precise characterization of the audience structure is crucial both for the arguer, who needs to design an effective argumentative strategy, and for the external analyst, who aims at reconstructing such a strategic discourse. While the peculiar relevance of multiple audience is (...) often emphasized in the argumentation literature and in rhetorical studies, proposals for modelling multi-audience argumentative situations remain scarce and unsystematic. To address this gap, we propose an analytical framework which integrates three conceptual constructs: Rigotti and Rocci’s notion of communicative activity type, understood as the implementation of an interaction scheme into a piece of institutional reality, named interaction field; the stakeholder concept, originally developed in strategic management and public relations studies to refer to any actor who affects and/or is affected by the organizational actions and who, accordingly, carries an interest in them; the concept of participant role as it emerges from Goffman’s theory of conversation analysis and related linguistic and media studies. From this integration, we derive the notion of text stakeholder for referring to any organizational actor whose interest becomes an argumentative issue which the organizational text must account for in order to effectively achieve its communicative aim. The text stakeholder notion enables a more comprehensive reconstruction and characterization of multiple audience by eliciting the relevant participants staged in a text and identifying, for each of them, the interactional role they have, the peculiar interest they bear and the related argumentative issue they create. Considering as an illustrative case the defense document issued by a corporation against a hostile takeover attempt made by another corporation, we show how this framework can support the analysis of strategic maneuvering by better defining the audience demand and, so, better explaining how real arguers design and adapt their topical and presentational choices. (shrink)

Still today it remains unclear whether Galileo ever climbed the leaning tower of Pisa in order to drop bodies from its top. Some believe that he established the principle of equal speeds for falling bodies by means of an ingenious thought experiment. However, the reconstruction of that thought experiment circulating in the philosophical literature is no more than a cartoon. In this paper I will tell the story of the thought processes behind the cartoon.Keywords: Galileo Galilei; Thought experiment; Falling bodies.

This paper aims to single out some pathologies of current lexical semantics, which suffers from both the trauma of immanence and the opposite anxiety of rooting all knowledge in the pre-semiotic dimension, or entrusting sense-making entirely to context. To untangle these pitfalls, the dialogue with a phenomenological cognitive semiotics may prove fertile to focus on the lexicon as a type of storage and a type of memory; that is, a type of accumulated and sedimented knowledge based on the dynamical re-pertinentization (...) of invariants. In particular, the perspective developed by Sonesson shows striking coincidences with De Mauro’s semiotic semantics, which already provides a solid foundation for rethinking the notion of lexical field drawing on an “authentic” Humboldtian and Saussurean heritage. Therefore, I will briefly review some principles of lexical structural semantics, with the aim of showing how these notions, once emancipated from the Saussurean vulgata, can not only be compatible with a cognitive phenomenological approach, but also facilitate the rehabilitation of a theoretical apparatus still valuable for both (lexical) semantics and semiotics. Although focused on lexical fields, some of the issues addressed can be extended to language and languages, as well as to other types of semiotic systems, to shed light on controversial themes such as the embodiment of signs and the autonomy of linguistics and semantics. (shrink)

Pautas de actuación letrada de los abogados y abogadas de las víctimas de violencia de género. Intervención del letrado o letrada de la víctima en el orden penal, desde el momento previo a la interposición de una denuncia por violencia de género, con solicitud de Orden de Protección, hasta la ejecución de la sentencia condenatoria. Intervención en el orden civil con el inicio de un procedimiento civil ante el Juzgado de Violencia Sobre la Mujer solicitando en su caso las medidas (...) paterno-filiales o la separación o el divorcio. Propuestas desde la Abogacía al Pacto de Estado en materia de violencia de género. Reformas legislativas previstas en respuesta al Pacto de Estado. (shrink)

Il fil rouge che lega le quattro sezioni del volume, che raccoglie le relazioni presentate al convegno internazionale Interactive Imagination (Roma, 6-8 giugno 2016), con l’aggiunta di contributi dei curatori e di studiosi che pure vi hanno partecipato, è la nozione di immaginazione, investigata da diverse prospettive teorico-filosofiche, correlata a quella di ambiente, anch’essa approfondita sotto diversi aspetti. Il tema mediale compare, talvolta esplicito talvolta in filigrana, con sfacce...

The paper examines three examples of Saint Jerome’s contemporary reception. First, in Sous l’invocation de Saint Jérôme, the essay by the French writer and translator Valery Larbaud (1946), Jerome’s life is imagined as the large city of Hiéronymopolis where three itineraries are possible: one that is imaginary to Stridon, Rome, and Bethlehem; one that is iconographical through the paintings of Raffaello, Correggio, and Domenichino, and one that is literary through Jerome’s works, divided into many “city districts,” where an impressive bridge, (...) the Vulgata, connects Jerusalem to Rome. – In the eccentric novel Jérôme ou de la traduction by the French-Canadian writer Jean Marcel (1990), Hieronymus’s famous lion narrates the main episodes of the Saint’s life, especially regarding his translations. This is an existential metaphor for the passage from the ancient eastern world to early Christian Rome. – The poetic movie by the Brasilian director Júlio Bressane, São Jerônimo (1999), is not a biographical reconstruction of Jerome’s life, but rather a fresco, which consists of some moments of his life and some iconic symbols (the skull, the lion, the desert). (shrink)

