The term “giving” refers to the altruistic act of offering something to another person for free without expecting anything in return. While prosocial behavior can also be found in very young children, altruistic behavior emerges later, with the moral and cognitive development, also supported by adult praise, that children may receive within the educational relationship. Education, in fact, has the noble purpose of guiding people to a better condition than they are now, through relationships. The aim of this paper is (...) to review the works that have analyzed the effects of praise in the relationship between teacher and student. Experimental studies over the last 50 years have shown that praise is a low-cost strategy that teachers can use to increase adaptive behavior in the classroom and decrease problem behavior. Furthermore, the use of praise improves the classroom climate, as it is a vehicle for positive emotions. Modern neuroscience has now shown how emotions play an important role in learning, including school learning. Therefore, we could consider praise as one of the greatest gifts a teacher can give to their students. (shrink)

In recent years, functional connectivity in the developmental science received increasing attention. Although it has been reported that the anatomical connectivity in the preterm brain develops dramatically during the last months of pregnancy, little is known about how functional and effective connectivity change with maturation. The present study investigated how effective connectivity in premature infants evolves. To assess it, we use EEG measurements and graph-theory methodologies. We recorded data from 25 preterm babies, who underwent long-EEG monitoring at least twice during (...) their stay in the NICU. The recordings took place from 27 weeks postmenstrual age until 42 weeks PMA. Results showed that the EEG-connectivity, assessed using graph-theory indices, moved from a small-world network to a random one, since the clustering coefficient increases and the path length decreases. This shift can be due to the development of the thalamocortical connections and long-range cortical connections. Based on the network indices, we developed different age-prediction models. The best result showed that it is possible to predict the age of the infant with a root mean-squared error equal to 2.11 weeks. These results are similar to the ones reported in the literature for age prediction in preterm babies. (shrink)

Children aged 7 and 11 years were interviewed about death in the context of two different narratives. Each narrative described the death of a grandparent but one narrative provided a secular context whereas the other provided a religious context. Following each narrative, children were asked to judge whether various bodily and mental processes continue to function after death, and to justify their judgment. Children displayed two different conceptions of death. They often acknowledged that functioning ceases at death and offered appropriate (...) biological justifications for that judgment. However, they also claimed that functioning continues after death and offered appropriate religious justifications. The tendency to claim that functioning continues after death was more frequent among older children than younger children, more frequent in the context of the religious narrative as opposed to the secular narrative and more frequent with respect to mental processes than bodily processes. Particularly among older children, two distinct conceptions of death appear to co-exist: a biological conception in which death implies the cessation of living processes and a metaphysical conception in which death marks the beginning of the afterlife. (shrink)

Historically, a great deal of attention has been addressed to the question of what it would take to test experimentally the metrical structure of spacetime. Arguably, however, consideration of this question has been at the expense of comparable investigations into what it would take to test other structural features of spacetime. In this article, we critique and expand substantially upon an article by Hadley (Hadley in Class Quantum Gravity, 19:4565–4571, 2002), which constitutes one of the best-known paper-length studies of what (...) it would take to test the orientability of spacetime. In so doing, we seek to clarify a number of matters which remain unclear in the wake of Hadley’s article, thereby allowing the literature on this topic to progress. More positively, we also present, compare, and evaluate a number of other potential approaches to testing the orientability of spacetime which have arisen in the recent physics literature. (shrink)

Systemic risks are risks produced through interconnected non-wrongful actions of individuals, in the sense that an individual's action is a negligible cause of the risk. Due to scale effects of interaction, their consequences can be serious but they are also difficult to predict and assess via a risk assessment. Since we can have good reason to engage in the interconnected activities giving rise to systemic risk, we incur a concurrent collective responsibility to ensure that the risks are fairly distributed and (...) well regulated. James argues that fairness in this context requires taking reasonably available precautions ensuring for each risk-bearer a favourable ratio of expected benefits over expected losses. In sections 2 and 3 we argue that such a conception of fairness applies but only on the condition that the systemic risks created are irreversible risks and that the general background conditions of justice are imperfectly fair. When risks are reversible, compensatory justice can correct for unfairness in risk imposition. Where risks are irreversible, compensatory justice necessarily fails, giving rise to a collective responsibility to regulate fairly ex ante. Additionally, where background conditions of justice are fully fair and the systemic risk is well understood, risk bearers can be said to have consented to the systemic risk. If they are not fair, we argue that the primary political obligation should lie in fixing the fairness of the backgrounds of justice. A related reason for addressing the general background conditions of fairness is that James’ account of fairness in systemic risk imposition encounters a baseline problem. If expected risks and benefits are calculated again an unfair historic background condition, systemic risk imposition would not be fully fair. Section 4 shows why differences in evidentiary uncertainty as to probability and levels of harm and effective responses require a normatively appropriate response in the form of additional precautions. We show that the evidentiary standards set for risk-based cost-benefit analysis have a connection with deontology because they express a postulate of equal treatment in formal terms. Systemic risks can have different possible degrees of epistemological certainty due to factors of social and natural origin, such as more available research funding or higher degrees of complexity for some systemic risks but not others. These differences have to be mitigated by taking even greater precautions in difficult-to-research systemic risks. (shrink)

