A lesion to the brain is not necessary for a successful neural transplantation. Embryonic Purkinje cells placed on the surface of an uninjured adult cerebellum can develop and migrate into the host molecular layer. Both the Purkinje cells that migrated into the host cerebellum and those that remained in the graft were innervated by collateral sprouting of adult intact climbing fibers.

Intergenerational justice represents a crucial theme in the on-going debate in ethics, politics and law. In what follows, I would like to show that a determined phenomenological perspective drawing from the motive of alterity can shed new light on such a topic. Importantly, my concern will be to display how this approach can provide a thorough justificatory underpinning for a responsibility towards future generations, while denouncing the main shortcomings that mainstream approaches reveal when dealing with this issue.

Drawing on empirical evidence from history and anthropology, we aim to demonstrate that there is room for genealogical ideology critique within normative political theory. The test case is some libertarians’ use of folk notions of private property rights in defence of the legitimacy of capitalist states. Our genealogy of the notion of private property shows that asking whether a capitalist state can emerge without violations of self-ownership cannot help settling the question of its legitimacy, because the notion of private property (...) presupposed by that question is a product of the entity it is supposed to help legitimise: the state. We anchor our genealogical critique in recent work on ideology in epistemology and philosophy of language, and in current debates on the methodology of political theory. But, unlike more traditional approaches that aim to debunk whole concepts or even belief systems, we propose a more targeted, argument-specific form of ideology critique. (shrink)

This work, in continuity with the article published by Ferdinando Casolaro and Giovanna Della Vecchia in Vol 5, 2017 of this series, in which we noted that in the centuries since the eight century B.C. at the 13th century A.D. the evolution of Astronomy and historical events have influenced the development of Mathematics, intends to demonstrate how the Architecture and Literature of the following centuries have further conditioned the development of the sciences in Italy and, in particular, of Mathematics, (...) identifying the affinities and, in some cases, the coincidences between the different forms of thought that invite us to make a serious reflection on the uniqueness of culture. (shrink)

In the last two decades Anglophone political theory witnessed a renewed interest in social-scientific empirical findings—partly as a reaction against normative theorizing centred on the formulation of abstract, intuition-driven moral principles. This brief paper begins by showing how this turn has taken two distinct forms: (i) a non-ideal theoretical orientation, which seeks to balance the emphasis on moral principles with feasibility and urgency considerations, and (ii) a fact-centric orientation, which seeks to ground normative conclusions in empirical results. The core of (...) the paper then compares and contrast three variants of fact-centric political theory: normative behaviourism, grounded normative theory, and radical realism. The upshot: normative behaviourism achieves focus on observable behaviour at the cost of status quo bias, grounded normative theory achieves radicalism at the cost of endorsing an activist orientation to theorising, and radical realism combines a non-activist orientation with the potential for far-reaching critique of the status quo. (shrink)

This work presents a Decision Making Model riferring to the forecasts about Football World Cup in Brazil. The aim of this work is to demonstrate how it is possible to approach young students to the study of Mathematics through evoking themes that are congenial to them and able to arouse their interest.

Ensayos-homenaje en el primer centenario del nacimiento del fil sofo espa ol, que abordan diversos aspectos de la obra de Ortega. Los cuatro trabajos dibujan con rigor algunos de los horizontes planteados por el maestro y respetan la debida modernidad conceptual. la compilaci n estuvo a cargo de Fernando Salmer n, Alejandro Rossi, Luis Villoro y Ram n Xirau.

This study intended to test whether attachment to one’s own residential place at neighborhood level could represent a coping response for the elderly (consistently with the “docility hypothesis;” Lawton, 1982), when dealing with the demands of unfamiliar environments, in order to balance their reduction of spatial abilities. Specifically, a sequential path was tested, in which neighborhood attachment was expected to play a buffer role between lowered spatial competence and neighborhood satisfaction. The participants (N = 264), senior citizens (over 65-year-old), responded (...) to a questionnaire including the measures of spatial self-efficacy, spatial anxiety, attitude toward wayfinding, residential attachment and residential satisfaction. Results from the mediation analysis showed that a lower perceived spatial self-efficacy is associated to a higher spatial anxiety, and both promote a more negative attitude toward wayfinding tasks in non-familiar places. This leads to a higher attachment to one’s own neighborhood, which in turn predicts a higher residential satisfaction. Thus, the “closure” response of becoming more attached to their residential place may be an adaptive strategy of the elderly for compensating the Person-Environment (P-E) mis-fit (Lawton and Nahemow, 1973) when they feel unable (or less able) to cope with the demands of unfamiliar environments. (shrink)

Il existe un lien intuitif entre le bien-être et le bonheur. Nous souhaitons proposer une nouvelle théorie selon laquelle le bien-être consiste en un bonheur approprié. Notre théorie peut être considérée comme la combinaison de quatre thèses. La première thèse est que le bonheur psychologique consiste en une balance largement positive d’états affectifs tels que les émotions, les humeurs et les plaisirs sensoriels. La seconde est que les émotions, les humeurs et les plaisirs sensoriels sont différents types d’expériences perceptuelles de (...) propriétés évaluatives. Il s’ensuit que le bonheur consiste en une balance largement positive d’expériences perceptuelles de propriétés évaluatives. La troisième thèse est que, dans la mesure où le bonheur est constitué par des états qui ont des conditions d’adéquation, alors le bonheur aussi peut être évalué comme étant approprié ou inapproprié. La quatrième thèse est une thèse concernant le bien-être : elle affirme que le bien-être consiste en un bonheur approprié ainsi défini. (shrink)

