The concept of scaffolding has wide resonance in several scientific fields. Here we attempt to adopt it for the study of development. In this perspective, the embryo is conceived as an integral whole, comprised of several hierarchical modules as in a recurrent circularity of emerging patterns. Within the developmental hierarchy, each module yields an inter-level relationship that makes it possible for the scaffolding to mediate the production of selectable variations. A wide range of genetic, cellular and morphological mechanisms allows the (...) scaffolding to integrate these modular variations into a functionally coordinate unit. A genetic scaffolding accounts for the inherited invariance of pattern formation during the embryo’s growth. At higher level, cells behave as agents endowed with the capacity to interpret any scaffolding variation as signs. The full hierarchy of a multi-level scaffolding is eventually attained when the embryo acquires the capacity to impose a number of developmental constraints on its constituting parts in a top-down direction. The acquisition of this capacity allows a semiotic threshold to emerge between the living cellular world and the underlying non-living molecular world. As this boundary is gradually defined during development, cells enter into new functional relationships, while, at the same time, are relieved from their physical determinism. The resulting constraints can thus become the driving forces that upgrade embryonic scaffolding from the simple molecular signalling to the complexity of sign recognition proper of a cellular community. In this semiotic perspective, the apparent goal directness of any developmental strategy should no longer be accounted for by a predetermined genetic program, but by the gradual definition of the relationships selected amongst the ones historically explored. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 29, Issue 1, pp 86 - 102 The aim of this paper is to give an overview of the place that Hobbes assigns to optics in the context of his classification of sciences and disciplinary boundaries. To do this, I will begin with an account of Hobbes’s conception of philosophy or science, and particularly his distinction between true and hypothetical knowledge. I will also show that in his demarcation between mathematics or geometry and natural philosophy Hobbes was (...) influenced by Galileo’s _Dialogue_. I then analyse the consequences of this distinction for optics, and conclude by clarifying its status among the scientific disciplines. (shrink)

Cell communication plays a key role in multicellular organisms. In developing embryos as in adult organisms, cells communicate by coordinating their differentiation through the establishment and/or renewal of a variety of cell communication channels. Under both these conditions, cells interact by either receptor signalling, surface recognition of specific cell adhesion molecules or transfer of cytoplasmic components through junctional coupling. In recent years, it has become apparent that cells may also communicate through the extracellular release of microvesicles. They may originate as (...) either exosomes from the endosomal compartment upon fusion of multivesicular bodies with the plasma membrane or be shed directly from the plasma membrane via extensions of the cell surface. Microvesicles may disperse over long distances through body fluids and deliver their molecular cargo onto a variety of target cells. As a general rule, the metabolic fate of these cells is determined by the molecular nature of the vesicular cargo, while targeting itself depends on the affinity of the molecules expressed on the enclosing membrane. In this paper, we will be arguing that intercellular vesicular transfer is substantially different from other types of cell communication, allowing cells and molecules to interact on varying levels. Cells interacting via ligand signalling owe their specificity to the steric coupling with cognate receptor molecules. As such, it is a pure molecular process that affects target cells only upon integration into their responding repertoire. In this relationship, coupled cells are reciprocally adapted to each other through the selection of their respective signalling capacities, following exploration of their receptor specificity. Interaction by intercellular vesicles realizes a substantially different type of cell communication. Vesicular traffic allows donor cells to carry out a horizontal type of gene transfer and target this information over long distances via independently controlled mechanisms. Because of this independence, cells interacting via vesicular traffic are not expected to adapt their signalling correspondences, but to control instead the efficiency of their cargo delivery irrespective of the receptor repertoire expressed by the target tissue. In this paper, the multifaceted functions of the intercellular vesicular traffic will be discussed in a multilevel biosemiotic perspective with the aim of unravelling the cellular mechanisms devised by nature to accomplish communication. (shrink)

Germ cells are cross-roads of development and evolution. They define the origin of every new generation and, at the same time, represent the biological end-product of any mature organism. Germ cells are endowed with the following capacities: to store a self-descriptive program, to accumulate a protein-synthesizing machinery, and to incorporate enough nourishment to sustain embryonic development. To accomplish this goal, germ cells do not simply unfold a pre-determined program or realize a sole instructive role. On the contrary, due to the (...) complexity of their cytoarchitecture and the nature of the soma-to-germ interactions, they are heavily involved in processes of sign recognition and meaningful tissue exploration. At each stage of their inward migration, germ plasma membranes act as semiotic interfaces allowing cells to interact with the surrounding extracellular milieu and experience the compatibility of selected developmental sequences. The question of which signaling pathways are activated at each developmental stage does not result from a strictly predetermined program instructing germ cell stemness. Rather, each developmental sequence is an open-ended semiotic relationship explored and gradually defined during evolution by the context-dependency of specific cell-to-cell interactions. In this way, any structural and functional novelty that has emerged in the course of germ cell interactions may be interpreted as an exaptation fixed in the species genome in response to specific environmental constraints. (shrink)

Meister Eckhart escribió textos en alemán y en latín. Pero, fuera del ámbito de los estudios eckhartianos, es conocido sobre todo por su obra alemana. De la obra latina, los textos menos frecuentados son los llamados “sermones latinos”: una serie de notas o borradores que podrían haber servido como material preparatorio para lo que en el _Prologus generalis in Opus tripartitum_ el mismo Eckhart llama el _Opus sermonum_, del que no tenemos más noticia que la del _Prologus_ mencionado. En castellano, (...) el destino de la obra latina de Eckhart no ha sido hasta ahora demasiado afortunado. Pocas son las traducciones. Y, en cuanto a los “sermones latinos”, ninguno ha sido traducido todavía. Ofrecemos la traducción de uno de estos sermones, el XXXVII, en el que Eckhart comenta un texto de Pablo (Efesios 4, 1-6): _Unus deus et pater omnium_. En el estudio preliminar se ofrece (1) una introducción a la obra latina de Eckhart en general y, en particular, a los “sermones latinos” y (2) un comentario del texto traducido. (shrink)

The Person and the Inpersonal: confronting Max Scheler’s phenomenological thought with Heidegger’s. This essay starts from a similarity between the thought of Max Scheler and Martin Heidegger in their correspondent approaches to the way the being of the human as non-substantial. Both Scheler’s notion of “Person” and Heidegger’s notion of “Dasein” are conceived of as acts, always already determined by their being-in-the-world, and not as substantial entities with a kind of identity previous to their “actuality”. Nonetheless, