Le vicomte Théodore Hersart de La Villemarqué a longtemps été accusé d’avoir inventé de toutes pièces les chansons arthuriennes qui apparaissent dans son recueil de chants populaires de la Bretagne, le Barzaz-Breiz. Cet article tente de mettre en évidence les restaurations effectuées par le collecteur sur ces chants arthuriens et de montrer le rôle joué par certains pourvoyeurs de « chansons nouvelles ». Viscount Théodore Hersart de La Villemarqué was accused of fabricating the Arthurian songs collected in his Barzaz-Breiz, the (...) first famous collection of popular songs from Brittany published in the 19th century. This paper aims to demonstrate how the editor actually rewrote the texts and to shed some light on La Villemarqué’s relationships with the persons who gave him access to these “new songs”. (shrink)

Anatomo-functional studies in humans point out that handedness and language-related functional laterality are not correlated – except during language production; and that the convergence of language and hand control is located in the precentral gyrus, whereas executive functions required by movement imitation and phonological and semantic processing converge onto Broca's area. Multiple domains are likely to be actors in language evolution. Footnotes1 Nathalie Tzourio-Mazoyer is the corresponding author for this commentary.

A practical hermeneutics of time. The Possible Present unfolds from within a freely reinterpreted hermeneutic perspective and provides an original theoretical proposal on the topic of time. In dialogue especially with the philosophies of Husserl and Heidegger, but resorting also to suggestions coming from a theological background (Barth and Bonhoeffer), the work proposes a personal and original theory of time centered on a conception of the present that does not reduce temporality to a succession of mere instants. When one claims (...) that time is ungraspable, one refers neither to the past (which is rather irretrievable) nor to the future (which is rather uncertain) but to the present. The present in which we are is in fact what fades from our hands without break. The present is a decisive threshold for finite existence. It is the threshold where past and future meet and can give birth to a livable horizon of meaning. Dilating the present and giving it a meaningful chance to be is a task for philosophy. It is the attempt of giving time to time and also giving it shape, place, and space. To succeed at this task while rediscovering the sources of a narrative way of thinking that in truth it has never abandoned, philosophy must go back and turn time into the primary object of discourse, like in stories, which are precisely the attempt at disposing the temporal flow of events according to a meaning. Perone argues that in time, however, what passes is not simply decline, but rather something irreducible, an exteriority that must be said. (shrink)

The following remarks try to trace a scenario of twentieth-century philosophy, which in my opinion shows a new interest in the issue of time. Many have underscored that nineteenth-century philosophy replaces the paradigm of Nature with that of History as an historical a priori in Foucault’s sense, that is, as the horizon within which the problems are to be located and solved. The issue of identifying the dominant nineteenth-century paradigm—further complicated by thedeclining resort to the great narratives of this “short (...) century”—is still open, so I do not believe it improper to point out that many twentiethcentury philosophers suddenly reconsidered the issue of time as a way of defining the nineteenth-century paradigm of time in a new manner. (shrink)

The following remarks try to trace a scenario of twentieth-century philosophy, which in my opinion shows a new interest in the issue of time. Many have underscored that nineteenth-century philosophy replaces the paradigm of Nature with that of History as an historical a priori in Foucault’s sense, that is, as the horizon within which the problems are to be located and solved. The issue of identifying the dominant nineteenth-century paradigm—further complicated by thedeclining resort to the great narratives of this “short (...) century”—is still open, so I do not believe it improper to point out that many twentiethcentury philosophers suddenly reconsidered the issue of time as a way of defining the nineteenth-century paradigm of time in a new manner. (shrink)

Intentionality plays a fundamental part in human social interactions and we know that interpretation of behaviours of conspecifics depends on the intentions underlying them. Most of the studies on intention attribution were undertaken with primates. However, very little is known on this topic in animals more distantly related to humans such as birds. Three hand-reared African grey parrots were tested on their ability to understand human intentional actions. The subjects’ attention was not equally distributed across the conditions and their behavioural (...) pattern also changed depending on the condition: the parrots showed more requesting behaviours when the experimenter was unwilling to give them seeds, and bit the wire mesh more that represented the obstacle when the experimenter was trying to give them food. For the first time we showed that a bird species, like primates, may be sensitive to behavioural cues of a human according to his intentions. Keywords: Grey parrots; intention attribution; theory of mind. (shrink)

