In this case report, we studied Theory of Mind and figurative language comprehension in a 7.2-year-old child, conventionally named RJ, with isolated and complete agenesis of the corpus callosum, a rare malformation due to the absence of the corpus callosum, the major tract connecting the two brain hemispheres. To study ToM, which is the capability to infer the other’s mental states, we used the classical false belief tasks, and to study figurative language, i.e., those linguistic usages involving non-literal meanings, we (...) used tasks assessing metaphor and idiom comprehension. RJ’s intellectual level and his phonological, lexical, and grammatical abilities were all adequate. In both the ToM false belief tasks and novel sensory metaphor comprehension, RJ showed a delay of 3 years and a significant gap compared to a typically developing control group, while in idioms, his performance was at the border of average. These outcomes suggest that RJ has a specific pragmatic difficulty in all tasks where he must interpret the other’s communicative intention, as in ToM tasks and novel sensory metaphor comprehension. The outcomes also open up interesting insights into the relationships between ToM and figurative language in children with isolated and complete ACC. (shrink)

This paper forges links between early analytic philosophy and the posits of semiotics. I show that there are some striking and potentially quite important, but perhaps unrecognized, connections between three key concepts in Wittgenstein’s middle and later philosophy, namely, complex, rule-following, and language games. This reveals the existence of a conceptual continuity between Wittgenstein’s “early” and “later” philosophy that can be applied to the analysis of the iterability of representation in computer-generated images. Methodologically, this paper clarifies to at least some (...) degree, the nature, progress and promise of an approach to doing philosophy and semiotics from a modally modest perspective that sees in the intellectual products of humanities, and not in unreflective empiricism, the future of scientific development. This hybrid, non-reductionist approach shows, among other things, that semiotic processes are encoded by specific types of complexes in computer-generated images that display iterability in time and space. (shrink)

Mayr’s paper is extremely interesting and compelling and I don’t plan here to address all its insights. Rather, I’ll just try to argue that there might be more unity in understanding of Raz’s accou...

Este artículo aborda la filosofía de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a partir de su noción de Naturaleza, que funciona como idea reguladora. El efecto es paradójico; las premisas y las consecuencias son cristianas, pero semejante categoría le es hostil a esta religión. Comenzando por Hume y deteniéndose en el Emilio, se muestran las aporías resultantes.

Neste artigo, discute-se algumas das contribuições de Hannah Arendt para a reflexão acerca do fenômeno da desobediência civil. Inicialmente, interroga-se em que medida a contestação civil pode ser identificada com a objeção de consciência. Discutir essa questão permite compreender o desenvolvimento da argumentação de Arendt que visa ressaltar o sentido político dos atos de desobediência civil em oposição à caracterização negativa deste fenômeno, defendida por juristas, na tentativa de incluir pelo direito ações extralegais de contestação. Com efeito, essa leitura jurídica, (...) que se baseia na ideia de que a contestação tem por fundamento a moralidade de consciência, negligencia determinados aspectos que são fundamentais para a compreensão da desobediência civil segundo a perspectiva de Arendt, sobretudo seu caráter público, o compartilhamento de um interesse ativo no mundo e, por fim, a não-violência. Em um segundo momento, explicita-se a influência da tradição filosófica na maneira típica de se compreender a desobediência civil, sendo Sócrates e Henry Thoreau elencados por Arendt como seus interlocutores neste debate. Com esse percurso argumentativo, pretende-se mostrar alguns potencias do ensaio de Arendt que contribuem para reatualizar a discussão sobre o papel político central do ato de divergir publicamente. (shrink)

The practice of parkour in urban spaces by young people, especially those who call themselves traceurs, illustrates how identities are formed in an ephemeral way by reinterpreting spaces in the city – briefly and without leaving a trace. However, in a sort of paradox, these interventions are registered in the socio-digital spectrum, tokenistically anchoring and incorporating them into conversations and social interactions. This work aims to explain the practice of the sport called parkour as a socio-semiotic phenomenon. We have used (...) some zones of Mexico City as a specific case for our approach. The foregoing leads to the conclusion that the meaning of parkour goes beyond its recreational role and places it as a relevant piece of identity for excluded urban social groups – even though these practices have been appropriated by marketing strategies. Our approach will use a cultural semiotics perspective, as well as direct observations and interviews as research techniques. (shrink)