Over the past few decades, the idea of philosophy as a way of life (PWL) has gained undeniable prominence in contemporary debates about the nature and function of philosophy. Pierre Hadot forged the notion to denote the specific way in which ancient philosophers conceived of and practiced philosophy, stressing its performative character and its potential for self-transformation on the basis of what he called “spiritual exercises.” Referring primarily to the Hellenistic and Roman eras, Hadot claimed that “philosophy was a mode (...) of existing-in-the-world, which had to be practiced at each instant, and the goal of which was to transform the whole of the individual’s life. Furthermore, he also implied that some modern and contemporary philosophers came close to this model of philosophical practice and described it as his own metaphilosophical ideal. As he comments in the same text: “Such is the lesson of ancient philosophy: an invitation to each human being to transform himself. Philosophy is a conversion, a transformation of one’s way of being and living, and a quest for wisdom.” This normative and pedagogic component is a crucial aspect of Hadot’s account of PWL. Indeed, Hadot is not just describing what philosophy was in the past, but also evaluating what it is in the present and considering what it could become beyond his (and our) time. This is one of the reasons that made his approach so popular and led to so many fruitful developments in the field of PWL. Inspired by Hadot’s account, which was complemented by the late Foucault’s own reflections on philosophy’s practical and performative potential, recent scholarship has characterized PWL as a metaphilosophical model that can be fruitfully used to criticize current academic practices and to develop innovative methodological approaches to the study, research, and teaching of philosophy, which in turn might enable a transformation of philosophical practices in the context of modern universities. (shrink)

Although research has examined the role leaders may play in shaping job re-design behaviors among their subordinates, little is known about the way managers craft their jobs as compared to other employees. In two crosssectional studies we tested whether organizational rank affects the frequency of job crafting, and to what extent this relationship is mediated via perceived autonomy. Study 1 demonstrated that managers craft their jobs more frequently than non-managers by increasing structural job resources and seeking challenges at work. We (...) also showed that autonomy explains the relationship between organizational rank and the frequency of increasing structural and social job demands, as well as seeking challenges. However, managers did not craft their jobs by decreasing job demands more often than regular employees. In Study 2 we replicated this pattern of results, subsequently demonstrating that managers with shorter tenure use their autonomy to craft their jobs via decreasing job demands. We discuss the contributions and potential implications of these results. (shrink)

We propose a new integrative framework of external time monitoring in prospective memory (PM) tasks and its relation with performance. Starting from existing empirical regularities and our theoretical analysis, the framework predicts that external monitoring in PM tasks comprises a first stage of loose monitoring to keep track of the passage of time, and a subsequent stage of finer-grained monitoring, based on interval reduction, to meet the PM deadline. Following our framework, we predicted and observed in three different datasets (N (...) = 375): (1) a marked increase in external monitoring frequency in the final part of the period of the PM task, well captured by a proportional rate exponential growth function; (2) a positive association between individual compliance with this monitoring pattern and PM performance; (3) a positive relation between monitoring frequency in the time window immediately preceding the PM deadline and PM performance at the individual level; and (4) good individual compliance with an interval reduction pattern in external monitoring, especially in the time window closer to the PM deadline. These results support the proposed integrative framework, which has the potential to foster future research on external monitoring in PM and in other fields of cognitive science. (shrink)

