The subject of the study is the figurative and symbolic reflection and transformation of the dynamic reality of life in the cinematic space of modern culture. The purpose of the work is to identify and substantiate trends in the development of cinematographic cultural texts based on the figurative and symbolic representation of the phenomenon of success in the existential space of human existence. The scientific novelty of the work is represented by the evidence base of the study, which determines the (...) figurative correspondence of the philosophical and sociological representation of cinematic texts to the phenomenon of success as a value-symbolic aspect of personal activity. Based on the analysis of cinema screen products created at the turn of the XX-XXI centuries and devoted to the characterization of the image of a subject whose existential level of being is characterized in the symbols of success/ failure, several trends in the development of cinematic culture can be identified. Firstly, the characteristic of the "sunset" of the previously dominant ideological trend of symbolization of the actual phenomenology of success. Secondly, the stage of axiological instability and ambivalence in the evaluation of the symbols of success, unevenly implemented in the scenario and staging part. And, thirdly, the formation and consolidation of new cinematic paradigms through the constant convergence of private symbols of success, manifested in different ways both in reality and on the cinema screen, and accompanied by constant attempts at their non-contextual universalization. (shrink)

The notion of lifestyle has recently attracted the attention of various scholars as a social science concept. For thousands of years, human beings attempted to realise and manage their lifestyles, and governments have tried to influence the lifestyles of their people. Nevertheless, the definition of lifestyle and its conceptualisation is relatively new. Lifestyle means the specific method of living of an individual, group or community. Lifestyles include a set of values, behaviours, moods and tastes that can refer to the interests, (...) opinions, behaviours and behavioural orientations of an individual, group or culture. The Islamic way of life follows a grand plan of behaviour according to which all life is a movement to get closer to God. This plan, however, is dynamic and always demands adjustment. In a desirable religious life, all actions and situations can be called worship. People's lifestyles and the path they choose for themselves are deeply related to their success in life. Therefore, the present study aimed to evaluate the effect of the Islamic lifestyle on the academic success of Russian Muslim students in 2021. In total, 2000 graduate students of Kazan, Russia were studied in this research. According to the results of mean analysis in SPSS, the academic success of the students who followed the Islamic lifestyle was reported to be higher than the mean level (more than 3 out of 5). Furthermore, according to the Structural Equation Modeling in LESREL, the Islamic lifestyle has a positive significant effect on the students' academic success (p-value: 0.83; t-value: 7.92). CONTRIBUTION: Amongst the various factors that can influence students' academic success, the current research focused on the Islamic lifestyle. The findings of the present study offered a new insight into the relationship between the Islamic lifestyle and academic success in Russia. (shrink)

Ethical behaviour, in its simplest terms, means knowing and doing what is right. Nevertheless, the main difficulty is how to define the word 'right'. For this purpose, various individuals, cultures and religions have thus far portrayed it in different ways. The present study reflected on the Islamic society, wherein ethical leadership has been one of the most effective factors in its continuation of life and success, with a vital role in its growth, development and progress. Accordingly, the relationship between ethical (...) leadership and the voice of Muslim employees in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in 2021, as the statistical population (n = 2500) was analysed. For this purpose, a standard questionnaire was used to collect the necessary data, whose validity was confirmed by the construct validity in the Linear Structural Relations (LISREL) software and its reliability was checked via the Cronbach's alpha in the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) software. Besides, path analysis was utilised to test the research hypothesis. Confirmatory factor analysis was correspondingly implemented to examine the data. Ultimately, the study results revealed a significant positive relationship between ethical leadership and the voice of Malaysian Muslim employees (p = 0.80; t = 5.02). CONTRIBUTION: Based on the literature review and the results of this study, ethical leadership can motivate Muslim citizens to participate in decision-making processes and even allows them to express their creative ideas in organisations and society. (shrink)