Background: Chronic Pain (CP) has serious medical and social consequences, and leads to economic burden that threatens the sustainability of healthcare services. Thus, optimized management of pain tools to support CP patients in adjusting to their condition and improving quality of life is timely. Although Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is considered an evidence-based psychological approach for CP, evidence for the efficacy of online-delivered ACT for CP is still scarce. At the same time, studies suggest that self-compassion mediates the change (...) in disability and psychopathological symptoms in ACT interventions for CP, although self-compassion is not a specific target in ACT. Thus, an explicit focus on self-compassion might increase the efficacy of ACT interventions for CP, although this hypothesis has not been tested. This study aims to develop an eHealth ACT and compassion-based self-management intervention for CP, the iACTwithPain, and to compare its efficacy in improving health outcomes to a similar ACT-only intervention and a waiting list group. Methods: The eHealth platform that will host the interventions will be developed using a flat design identity and will be interactive. The iACTwithPain intervention will comprise 8 weekly self-management sessions, and will be developed taking into consideration the psychological flexibility model applied to CP, with the addition of explicit compassion-based components. To analyse whether the iACTwithPain intervention will present superiority in improving CP’s impact and related health markers over the two other conditions, this study will follow a RCT design with three arms. CP patients will be recruited through direct contact with patient associations and healthcare services and a national press release in Portugal. Outcome measurement will be conducted at baseline, post-intervention and at 3- and 6-months follow-ups. The interventions’ acceptability will also be assessed. Discussion: The iACTwithPain intervention is expected to improve CP patients’ psychosocial functioning, quality of life, and empowerment, by promoting adaptive disease management and regulation of pain-related internal experiences. Results will contribute to a better understanding on the pertinence of adding compassion elements to ACT for CP and to reach an optimized intervention for CP. (shrink)

This paper argues that the Encomium of Helen must be seen as a speech about the value and importance of wisdom in human life and not as much as one as about logos. Gorgias sustains his vision based on a certain intellectualism which reduces moral faults to intellectual errors. This intellectualist program comprises a rationalization of emotions and a commitment with a certain tradition that discriminates between a minority with knowledge and a majority with only opinion. The consequence for Helen (...) is that she can be excused from her action at the expense of being reproached for her lack of wisdom and is thus relegated to the ignorant majority. Therefore, what is initially praise and an apology turns into severe blame. For this, I argue, the encomium can be qualified as an amusement (paignion). For the Encomium’s listeners the amusement becomes a challenge that demands they decipher the speech’s paradoxical character and appeal to their own wisdom to not be reproached like Helen. Thus the Encomium cannot be seen as a treaty nor as mere joke but rather as an intellectual agôn between the speech and the listener, which serves them “to arm the soul for contests of excellence”, as the epigram dedicated to Gorgias in Delfos says. (shrink)

Anticipation has emerged over the past two decades as a fundamental tool for a wide variety of normative frameworks aimed at promoting a more socio-politically responsible governance of science, technology and innovation. However, theoretical considerations and reflections on the meaning and scope of anticipation have received far less attention than its invocation. The main objective of this article is to advance the theoretical-conceptual treatment of anticipation. On the one hand, it assumes that there is a connection between the ways of (...) thinking about and using the future and the fields of science, technology and innovation that are considered the object of ethical-political problematisation. On the other hand, the article evaluates each of these forms of anticipatory articulation of responsibility on the basis of their respective ethico-political radicality. (shrink)

This is one more edition of Voltaire's "Candide", meant to highlight the wealth of philosophical and theological discussions hidden behind the apparently innocent veil of the most renowned fable of modernity. The rather extended apparatus accordingly consists of a series of short chapters by Filippo Bruni on the Enlightenment and Metaphysics, and in more detail, on theology, Free choice, the problem of evil, and happiness in an imperfect world and another by Sergio Cremaschi on the Enlightenment and morality, and (...) in more detail on moral universalism, religion without metaphysics, toleration, and pacifism. -/- Table of contents I. Before the text A trick for priests A scandalous book Garden with view -/- II. Text Candide or optimism -/- III. Context Biography 1. The seven years war 2. Calvinists and Socinians 3. Jiansenists and Gesuits 4. Marranos and inquisitors 5. Conquistadores and slave-traders 6. Paraguay under the Jesuits -/- IV. Co-text 1. Enlightenment and Metaphysics 1.1. Theology 1.2. Free choice 1.3. The problem of evil 1.4. Being happy in an imperfect world -/- 2. Enlightenment and morality 2.1. Universal morality 2.2. Religion without Metaphysics 2.3. Toleration 2.4. Pacifism -/- 3. Enlightenment and the images of other places 3.1. The image of Eldorado 3.2. The image of Paraguay 3.3 The image of the Islamic world 3.4. The image of the Jew -/- 4. The conte philosophique -/- Bibliography Lexicon Index of names and concepts -/- V. Reader’s guide. (shrink)

