Nos primeiros parágrafos do livro XIII das Confissões, Agostinho interpreta os primeiros versículos do Gênesis de maneira a entrelaçar criação do mundo, surgimento da consciência e história da conversão. Para isso, lança mão tanto da literatura neoplatônica quanto de uma tradição cristã já quase consolidada. Uma das fontes poderia ser o conjunto de tratados sobre a Trindade de Mário Vitorino.

What role does habit formation play in the development of sport skills? We argue that motor habits are both necessary for and constitutive of sensorimotor skill as they support an automatic, yet inherently intelligent and flexible, form of action control. Intellectualists about skills generally assume that what makes action intelligent and flexible is its intentionality, and that intentionality must be necessarily cognitive in nature to allow for both deliberation and explicit goal-representation. Against Intellectualism we argue that the habitual behaviours that (...) compose skilful action are accompanied by their specific, non-cognitive form of intentionality: this is motor intentionality, which is purposive and adaptive while involving no explicit deliberation or goal representation. Our account of habit based on Motor Intentionality explains why the formation of motor habits can sometimes act as the sole basis of skilful acquisition: Motor Intentionality is inherently purposeful because it is an embodied source of sensorimotor anticipation, pre-reflective motivation, and pragmatic know-how. Skill development through exercise always builds on a motor intentional component even when it is guided by Deliberate Practice to the point that, pace Intellectualism, Deliberate Practice is disclosed, not constrained, by habit formation. As suggested by the fact that repetitive exercises can play a major role in the development of flexible and intelligent sport skills, automatism is not a drawback for strategic control and improvisation but rather their pragmatic foundation. (shrink)

What is street art? This paper offers a definition of street art as an art kind or art form based on its essential value: its subversiveness. It argues that street art is essentially subversive in virtue of using public space as a technical resource. By hijacking a portion of the urban landscape with its colourful forms and witty designs, street art challenges familiar ways of practising the city, while creating a ‘temporary autonomous zone’ of free expression. There, corporate control over (...) the city’s visible surfaces is ridiculed and people reclaim their right to use the city. In this sense, street art functions as a carnivalesque tactic of social resistance, favouring the emergence of alternative ways to imagine our urban life and our uses of public space. By considering its subversiveness, one can also explain how street art (i) significantly differs from official public art; (ii) includes graffiti as its original and most radical style. (shrink)

The discussion about the relationship between tone at the top and financial reporting practices has been primarily focused on the oversight role played by the board of directors and other structural elements of corporate governance. Another relevant determinant of tone at the top is the corporate narrative language, since it is a fundamental way in which the chief executive officer enacts leadership. In this study, we empirically explore the association between financial reporting aggressiveness and five thematic indicators capturing different traits (...) of ethical leadership from 535 annual letters to shareholders. We find that aggressive financial reporting is positively associated with CEO letters using a language which is resolute, complex, and not engaging. Our empirical findings highlight the importance of examining discretionary corporate narratives for the auditing process and the role of tone at the top in influencing accounting practices. (shrink)

This study uses a Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies methodology to provide the first systematic analysis of how trust is discursively constructed in crypto-drug markets. The data come from two purpose-built corpora. One comprises all the forum messages posted on the flag ship crypto-drug market Silk Road during the years in which it traded on the hidden net. The other corpus comprises all the reports published by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime during the same period. Our analysis of (...) trust focuses on the identities of those buying and selling drugs. The findings reveal that the Silk Road community members regularly discussed vendors’ identities alongside a continuum of trust–risk calculation, explicitly identifying both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ practices and hence engaging in self-regulatory discourses, and mainly constructed drug users’ identities in relation to values of expertise, integrity and benevolence. The findings also suggest that hard law enforcement activity, such as crypto-drug market closure, may encourage technological innovation within these markets. Moreover, our results show a disconnect between the discursive reality of the policy-making documents we examined and the very crypto-drug markets that they seek to legislate. (shrink)