This paper is an insight on a front-line doctor’s experience of Coronavirus in Italy, in an Internal Medicine ward transformed to a COVID-19 ward. Using content analysis were analyzed 52 destructurated interviews to “Covid clinicians” in the “Ospedale dei Castelli” hospital structure in Rome, Italy. Thematic analysis was performed to recognize common topics in the interviews. Finally, a correlation between the 5 Ovid’s forces and Narrative Medicine scenarios is described. Coronavirus is a “tsunami” by confrontation with the poet Ovid’s five (...) driving forces. Covid-19 never gave health-workers a chance to draw breath for a moment themselves, as presentation and treatment hypotheses changed at dizzying speed, constantly forcing them to modify and adapt established procedures and behavior as the pandemic evolved. Every scenarios present a correlation with at least one positive and one negative force. Many healthcare workers who came face-to-face with the magnitude of this emergency are able in some way to contextualize the social implications of this experience, which paradoxically has some positive aspects, having let them discover newfound courage, resourcefulness, and hope. Negative forces result from too strong positive emotions and they are a signal of deteriorated relationships and an alarm bell of clinician’s burn-out. Covid era has been defined by the lack of emergency preparedness, together with lack of international coordination and media reports generating terror. People can defeat Covid by combatting against terror of the heart, by finding passion and courage and by dealing honestly with the fear of disease and death. (shrink)

The use of robots had already been proven to encourage the promotion of social interaction and skills lacking in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders, who typically have difficulties in recognizing facial expressions and emotions. The main goal of this research is to study the influence of a humanoid robot to develop socio-emotional skills in children with ASD. The children’s performance in game scenarios aiming to develop facial expressions recognition skills is presented. Along the sessions, children who performed the game scenarios (...) with the robot and the experimenter had a significantly better performance than the children who performed the game scenarios without the robot. The main conclusions of this research support that a humanoid robot is a useful tool to develop socio-emotional skills in the intervention of children with ASD, due to the engagement and positive learning outcome observed. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to discuss Rorty’s sceptical view of knowledge as representation, particularly as expressed in his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity as a framework for a rereading of Poe’s poetics. Despite the differences in their historical context, this comparative approach discloses Rorty’s and Poe’s shared anti-representationalism, which subverts the accepted notions of the relationship between language and reference on the one hand, and between the world as referent and its (...) poetic representation on the other. (shrink)

About a century ago, Ernst Mach argued that Archimedes’s deduction of the principle of the lever is invalid, since its premises contain the conclusion to be demonstrated. Subsequently, many scholars defended Archimedes, mostly on historical grounds, by raising objections to Mach’s reconstruction of Archimedes’s deduction. In the debate, the Italian philosopher and historian of science Giovanni Vailati stood out. Vailati responded to Mach with an analysis of Archimedes’s deduction which was later quoted and praised by Mach himself. In this paper, (...) my objective is to show that the debate can be further advanced, as Mach indicated, by reframing it in terms of the empirical vs. the logical dimensions of mechanics. In this way, I will suggest, the debate about Archimedes’s deduction can be resolved in Mach’s favour.Keywords: Equilibrium; Experience; Thought experiment; Archimedes; Ernst Mach; Giovanni Vailati. (shrink)

This book explores the life of Galileo Galilei through a philosophical and scientific lens, utilizing an innovative hermeneutic perspective that places his work in the wider context of early modern hermeticism, religious heresy, and libertinism. As the first comprehensive study of Galileo’s life and work from a phenomenological and existentialist viewpoint, Paolo Palmieri calls into question the positivist myth of Galileo, the founder of modern science, and interrogates the positivist historiography that has shaped the myth since the historic publication (...) of the monumental edition of Galileo’s works at the turn of the twentieth century. The book highlights the entanglement of Galileo’s natural philosophy with his private unorthodox convictions about Christian theology, Biblical hermeneutic, sexuality, and the hidden traditions of Italian heretics and libertines. The text demonstrates the philosophical, pedagogical, and political implications of this new reading of one of the founding fathers of modernity for both the sciences and the humanities. Addressing hotly debated questions of ethnicity, racism, subjectivity, the self, and pedagogy, this study will be of particular interest to scholars who teach both undergraduate and graduate courses in history of science, philosophy of science, phenomenology and existential philosophy, cultural studies, Italian studies, humanism, and the European Renaissance. (shrink)

Résumé Née en 1959, l’ autrice retrace depuis sa naissance 20 ans d’ histoire du prolétariat, de l’ engagement communiste, de l’ empreinte catholique, de l’ immigration en Europe et en Afrique du Nord, de la France des taudis et des banlieues. Ce parcours marqué par le féminisme et la lutte contre le patriarcat, l’ ascension et l’ intégration sociales, s’ inscrit dans les débats intellectuels de l’ époque sur le colonialisme, le racisme, le fascisme, le capitalisme, notamment portés par (...) Boris Vian, Jean-Paul Sartre et Simone de Beauvoir, dont elle revendique la filiation. (shrink)

The word akoumena succinctly refers to the main focus of the book, which is the natural philosophy of human hearing from the perspective of intellectual history of science and of philosophy, with a theoretical emphasis on phenomenology. The word akoumena suggests a move away from the language of vision which has been predominant throughout Western thought, both in the modern natural sciences and in Western metaphysics.