Religious teachings express the fact that a human is a social being and associates with various people. In order to have a successful and safe life, we should refrain from any selfishness, harming others, malice and humiliating people and should always be forgiving, selfless and humble in relationships. Interpersonal relationships are one of the most important components of human life from birth to death; none of the potential capabilities of humans grow except in the shadow of interpersonal relationships. Learning correct (...) interpersonal relationships is very important in creating mental health, personality development, identity finding, increasing job productivity, increasing quality of life, increasing adaptability and self-fulfilment. The current research was conducted with the aim of explaining the relationship between communication skills based on Islamic teachings and students’ life skills. In this research, Ayats [verses] from the Holy Quran that are related to communication skills and relationships between people in Islamic society have been discussed, and then the components of effective communication and its role in students’ life skills have been explained. This research discusses the following factors: human dignity and self-esteem, tolerance and compromise skills, forgiveness skills, accountability skills, justice orientation skills and individual behaviour skills. Contribution: The results of this research indicate that according to students’ imitation of teachers, paying special attention to the components of communication skills according to Islamic teachings in schools can affect students’ life skills. Therefore, by improving the mental health of the youth, and consequently the health of the society will be affected and it will bring excellence to the society. (shrink)

East Asia’s economy is leading the world into the new Asian century. While meritocratic practices in the educational and private sectors are often considered pivotal conditions for East Asia’s economic success, experts have pointed out that the path ahead requires new approaches to ensure social cohesion and stability, which depend on the quality of relations across social divides. These considerations raise multiple questions for philosophers: What forms of social meritocracy are necessary to sustain social cohesion? Moreover, how can the detrimental (...) effects of meritocratic practices be contained? Is it possible to utilise some of the intellectual resources indigenous to East Asia to generate innovative solutions? This paper argues that the answers to these questions lie in the indigenous Confucian conceptual resources. Confucian ideas can inspire a more desirable societal ideal for the future of East Asia. In particular, the Confucian emphasis on cultivating reciprocal harmonious human relationships and others’ morality can guide new approaches to fostering social cohesion. As Confucian personal cultivation through harmonious relations is a process of social cohesion, these ideas inspire a) a multiple approach to policymaking that is not only grounded in economic redistribution, b) a richer understanding of societal progress, and c) a democratic approach to fostering social cohesion. Unlike Confucian meritocrats and scholars who defend the Confucian roots of East Asian forms of political and social meritocracy, this paper proves that Confucian conceptual resources can help formulate a societal vision that strengthens cohesion and mitigates the adverse effects of meritocratic practices. (shrink)

Coordination is a widely employed term across recent quantitative and qualitative approaches to intersubjectivity, particularly approaches that give embodiment and enaction central explanatory roles. With a focus on linguistic and bodily coordination in conversational contexts, I review the operational meaning of coordination in recent empirical research and related theorizing of embodied intersubjectivity. This discussion articulates what must be involved in treating linguistic meaning as dynamic processes of coordination. The coordination approach presents languaging as a set of dynamic self-organizing processes and (...) actions on multiple timescales and across multiple modalities that come about and work in certain domains (those jointly constructed in social, interactive, high-order sense-making). These processes go beyond meaning at the level that is available to first-person experience. I take one crucial consequence of this to be the ubiquitously moral nature of languaging with others. Languaging coordinates experience, among other levels of behavior and event. Ethical effort is called for by the automatic autonomy-influencing forces of languaging as coordination. (shrink)

In recent years, a change in attitude in particle physics has led to our understanding current quantum field theories as effective field theories. The present paper is concerned with the significance of this EFT approach, especially from the viewpoint of the debate on reductionism in science. In particular, it is a purpose of this paper to clarify how EFTs may provide an interesting case-study in current philosophical discussion on reduction, emergence and inter-level relationships in general.