La igualdad de género es para la UNESCO una prioridad mundial estrechamente ligada a los esfuerzos de la Organización para promocionar el derecho a la educación de las niñas para que adquieran las mismas competencias en la educación y mediante ella.Existen, dependiendo del contexto (niveles de enseñanza e instrucción) y de la ubicación geográfica, grandes desigualdades de género en el acceso, el logro del aprendizaje y la continuación de la educación, resultando ser las niñas, en general, las más desfavorecidas. A (...) pesar de los logros alcanzados, existe un mayor número de niñas sin escolarizar que de niños - 16 millones de niñas nunca irá a la escuela (Instituto de Estadística de la UNESCO) - y las mujeres representan dos tercios de los 750 millones de adultos que carecen de conocimientos básicos de lectura y escritura. (shrink)

Suele argumentarse que la contribución original de la Reforma a la teoría de la resistencia se basa en una exégesis del pasaje paulino de Romanos, según la cual sólo se debe obediencia a las autoridades que obran en favor del interés general. De ahí se derivaría una teoría constitucionalista de la resistencia protestante, que tendría en Calvino a uno de sus principales inspiradores. Sin embargo, en el derecho de resistencia calviniano la ciudadanía no es concebida como sujeto político en sentido (...) estricto: el pueblo no es ni el fundamento de la autoridad ni puede reemplazarla o resistir si incumple sus deberes religiosos, sociales o políticos. La resistencia activa no está justificada más que como excepción y su motor es únicamente otra autoridad legitimada divinamente, esto es, que ocupe un oficio público, es decir, un tutor. La existencia de una tutoría semejante implica reconocer la incapacidad jurídica del menor tutelado, esto es, el pueblo. Difícilmente puede hablarse aquí de constitucionalismo o democracia. El análisis de las ideas del reformador en el contexto en el que fueron puestas en práctica apoyará esta tesis. (shrink)

En este trabajo, a partir de un repaso de la hipótesis Nietzsche en la concepción foucaulteana de la genealogía del poder y de la constitución de los Estados modernos, se trata de ver de cerca el �caso Argentina�, en alguno de los autores fundacionales, en especial la impronta de la recepción sociobiológica que permitió la configuración ideológica de las principales instituciones estatales en la llamada �generación del ´80�. El evolucionismo fue la herramienta científica, el discurso debajo del cual se encubrieron (...) los intereses políticos por higienizar el cuerpo social, para someter cuando no exterminar a las �razas inferiores�, a los gauchos, indios, negros y sirvió para legitimar las políticas de sojuzgamiento, dominación y aniquilamiento de los sectores sociales que resultaban superfluos en el nuevo orden. (shrink)

SUMMARYEarly modern artists who did not have access to Roman Antiquity or needed quick access to it could refer to prints after monuments such as those issued by Antoine Lafréry. But Du Choul's Discours sur la castrametation et discipline militaire des Romains [ … ] De la Religion des anciens Romains was also successful among artists, particularly painters. It was in vernacular language and widely available in French, Spanish and Italian; it was affordable and compact in format ; it had (...) plenty of woodcuts; and it focused on the Roman military life, besides the monuments, for which information could also be found in travel guides. The present essay aims to study how Du Choul's volume circulated, with several examples from Spain and Italy. The Discours will be used as a case study of artists as readers, and I will study aspects previously overlooked such as the book's market price in the early modern period, examples of use of copies of the book by artists and, more broadly, the troubles and challenges encountered by these readers when representing subjects from ancient history. (shrink)

L'oeuvre monumentale de Jonathan Israel a suscité l'intérêt des historiens et des philosophes. Ses thèses politiques ont été quelque peu négligées, cependant. Israel soutient qu'elles comportent une dimension politique incontournable, puisque les institutions démocratiques, les théories républicaines et les révolutions mêmes du XVIII e siècle trouvent leurs racines dans cette idéologie radicale.

La literatura sobre género y medio ambiente se ha desarrollado intensamente durante 30 años con enfoques y propósitos muy diversos. Más allá de los ecofeminismos clásicos, se han explorado recientemente las condiciones materiales del contexto que favorecen que las mujeres tengan una relación más directa con el medio y sus problemas. Estos análisis hacen evidente que las mujeres no son una categoría homogénea, sino que se encuentran ubicadas en diferentes situaciones, sometidas a una variedad de presiones sociales y motivadas por (...) distintas consideraciones. En este trabajo se argumenta que atender a esta diversidad es requisito para una comprensión más adecuada de los factores que influyen en la relación humana con sus medios naturales y para la identificación de campos y estrategias de acción. No obstante, la peculiar situación de cada mujer se desarrolla sobre el trasfondo de una ideología de género que resiste sutilmente los cambios sociales y los intentos de construcción de identidades individuales propias, por lo que se defiende asimismo la pertinencia del enfoque de género para dar cuenta de las actitudes y comportamientos ambientalistas. (shrink)

In order to clarify the status of morality, this paper tries to answer the following questions: 1. Which is the difference between morality and happiness in Aristotle? 2. How does Thomas Aquinas assume the aristotelian ethics whithin a christian frame? 3. What has aristotelian and thomistic ethics in common? 4. Which is the main difference between their concept of morality and the modern one.

Polish translation of an article by Gérard Chazal, devoted to the relationship of François Dagognet’s philosophy to the work of Gaston Bachelard. The author shows the complexity of this relationship, analyzing it in relation to the philosophy of science, the philosophy of technology and the philosophy of art. In many dimensions Chazal shows that Dagognet was inspired not so much by the letter of Bachelard’s texts as by their spirit, using his methods and concepts in areas that Bachelard was not (...) or only marginally interested in. The article is also an interesting voice in the discussion about the essence of the reception of philosophical concepts and currents. In this aspect author asks about the negation of the source theory in its continuations at the same time asking whether it is not this kind of negative inspiration that best testifies to the vitality of the theory — alive due to constant creative transformations. (shrink)

El objetivo de este trabajo es proponer un modelo eficiente e integrado para la selección de habilidades personales, con la idea de inducir su adquisición entre los estudiantes de la universidad. Definidas las competencias de amplio espectro a mejorar, se sugieren herramientas y procesos para su consecución. En concreto, como trabajo aplicado, se ofrece el uso del Trabajo de Fin de Grado como guía para realizarlo. El método consiste en permitir al docente implicado en la tutorización del TFG la elección (...) de competencias que aseguren el aprendizaje transversal del alumno así como la motivación del estudiante en la realización del proyecto. Los resultados obtenidos sugieren que es posible a través de programas aplicados como el aquí descrito lograr mejoras en la habilidad de los estudiantes, a la vez que se podrían mejorar los resultados académicos finales. (shrink)

This paper examines the UN 2000 Trafficking Protocol in the context of international responses to the issue of people trafficking. Attention is drawn to the conceptual flaws in this new instrument regarding the failure to address domestic trafficking, not incorporating the purchasing and selling of people as defining characteristics of trafficking, and the lack of clarity around issues of prostitution. Framing the discussion within feminist theory, the essay concludes that women’s campaigning will continue to be crucial to putting issues such (...) as human trafficking on the international political agenda. This is extended to affirm that people’s struggle against oppressive circumstances will lead the tackling of the underlying causes of trafficking. (shrink)

This book presents a novel interpretation of Aristotle's account of how shame instils virtue, and defends its philosophical import. Shame is shown to provide motivational continuity between the actions of the learners and the virtuous dispositions that they will eventually acquire.

In our everyday interaction with the environment, we often perceive objects and spaces as opportunities to feel, maintain, enhance, and change our affective states and processes. The concept of affective affordance was coined to accommodate this aspect of ordinary perception and the many ways in which we rely on the material environment to regulate our emo- tions. One natural way to think of affective affordances in emotion regulation is to interpret them as tools for regulating felt affective states. We argue (...) that this way of conceiving of affective affordances is too restrictive. By analyzing the role of expressive properties of objects and spaces in emotion regulation, we show that our environment does not need to elicit felt affective states to regulate our emotions. Thus, we revise the concept of affective affordance to accommodate these cases. This revised concept explains more with less. Hence, it should be preferred in wide-reaching philosophical projects that aim to explain human affectivity as a situated phenomenon. (shrink)

Aristotle ’s claim that we become virtuous by doing virtuous actions raises a familiar problem: How can we perform virtuous actions unless we are already virtuous? I reject deflationary accounts of the answer given in _Nicomachean Ethics_ 2.4 and argue instead that proper habituation involves doing virtuous actions with the right motive, i.e. for the sake of the noble, even though learners do not yet have virtuous dispositions. My interpretation confers continuity to habituation and explains in a non-mysterious way how (...) we become virtuous by doing virtuous actions in the right way. (shrink)