Arguing against the dominant developmental theories (e.g., Piaget, 1945; Vygotsky, 1978) stating that pretend play is limited to early childhood, we illustrate that pretend play is an adaptive human activity of adulthood as well as childhood. We advance this argument on three levels. First, we offer an analysis of why the discipline of developmental psychology in the Western world considered play only as an activity of childhood by neglecting to explore whether or how pretend play exists during adulthood. Second, we (...) discuss the similarities between adult improvisational theater and children’s pretend play in illustrating our thesis that pretend continues to exist during adulthood. In this discussion, we focus on similarities in the definitions, psychological origins, social functions, and developmental consequences of pretend play and adult improvisation. Finally, we end the article with educational implications of conceptualizing pretend play as a life-span activity and offer directions for future research. (shrink)

Este relato apresenta recorte da experiência de estágio supervisionado de História no Colégio de Aplicação da Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC), em 2018, na turma 2B do ensino médio. De modo específico, trata da metodologia utilizada nas aulas para debater sobre o período da Primeira República no Brasil (1889-1930). Tal metodologia foi centrada no trabalho com diferentes fontes: o samba enredo da escola Imperatriz Leopoldinense, Liberdade! Liberdade! Abra as asas sobre nós (1989); o Hino da Proclamação da República e (...) a pintura (1890), A Redenção de Cam (1895). Essas obras foram utilizadas para compreender determinado contexto histórico, do auge do pensamento racialista na esfera pública e representativo de um projeto de nação que se pretendia branca. A experiência de interpretar as referidas fontes permitiu compreender o contexto de transição entre o império e a república e questionar ideias internalizadas que se apresentam como naturais em relação a cultura afro-brasileira na história do Brasil. (shrink)

The political does not exist. What exists is individual and collective life; there is nature, with its inexhaustible cycles; there is the world, the (blind and astute) interlacement of the actions, conflicts and visions that will become history. The political exists only as an invention: the invention of a specific space of the relation that intercepts life, modifies nature, and is a curvature of the world. I would like to dwell on this invention, not without warning that the political of (...) which one speaks precedes and constitutes specific kinds of politics, since it is the condition of their possibility. (shrink)

Looking is a fundamental exploratory behavior by which infants acquire knowledge about the world. In theories of infant habituation, however, looking as an exploratory behavior has been deemphasized relative to the reliable nature with which looking indexes active cognitive processing. We present a new theory that connects looking to the dynamics of memory formation and formally implement this theory in a Dynamic Neural Field model that learns autonomously as it actively looks and looks away from a stimulus. We situate this (...) model in a habituation task and illustrate the mechanisms by which looking, encoding, working memory formation, and long-term memory formation give rise to habituation across multiple stimulus and task contexts. We also illustrate how the act of looking and the temporal dynamics of learning affect each other. Finally, we test a new hypothesis about the sources of developmental differences in looking. (shrink)

In 1940 Dugundji proved that no system between S1 and S5 can be characterized by finite matrices. Dugundji’s result forced the development of alternative semantics, in particular Kripke’s relational semantics. The success of this semantics allowed the creation of a huge family of modal systems. With few adaptations, this semantics can characterize almost the totality of the modal systems developed in the last five decades. This semantics however has some limits. Two results of incompleteness showed that not every modal logic (...) can be characterized by Kripke frames. Besides, the creation of non-classical modal logics puts the problem of characterization of finite matrices very far away from the original scope of Dugundji’s result. In this sense, we will show how to update Dugundji’s result in order to make precise the scope and the limits of many-valued matrices as semantic of modal systems. A brief comparison with the useful Chagrov and Zakharyaschev’s criterion of tabularity for modal logics is provided. (shrink)

In view of the limitations of classical, free, and modal logics to deal with fictional names, we develop in this paper a four-valued logical framework that we see as a promising strategy for modeling contexts of reasoning in which those names occur. Specifically, we propose to evaluate statements in terms of factual and fictional truth values in such a way that, say, declaring ‘Socrates is a man’ to be true does not come down to the same thing as declaring ‘Sherlock (...) Holmes is a man’ to be so. As a result, our framework is capable of representing reasoning involving fictional characters that avoids evaluating statements according to the same semantic standards. The framework encompasses two logics that differ according to alternative ways one may interpret the relationships among the factual and fictional truth values. (shrink)