Galiani discusses a subject much debated in the eighteenth century, namely, the nature of the currency. He also includes considerations of economic theory and political philosophy around the main motif. He supports the following theses of monetary theory: currency has the function of a sort of register of credits that every individual can have towards the warehouses of goods of which the society is supplied, and precisely in the measure of the contribution he has given to their supply; the metallic (...) currency has the merit, with respect to a hypothetical system of artificial accounting, to be safe from frauds and not to require a bureaucratic apparatus; the value of currency depends on the value of metals, not on legislative interventions. (shrink)

I discuss the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences, in order to reach also in the domain of morality the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the apriori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of (...) humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was really worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of the naïve positivist starting point Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations. -/- . (shrink)

A short discussion of the history and main issues of the philosophy of the social sciences.

Starting from the analysis of the first book of De libero arbitrio, the Italian philosopher Sergio Cotta explores the relationship between law, morality and safety in Augustine’s thought. According to Cotta, Lib. arb. I contains implicitly a complete typology of the four normative judgments used in jurisprudence, philosophy of law and legal science: judgments of legality; judgments of validity; judgments of purpose; judgments of morality. The analysis of the relationship between these four types of normative judgments allows us to (...) interpret correctly Augustine’s most famous sentence: mihi lex esse non videtur quae iusta non fuerit. (shrink)

El autor hace una lectura de la literatura de Cortázar desde la pregunta sobre la proximidad, y señala que la dificultad en delimitar con precisión el lugar de la subjetividad le viene a Cortázar de la desarticulación categorial provista por la herencia cartesiana y del contacto esporádico con el último Heidegger. Afirma que la literatura de Cortázar continúa el derrotero abierto por la modernidad tardía en tanto que los cuestionamientos alcanzan inexorablemente al sujeto.

The present study uses EEG time-frequency representations with a Flanker task to investigate if and how individual differences in bilingual language experience modulate neurocognitive outcomes in two bilingual group types: late bilinguals and early bilinguals. TFRs were computed for both incongruent and congruent trials. The difference between the two was then compared between the HSs and the L2 learners, modeled as a function of individual differences with bilingual experience within each group separately and probed for its potential symmetry between brain (...) and behavioral data. We found no differences at the behavioral and neural levels for the between-groups comparisons. However, oscillatory dynamics of inhibition and cognitive control were found to be modulated by individual differences in bilingual language experience, albeit distinctly within each bilingual group. While the results indicate adaptations toward differential brain recruitment in line with bilingual language experience variation overall, this does not manifest uniformly. Rather, earlier versus later onset to bilingualism—the bilingual type—seems to constitute an independent qualifier to how individual differences play out. (shrink)

Within all philosophical systems there are some categories that are fundamental to the understanding of the whole. This is the case of categories such as identity, difference and contradiction in Hegel’s philosophy. In the second book of the Logik, such categories are set in what appears to be th..

The present paper introduces and studies the variety [MATHEMATICAL SCRIPT CAPITAL W]ℋn of n-linear weakly Heyting algebras. It corresponds to the algebraic semantic of the strict implication fragment of the normal modal logic K with a generalization of the axiom that defines the linear intuitionistic logic or Dummett logic. Special attention is given to the variety [MATHEMATICAL SCRIPT CAPITAL W]ℋ2 that generalizes the linear Heyting algebras studied in [10] and [12], and the linear Basic algebras introduced in [2].