In Part I of this paper, we identified and compared various schemes for trivalent truth conditions for indicative conditionals, most notably the proposals by de Finetti and Reichenbach on the one hand, and by Cooper and Cantwell on the other. Here we provide the proof theory for the resulting logics DF/TT and CC/TT, using tableau calculi and sequent calculi, and proving soundness and completeness results. Then we turn to the algebraic semantics, where both logics have substantive limitations: DF/TT allows for (...) algebraic completeness, but not for the construction of a canonical model, while CC/TT fails the construction of a Lindenbaum-Tarski algebra. With these results in mind, we draw up the balance and sketch future research projects. (shrink)

The present collection of essays honours John Woods on the occasion of his eightieth birthday from contributors who wish to pay homage to this remarkable researcher whom they see not only as a scholar of prodigious energy and insight, but as a friend, colleague, collaborator, or former teacher. All of the essays touch upon topics Woods has taken a direct or indirect interest in, ranging from technical problems of mathematical logic and applications of formal methods through philosophical logic, philosophy of (...) language, epistemology and history of ancient and modern logic. The sections themselves of the book cover relevance, paradoxes, inconsistency, fallacies, abduction, fictions, logic naturalized, law, argumentation and narratives, and many other topics: and represent the main research areas which have profited from Woods' reflections. (shrink)

It is widely assumed that functional and dispositional properties are not identical to their physical base, but that there is some kind of asymmetrical ontological dependence between them. In this regard, a popular idea is that the former are realized by the latter, which, under the non-identity assumption, is generally understood to be a non-causal, constitutive relation. In this paper we examine two of the most widely accepted approaches to realization, the so-called ‘flat view’ and the ‘dimensioned view’, and we (...) analyze their explanatory relevance in the light of a number of examples from the life sciences, paying special attention to developmental phenomena. Our conclusion is that the emphasis placed by modern-day biology on such properties as variability, evolvability, and a whole collection of phenomena like modularity, robustness, and developmental constraint or developmental bias requires the adoption of a much more dynamic perspective than traditional realization frameworks are able to capture. (shrink)

The aim of the study is to determine the association between Behavioral Lifestyles and longevity in the elderly. A search strategy was conducted in the PsycInfo, Medline, PubMed, Web of Science, and Scopus databases. The primary outcome was mortality/survival. Four variables were analyzed to evaluate the role of potential moderators. Ninety-three articles, totaling more than 2,800,000 people, were included in the meta-analysis. We found that the lifestyles analyzed predict greater survival. Specifically, doing regular physical activity, engaging in leisure activities, sleeping (...) 7–8 h a day, and staying outside the BMI ranges considered as underweight or obesity are habits that each separately has a greater probability associated with survival after a period of several years. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The World Of Desire:Lacan Between Evolutionary Biology and Psychoanalytic TheoryLorenzo Chiesa (bio)The primary aim of this paper is to analyse the biological foundations of Lacan's notion of desire as expounded in his first two Seminars (1953-1955). These works provide us with his most detailed discussion of the species-specific preconditions that allow Homo sapiens to speak and establish symbolic pacts among individuals. Despite its irreducibility to the domain of animal (...) instincts, human desire can only be adequately understood against the background of an evolutionary enquiry on the emergence of language, one that problematises both the implicit teleological assumptions of a certain Darwinism and the logical consistency of an investigation of origins. Drawing on organic and anatomical evidence endorsed by natural scientists as different as Stephen Jay Gould and Adolf Portmann, Lacan postulates a primordial biological discord between man and his environment, centred on premature birth and a subsequent disorder of the imagination, from which language and the Symbolic immanently arise.1 Desire is seen in this context as coextensive with what, especially in Seminar I, Lacan repeatedly refers to as "the world of the symbol," or "the symbolic world"—a crucial phrase, rich with philosophical implications, to which critics have not yet [End Page 200] paid sufficient attention.2 The most important point to be grasped here is that the symbolic order is a world in the sense that, in always presenting itself to man as a totality, a uni-verse, it compensates for the failure of a strictly 'natural' relationship between man as animal and his environment. Yet, in performing this function, the Symbolic also amounts to nothing other than 'human nature' tout-court.3 In other words, the Symbolic is an exceptional and to a certain extent autonomous pseudo-environment that must nevertheless be interpreted by means of biological concepts.4 For this reason, the very opposition between nature and culture is as such put into question and re-proposed at a different level.5Lacan's seminars and articles of the early to mid-1950s are usually read from the standpoint of the notions of 'empty' and 'full' speech in their relation to the Kojèvian dialectic of the recognition of desire. While not underestimating the importance of this first formulation of desire as desire of the other, I intend to dwell especially on its biological presuppositions, since Lacan will maintain them—often to the point of taking them for granted—even after abandoning the notions of 'empty' and 'full' speech. This will also enable me to show that the supposedly Hegelian Lacan of this period is already preoccupied with a materialist explanation of language and of human desire as desire for recognition, both of which are framed within the context of a virulent anti-teleological, anti-humanist, and anti-vitalist polemics.It is, however, paramount to pre-emptively specify that my new approach to Seminars I and II does not intend to deny the impasses of Lacan's early notion of desire as a desire for recognition, which I have thoroughly discussed in Subjectivity and Otherness.6 In brief, the problem with Lacan's appropriation of Kojève is that, at this stage, the mutual recognition of one's desire is identified with the subject's fully successful integration into the symbolic order. What is not sufficiently stressed in this way—yet not entirely overlooked—is the incompleteness of the latter, the fact that man's pseudo-environment presents itself as a totality only insofar as it is structurally not-all. The [End Page 201] elaboration of a meticulous theoretical distinction between need, demand, and desire carried out in Seminars IV and V, as well as a direct confrontation with the Real as the not-all of the Symbolic in Seminar VII, will later oblige Lacan to reconsider this harmonic view. By the early 1960s, full integration in the Symbolic will be explicitly regarded as impossible and the dialectic of desire will consequently be focused on the level of the subject's mapping of himself as falling onto the object of the repressed fantasy.IIAccording to Lacan, man is born prematurely, that is, with "foetalised traits,"7 which are especially... (shrink)