What do we talk about when we talk about ethical diversity as a challenge to the normative justifiability of liberal democracy? Many theorists claim that liberal democracy ought to be reformed or rejected for not being sufficiently ‘inclusive’ towards diversity; others argue that, on the contrary, liberalism is desirable because it accommodates (some level of) diversity. Moreover, it has been argued that concern for diversity should lead us to favour (say) neutralistic over perfectionist, universalistic over particularistic, participative over representative versions (...) of liberal democracy. This paper provides a conceptual framework to situate those debates, and argues that there are two fundamental ways in which diversity constitutes a challenge to the justificatory status of liberal democracy: consistency (whereby diversity causes clashes between the prescriptions generated by normative political theories), and adequacy (whereby diversity generates a rift between our experience of what is considered valuable and what the theory treats as such). (shrink)

The landscape of seventeenth-century chemistry is complex, and it is impossible to find in it either a clear-cut distinction between alchemy and chemistry or a sort of simple identification of the two. The seventeenth-century cultural context contained a rich variety of "chemical" discourses with arguments ranging from specific experiments to the justification of the validity of chemistry and its novelty in terms of its extraordinary antiquity. On the basis of an analysis of the works by O. Borch, J.J. Glauber, and (...) J. J. Becher, this paper tries to demonstrate that a historical reconstruction of "chemistry" must consider these different levels of the chemical debate. Only then will it be possible to appreciate the outstanding role played by G.E. Stahl in founding modern chemistry. The paper argues in favor of a contextualization of the historical research on seventeenth-century chemistry. (shrink)

The logic of discovering and that of justifying have been a permanent source of debate in mathematics, because of their different and apparently contradictory features within the processes of production of mathematical sentences. In fact, a fundamental unity appears as soon as one investigates deeply the phenomenology of conjecturing and proving using concrete examples. In this paper it is shown that abduction, in the sense of Peirce, is an essential unifying activity, ruling such phenomena. Abduction is the major ingredient in (...) a theoretical model suitable for describing the tran-sition from the conjecturing to the proving phase. In the paper such a model is introduced and worked out to test Lakatos' machinery of proofs and refutations from a new point of view. Abduction and its categorical counter-part, adjunction, allow to explain within a unifying framework most of the phenomenology of conjectures and proofs, encompassing also the method of Greek analysis-synthesis. (shrink)

Nicholas Kaldor was one of this century's most original thinkers on economics, his influence on British economic policy second only to that of Keynes. This book traces the development of Kaldor's thought as it underwent a remarkable evolution from his membership of the Austrian neoclassical school to his embracing of radical Keynesianism. He was also extremely quick to grasp essential changes in economic reality and to forge analytical tools to explain them. Although he was innovative from 1938 onwards, much of (...) his seminal work belongs to a coherent project of research which made him, together with Joan Robinson and Micha/l Kalecki, a leading representative of the post-Keynesian school, an outstanding critic of the neoclassical theory of equilibrium, growth, and distribution, and a convinced opponent of the monetarist school. The book also seeks to show how economic policy and political economy were closely connected in Kaldor's work. It was this that made Kaldor one of the most lucid and radical champions of the economic policies which, by blending political freedom with social justice, have been the outstanding feature of the great European tradition of social democracy. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the Rawlsian project of public reason, or public justification-based 'political' liberalism, and its reception. After a brief philosophical rather than philological reconstruction of the project, the chapter revolves around a distinction between idealist and realist responses to it. Focusing on political liberalism’s critical reception illuminates an overarching question: was Rawls’s revival of a contractualist approach to liberal legitimacy a fruitful move for liberalism and/or the social contract tradition? The last section contains a largely negative answer to that (...) question. Nonetheless the chapter's conclusion shows that the research programme of political liberalism provided and continues to provide illuminating insights into the limitations of liberal contractualism, especially under conditions of persistent and radical diversity. The programme is, however, less receptive to challenges to do with the relative decline of the power of modern states. (shrink)

In this paper we show how a realistic normative democratic theory can work within the constraints set by the most pessimistic empirical results about voting behaviour and elite capture of the policy process. After setting out the empirical evidence and discussing some extant responses by political theorists, we argue that the evidence produces a two-pronged challenge for democracy: an epistemic challenge concerning the quality and focus of decision-making and an oligarchic challenge concerning power concentration. To address the challenges we then (...) put forward three main normative claims, each of which is compatible with the evidence. We start with a critique of the epistocratic position commonly thought to be supported by the evidence. We then introduce a qualified critique of referenda and other forms of plebiscite, and an outline of a tribune-based system of popular control over oligarchic influence on the policy process. Our discussion points towards a renewal of democracy in a plebeian but not plebiscitarian direction: Attention to the relative power of social classes matters more than formal dispersal of power through voting. We close with some methodological reflections about the compatibility between our normative claims and the realist program in political philosophy. (shrink)

Do salient normative claims about politics require moral premises? Political moralists think they do, political realists think they do not. We defend the viability of realism in a two-pronged way. First, we show that a number of recent attacks on realism, as well as realist responses to those attacks, unduly conflate distinctively political normativity and non-moral political normativity. Second, we argue that Alex Worsnip and Jonathan Leader-Maynard’s recent attack on realist arguments for a distinctively political normativity depends on assuming moralism (...) as the default view, which places an excessive burden on the viability of realism, and so begs the question. Our discussion, though, does not address the relative merits of realism and moralism, so its upshot is relatively ecumenical: moralism need not be the view that all apt normative political judgments are moral judgments, and realism need not be the view that no apt normative political judgments are moral judgments. (shrink)