RESUMEN La interpretación habitual de Descartes sostiene que la nueva ciencia cartesiana es resultado del remplazo, en las explicaciones científicas, de las causas finales y formales por las causas eficientes. Si bien dicha afirmación en líneas generales es correcta, se ha tendido a asumir que las causas eficientes no entrañan problema alguno. Este artículo desea cuestionar dicha asunción, poniendo de manifiesto una serie de problemáticas concernientes a la cognoscibilidad de las causas eficientes. ABSTRACT The common interpretation of Descartes argues that (...) the new science is a result of Cartesian replacement, in scientific explanations, of the final and formal causes by the efficient causes. While this statement is broadly correct, it has tended to assume that efficient causes do not imply any problem. This paper wishes to question this assumption, showing a number of problems concerning the knowability of efficient causes. (shrink)

The Mexican cult around the image of the Virgin of Tepeyac is commonly addressed in relation with creole nationalism, but that emphasis ignores the survival of its cult until today. Given that construction of identity through ‘miraculous’ images persists through technologies of iconic deployment, it is necessary to examine the original functions of its technologies. I investigate these problems by considering the construction of a newexhibition site for the Virgin of Tepeyac, and the modalities of reproducing the image until today. (...) The historical comparison of these contemporary techniques with those of the seventeenth century enables to appreciate the coherence of this visual tradition and its importance to the construction of social processes in Mexico. (shrink)

O que se pretende com este artigo é mostrar, seguindo o itinerário da sucessão das categorias, que é o mesmo das atitudes nas quais o homem se compreende, a relação entre as duas últimas categorias da Lógica da filosofia - Sentido e Sabedoria - e a ideia de cidada­nia. Com efeito, a tese de fundo deste texto consiste em dizer que uma das originalidades do pensamento de Eric Weil reside justamente no conceito de retomada, que é um conceito de compreensão, (...) e dizer, ao mesmo tempo, que ele é decisivo para a problematização da relação entre Sentido, Sabedoria e cidadania. (shrink)

Deianira complains that Hercules, as a slave of Omphale, did not refrain from telling to the Lydian queen his famous labours; among them, the Hydra: quaeque redundabat fecundo vulnere serpens fertilis et damnis dives ab ipsa suis ‘It will be admitted that redundabat, which usually means to “overflow”’ can only be applied to the Hydra by a very strong metaphor; but it is not only a strong one, it is quite unexampled: so A. Palmer in The Academy 49 , 160. (...) But his own emendation rebellabat has not convinced anybody – rightly, as I think. Still, his remark was not otiose: redundabat refers to the ‘growing again’ of Hydra's heads, that seem to ‘spring’ from the wounds like water's spurts; it is not impossible, but nevertheless it is strange. Why does Ovid use this metaphor ‘a fluctibus desumpta’ here? I suggest that there is a precise reason: Ovid does not mention the name of the serpens, but of course his reader knows it and also knows why the Hydra is so called: πò τν δτων. (shrink)

El presente artículo se introduce en la cuestión de la reversión del poder a partir de las posiciones de Suárez sobre el origen de la potestad política. A continuación aborda el problema en autores representativos de la segunda escolástica. Por último, con el ejemplo de los sucesos posteriores a 1808 en los reinos americanos de la monarquía castellana, intenta determinar si es dable sostener en la realidad objetiva alguna forma de reversión del poder a la comunidad.

En la doctrina del derecho internacional de Hermann Heller el dato fundamental del orden jurídico lo constituye la presencia de unidades decisorias soberanas, individualizadoras del derecho. Heller agrega que, paradojalmente, la existencia del derecho positivo depende de la acción legibus soluta de tales unidades comunitarias. Aunque obligados por “principios jurídicos fundamentales”, los Estados, ante una amenaza que los ponga en riesgo y comprometa, por ende, a la totalidad del orden jurídico, pueden modificar a éste último parcialmente. Así pues, respecto del (...) orden jurídico positivo, el Estado permanece como elemento determinante. Y, dado que en el orden internacional no hay una civitas maxima, sino pluralidad de Estados, serán éstos quienes libremente determinen el derecho internacional público. El Estado nace y perdura como una cierta realidad social y existe como sociedad política –con la legitimidad correspondiente- aun cuando no entable relaciones jurídico-internacionales de ninguna especie. En conclusión, para Heller si el Estado no aparece ni pervive por decisión del derecho internacional, luego tampoco su potestad se origina en una delegación o distribución de funciones emanada de tal orden normativo. (shrink)

COMENTÁRIOS À LEI Nº 13.329/2016, QUE INSTITUI O REGIME ESPECIAL DE INCENTIVOS PARA O SANEAMENTO BÁSICO - REISB.