Ecological developmental biology considers the phenotype as actively produced through an environmentally informed process of individual development, rather than predetermined by the genotype. Accordingly, the genotype is viewed as one among many interactants that contribute formative elements; it is understood to do so no differently from the way other organism-internal and environmental resources do. Although the EcoDevo approach is evidently particularly apt to inform approaches to human development, which mostly takes shape in rich cultural environments, it is remarkable that, at (...) least within some highly influential circles of the linguistic sciences, the study of many distinctive human cognitive traits including language remains strongly anchored to a preformationist stance. This article brings an EcoDevo approach to the biologically focused study of language to argue that an aspect of language design commonly assumed to be “blueprinted,” namely, the lexicon-syntax interface, may instead be explained as a plastic effect of ongoing developmental processes in the mind of the child, in which designated aspects of the environment fulfill a key constructive role. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Klio Jahrgang: 97 Heft: 1 Seiten: 295-299.

God’s gesture. Nature and the origin of the sign in Spinoza. The Author provides the textual and conceptual elements to outline a thought of event in Spinoza’s philosophy. On the one hand necessitas and contingentia are known to exclude one another while, on the other, necessitas and contingere are not opposite. They are the same when seen in relation to the conception of libera necessitas and to the doctrine of the unity of intellect and will. Also, the unity of a (...) thought of concept and a thought of event appears in the definition of revelation, where the problem of the sign becomes crucial in separating philosophy from theology. A comparative study of the texts confirms the influence of Stoicism on the triadic model of the sign, showing that all interpreters give a pragmatic orientation to the sense of signs. The impossibility for any sign to be signum sui is not due to a defect in its nature. The idea of God, in fact, does not itself need any sign to be known, but it is also true that there is no lack of a sign for its linguistic communication. (shrink)

This paper argues that the graphic adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s Shutter Island utilizes the medium to evoke an affective participation and investment from the reader. It explores the ways the graphic novel overcomes problematic representations of mental illness in the popular film version. Drawing on graphic fiction theory, I contend that readers’ engagement in and construction of the story between panels, in the “gutters,” allows them to participate in the protagonist’s persecutory delusion. Additionally, I draw on Foucault’s conceptualizations of the (...) medical gaze and historical figurations of madness connected to water in order to demonstrate the mechanism by which the reader is placed in a dual subject position, becoming both observer and observed. In this capacity, I suggest that graphic fiction provides a unique experience to engender empathy for psychiatric illness. (shrink)

This is the first dedicated commentary to Sextus Empiricus’ treatise _Against the Arithmeticians_, dealing with crucial issues in the history of the sceptical, Platonic and Pythagorean traditions and in the ancient philosophy of mathematics.