The idea for this issue of the Rivista di Estetica comes from a conference that was held at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory in Belgrade, June 2011. The question that the speakers were asked to tackle was “What keeps society together?”. At least since John Searle’s 1995 book, The Construction of Social Reality, a popular answer to that question has been that collective intentionality lies at bottom of all manifestations of social reality – from interactions in informal groups (...) to... (shrink)

The enactive approach to cognition distinctively emphasizes autonomy, adaptivity, agency, meaning, experience, and interaction. Taken together, these principles can provide the new sciences of language with a comprehensive philosophical framework: languaging as adaptive social sense-making. This is a refinement and advancement on Maturana’s idea of languaging as a manner of living. Overcoming limitations in Maturana’s initial formulation of languaging is one of three motivations for this paper. Another is to give a response to skeptics who challenge enactivism to connect “lower-level” (...) sense-making with “higher-order” sophisticated moves like those commonly ascribed to language. Our primary goal is to contribute a positive story developed from the enactive account of social cognition, participatory sense-making. This concept is put into play in two different philosophical models, which respectively chronicle the logical and ontogenetic development of languaging as a particular form of social agency. Languaging emerges from the interplay of coordination and exploration inherent in the primordial tensions of participatory sense-making between individual and interactive norms; it is a practice that transcends the self-other boundary and enables agents to regulate self and other as well as interaction couplings. Linguistic sense-makers are those who negotiate interactive and internalized ways of meta-regulating the moment-to-moment activities of living and cognizing. Sense-makers in enlanguaged environments incorporate sensitivities, roles, and powers into their unique yet intelligible linguistic bodies. We dissolve the problematic dichotomies of high/low, online/offline, and linguistic/nonlinguistic cognition, and we provide new boundary criteria for specifying languaging as a prevalent kind of human social sense-making. (shrink)

E. V. Il’enkov proceeded from the classical philosophical notion of Beauty considered in organic unity with Truth and Good. Following Marx, he regarded the sense of Beauty, the supreme mental feeling, as a product of history. Il’enkov insisted on the universal character of this feeling, for its basis is an activity of imagination which also lies at the root of any creative work. His criticism of modern art rested on analysis of the process of disintegration of personality, its capabilities within (...) industrial civilisation to break the natural tie between Truth, Good and Beauty. (shrink)

E. V. Il'enkov proceeded from the classical philosophical notion of Beauty considered in organic unity with Truth and Good. Following Marx, he regarded the sense of Beauty, the supreme mental feeling, as a product of history. Il'enkov insisted on the universal character of this feeling, for its basis is an activity of imagination which also lies at the root of any creative work. His criticism of modern art rested on analysis of the process of disintegration of personality, its capabilities within (...) industrial civilisation to break the natural tie between Truth, Good and Beauty. (shrink)

This essay argues that according to feminist existential phenomenology, feminist pragmatism, and feminist genealogy, our embodied condition is an important starting place for ethical living due to the inevitable role that habits play in our conduct. In bodies, the phenomenon of habit uniquely holds together the ambiguities of freedom and determinism, transcendence and immanence, and stability and plasticity. Seeing habit formation as a matter of self-growth and social justice gives fresh opportunity for thinking of “assuming ambiguity” as a lifelong endeavor (...) made up of many small projects and practices of situated resistance to stagnation. Transcendence, understood as ameliorative transformation, is found in cultivating habits of learning from our bodily living. I articulate this argument via a reading of Simone de Beauvoir's The Coming of Age, John Dewey's Human Nature and Conduct, and Ladelle McWhorter's Bodies and Pleasures. I discuss two domains wherein the ethical significance of habit formation appears: cognitive psychological research on neural plasticity, and certain projects of self-cultivation that risk turning into overdetermining “cult of the self ” practices that close off possibilities for personal and collective transformation. (shrink)

"Now in its third edition, this classic text remains the seminal resource for in-depth information about major concepts and principles of the cultural-historical theory developed by Lev Vygotsky, his students, and colleagues, as well as three generations of neo-Vygotskian scholars in Russia and the West. Featuring two new chapters on brain development and scaffolding in the zone of proximal development, as well as additional content on technology, dual language learners, and students with disabilities, this new edition provides the latest research (...) evidence supporting the basics of the cultural-historical approach alongside Vygotskian-based practical implications. With concrete explanations and strategies on how to scaffold young children's learning and development, this book is essential reading for students of early childhood theory and development"--. (shrink)