In March 2016, DeepMind's computer programme AlphaGo surprised the world by defeating the world‐champion Go player, Lee Sedol. AlphaGo exhibits a novel, surprising and valuable style of play and has been recognised as “creative” by the artificial intelligence (AI) and Go communities. This article examines whether AlphaGo engages in creative problem solving according to the standards of comparative psychology. I argue that AlphaGo displays one important aspect of creative problem solving (namely mental scenario building in the form of Monte Carlo (...) tree search), while lacking another (domain generality). This analysis has consequences for how we think about creativity in humans and AI. (shrink)

Remembering and forgetting are the two poles of the memory system. Consequently, any approach to memory should be able to explain both remembering and forgetting in order to gain a comprehensive and insightful understanding of the memory system. Can an enactive approach to memory processes do so? In this article I propose a possible way to provide a positive answer to this question. In line with some current enactive approaches to memory, I suggest that forgetting –similarly to remembering– might be (...) constituted within an embodied and active process. Within this process, some simulation and re-enactment paths would acquire more relevance than others. This acquired relevance would make the activation of other paths of recall less likely, thus preventing the memory system from engaging in some episodic simulations. These changes in the likelihood of activation of some paths of recall –the forgotten ones– can be accounted for in an enactive fashion by studying both “internal” and “external” re-enactment and simulation paths. With regard to the latter, I propose to examine the process of forgetting by considering the engagement and affective relation of an embodied agent with her field of affordances. I suggest that, in the case of emotion-laden memories, the agent’s decoupling from some affordances of the environment might contribute to the process of forgetting, in that it would reduce the agent’s opportunities for situated episodic simulations. (shrink)

Sometimes subjects have sufficient internal and external resources to retrieve information stored in memory, in particular information that carries socially charged content. Yet, they fail to do so: they forget it. These cases pose an explanatory challenge to common explanations of forgetting in cognitive science. In this paper, I take this challenge and develop a new explanation of these cases. According to this explanation, these cases are best explained as cases of norm-induced forgetting: cases in which forgetting is caused by (...) social norms in a relevant sense. These cases draw attention to the normative aspects of the mechanisms of forgetting. This is an important but neglected aspect of cases of everyday forgetting, in particular of those characterized by a social dimension. By investigating some ways in which the psychology of social norms is causally relevant in the mechanisms of retrieval failure, I begin to fill this gap. (shrink)

ABSTRACTFinance may suffer from institutional deformations that subordinate its distinctive goods to the pursuit of external goods, but this should encourage attempts to reform the institutionalization of finance rather than to reject its potential for virtuous business activity. This article argues that finance should be regarded as a domain-relative practice. Alongside management, its moral status thereby varies with the purposes it serves. Hence, when practitioners working in finance facilitate projects that create common goods, it allows them to develop virtues. This (...) argument applies MacIntyre’s widely acknowledged account of the relationship between practices and the development of virtues while questioning some of his claims about finance. It also takes issue with extant accounts of particular financial functions that have failed to identify the distinctive goods of financial practice. (shrink)

The specific role of empeiria in Aristotle’s ethics has received much less attention than its role in his epistemology, despite the fact that Aristotle explicitly stresses the importance of empeiria as a requirement for the receptivity to ethical arguments and as a source for the formation of phronêsis.1 Thus, while empeiria is an integral part of all explanations that scholars give of the Aristotelian account of the acquisition of technê and epistêmê, it is usually not prominent in explanations of the (...) acquisition of phronêsis.2 The abundant mentions of empeiria in Aristotle’s ethical treatises are often eclipsed in the secondary literature... (shrink)

In this paper we introduce two issues relevantly related to the cognitive phenomenology debate, which, to our minds, have not been yet properly addressed: the relation between access and phenomenal consciousness in cognition and the relation between conscious thought and inner speech. In the first case, we ask for an explanation of how we have access to thought contents, and in the second case, an explanation of why is inner speech so pervasive in our conscious thinking. We discuss the prospects (...) of explanation for both sides of the debate and argue that cognitive phenomenology defenders are in an overall advantageous position. We also propose an account of inner speech that differs from other influential explanations in some interesting respects. (shrink)