Theoretical and manipulative abduction conjectures and manipulations : the extra-theoretical dimension of scientific discovery. -- Non-explanatory and instrumental abduction : plausibility, implausibility, ignorance preservation. -- Semiotic brains and artificial minds : how brains make up material cognitive systems. -- Neuromultimodal abduction : pre-wired brains, embidiment, neurospaces. -- Animal abduction : from mindless organisms to srtifactual mediators. -- Abduction, affordances, and cognitive niches : sharing representations and creating chances through cognitive niche construction. -- Abduction in human and logical agents : hasty (...) generalizers, hybrid abducers, fallacies. -- Morphodynamical abduction : causation of hypotheses by attractors dynamics. (shrink)

This book employs a new eco-cognitive model of abduction to underline the distributed and embodied nature of scientific cognition. Its main focus is on the knowledge-enhancing virtues of abduction and on the productive role of scientific models. What are the distinctive features that define the kind of knowledge produced by science? To provide an answer to this question, the book first addresses the ideas of Aristotle, who stressed the essential inferential and distributed role of external cognitive tools and epistemic mediators (...) in abductive cognition. This is analyzed in depth from both a naturalized logic and an ecology of cognition perspective. It is shown how the maximization of cognition, and of abducibility – two typical goals of science – are related to a number of fundamental aspects: the optimization of the eco-cognitive situatedness; the maximization of changeability for both the input and the output of the inferences involved; a high degree of information-sensitiveness; and the need to record the “past life” of abductive inferential practices. Lastly, the book explains how some impoverished epistemological niches – the result of a growing epistemic irresponsibility associated with the commodification and commercialization of science – are now seriously jeopardizing the flourishing development of human creative abduction. (shrink)

This essay seeks to give a contractarian foundation to the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility, meant as an extended model of corporate governance of the firm. It focuses on justification according to the contractarian point of view. It begins by providing a definition of CSR as an extended model of corporate governance, based on the fiduciary duties owed to all the firm's stakeholders. Then, by establishing the basic context of incompleteness of contracts and abuse of authority, it analyses how the (...) extended view of corporate governance arises directly from criticism of the contemporary neo-institutional economic theory of the firm. Thereafter, an application of the theory of bargaining games is used to deduce the structure of a multi-stakeholder firm, on the basis of the idea of a constitutional contract, which satisfies basic requirements of impartial justification and accordance with intuitions of social justice. This is a sequential model of constitutional bargaining, whereby a constitution is first chosen, and then a post-constitutional coalition game is played. On the basis of the unique solution given to each step in the bargaining model, the quest for a prescriptive theory of governance and strategic management is accomplished, so that I am able to define an objective-function for the firm consistent with the idea of CSR. Finally, a contractarian potential explanation for the emergence of the multi-fiduciary firm is provided. (shrink)

This volume sets out to give a philosophical "applied" account of violence, engaged with both empirical and theoretical debates in other disciplines such as cognitive science, sociology, psychiatry, anthropology, political theory, ...

In this essay I revisit Ricœur’s famous greffe in light of Husserl’s method. In other words, I try to highlight the anti-idealist interpretation of phenomenology exposed by Ricœur in his early project (Philosophie de la volonté) and in some later works, in order to present the necessity of the graft of hermeneutics onto the worn out body of western reflexive philosophy. This surgery has a radical effect on the “Subject”: far from provoking a “rejection crisis”, the hermeneutical graft provides the (...) Cogito with a new heart, and gives new life to Ricœur’s homme capable – the ultimate character of his long philosophical journey. The essay closes with an alternative interpretation of this “capability”. (shrink)