The justification of democracy, while widely debated, is hindered by a sub-optimal conceptual framework. For a start, there is confusion about the basic terms in the discussion. Many theorists claim to support either the ‘intrinsic’ or the ‘instrumental’ value of democracy, but it is unclear what this exactly means. Can democracy have other kinds of values? What does it mean to value democracy intrinsically? As a result, at certain points, scholars are talking past one another and their assessments of their (...) respective approaches to democracy are less clear than what they intended. This paper develops a conceptual framework of the values of democracy. I use this framework to classify theories of democracy under three main groups: theories that value democracy intrinsically, instrumentally, or contributorily (necessarily and non-necessarily). Through this analysis, the points of engagement among the different approaches will emerge and flawed arguments about democracy will be revealed. (shrink)

Villeneuve d’Ascq, Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2018, 404 p. Cette collection d’essais commence avec une question provocatrice : d’autres cours d’Europe offrent-elles une place « aussi éminente » aux femmes que la cour de France à l’époque moderne? Les études réunies ici montrent de façon évidente l’importance et la centralité des femmes à la cour de France, des reines et princesses au sommet du pouvoir jusqu’aux demoiselles de musique, nourrices, femmes d’officiels et autres. Cet...

This essay frames systemic patterns of mental abuse against women of color and Indigenous women on Turtle Island (North America) in terms of larger design-of-distribution strategies in settler colonial societies, as these societies use various forms of social power to distribute, reproduce, and automate social inequalities (including public health precarities and mortality disadvantages) that skew socio-economic gain continuously toward white settler populations and their descendants. It departs from traditional studies in gender-based violence research that frame mental abuses such as gaslighting--commonly (...) understood as mental manipulation through lying or deceit--stochastically, as chance-driven interpersonal phenomena. Building on structural analyses of knowledge in political epistemology (Dotson 2012, Berenstain 2016), political theory (Davis and Ernst 2017), and Indigenous social theory (Tuck and Yang 2012), I develop the notion of cultural gaslighting to refer to the social and historical infrastructural support mechanisms that disproportionately produce abusive mental ambients in settler colonial cultures in order to further the ends of cultural genocide and dispossession. I conclude by proposing a social epidemiological account of gaslighting that a) highlights the public health harms of abusive ambients for minority populations, b) illuminates the hidden rules of social structure in settler colonial societies, and c) amplifies the corresponding need for structural reparations. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 45, Issue 11, November 2021.

The question whether AI systems have agency is gaining increasing importance in discussions of responsibility for AI behavior. This paper argues that an approach to artificial agency needs to be teleological, and consider the role of human goals in particular if it is to adequately address the issue of responsibility. I will defend the view that while AI systems can be viewed as autonomous in the sense of identifying or pursuing goals, they rely on human goals and other values incorporated (...) into their design, and are, as such, dependent on human agents. As a consequence, AI systems cannot be held morally responsible, and responsibility attributions should take into account normative and social aspects involved in the design and deployment of the said AI. My argument falls in line with approaches critical of attributing moral agency to artificial agents, but draws from the philosophy of action, highlighting further philosophical underpinnings of current debates on artificial agency. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss a proposal for reform in the teaching of Euclidean geometry that reveals the symbiotic relationship between axiomatics and pedagogy. We examine the role of intuition in this kind of reform, as expressed by Mario Pieri, a prominent member of the Schools of Peano and Segre at the University of Turin. We are well aware of the centuries of attention paid to the notion of intuition by mathematicians, mathematics educators, philosophers, psychologists, historians, and others. To set (...) a context for Pieri’s proposal, we only seek to open a small window on views of the pedagogical role of intuition, from primary education to university study that may have informed early 20th century efforts to improve the teaching of geometry at the secondary school level. Pieri addressed the topic of intuition in many of his axiomatizations, including those in projective geometry which was his main area of concentration in foundations. We focus here primarily on his axiom systems for elementary geometry, which embraced the transformational approach of Felix Klein’s vision for the subject. Our goal is to convey Pieri’s thoughts on how to integrate two types of intuition, denoted as sensible and rational, in his endeavors to improve the teaching of the geometry of Euclid. We show how Pieri’s views on geometric intuition and pedagogical reform were either ignored or misrepresented in several notable publications at the turn of the 20th century. In particular, we give Pieri a voice in response to specific comments made in the early 1900s by Federigo Enriques, Ugo Amaldi, and Florian Cajori in widely circulated publications inspired by Klein. (shrink)

In the 1920s and 1930s, some of the most talented linguists of the Soviet Union, among whom one can highlight N. F. Jakovlev and E. D. Polivanov, were involved in the process of "language building". Their role in the success of this process is examined from the point of view of the phonological theory that they developed for creating scripts for the numerous peoples of the Soviet Union, Turkic and Caucasian above all. Jakovlev's phonology, that Polivanov termed "social phonology", was (...) very different from the one that N. Trubetskoj proposed some 10 years later. We will try to explain their ambitious script projects, which remain difficult to understand from the point of view of the modern phonology. (shrink)

Confucian meritocratic rule has been recently advocated on the basis of the economic performance of Western democracies and the political ignorance of their average voters. These arguments are grou...

Prompted by our commentators, we take this response as an opportunity to clarify the premises, attitudes, and methods of our enactive approach to human languaging. We high-light the need to recognize that any investigation, particularly one into language, is always a concretely situated and self-grounding activity; our attitude as researchers is one of knowing as engagement with our subject matter. Our task, formulating the missing categories that can bridge embodied cognitive science with language research, requires avoiding premature abstractions and clarifying (...) the multiple circularities at play. Our chosen method is dialectical, which has prompted several interesting observations that we respond to, particularly with respect to what this method means for enactive epistemology and ontology. We also clarify the important question of how best to conceive of the variety of social skills we progressively identify with our method and are at play in human languaging. Are these skills socially constituted or just socially learned? The difference, again, leads to a clarification that acts, skills, actors, and interactions are to be conceived as co-emerging categories. We illustrate some of these points with a discussion of an example of aspects of the model at play in a study of gift giving in China.Keywords: Enactive epistemology, Enactive ontology, Dialectics, languaging, Shared know-how. (shrink)

In our contemporary age, where a combination of individualism and mutual distrust is unhappily common among people and society is “liquid” and disoriented, so-called intermediate units are a precious resource that promotes positive coexistence within organizations and in local communities, too. The present contribution describes an example of such an intermediate unit, the Talent Club, located in a peripheral neighborhood of a metropolitan area in northern Italy. This case study shows the development of positive living and working together in organizations (...) and their transformation in the tool for community development and good coexistence. Qualitative and quantitative data show that the relational aspect is crucial because it promotes authentic exchange among people, supporting participation and social cohesion against self-referential habits and isolation. Although at present the Talent Club is mostly functioning in a affiliating coexistence among members, seeds of a more generativ... (shrink)

This essay offers an overview of the diversity of women’s prose writing that emerged on the Czech cultural scene in the post-communist era. To that end it briefly characterizes the work of eight Czech women authors who were born within the first two decades after World War II and began to create during the post-1968 era of ‘normalization’. In this broad sense they belong to a single generation. With rare exception their work was not officially published in their homeland until (...) the 1990s. The writers included are: Lenka Procházková, Tereza Boučková, Alexandra Berková, Zuzana Brabcová, Daniela Hodrová, Sylvie Richterová, Iva Pekárková, and Eva Hauserová. The overview is followed by a concise comparative analysis of texts by three very different writers (Procházková, Pekárková, and Hodrová), using a feminist critical approach. There is also an appendix of works by these writers available in English translation. (shrink)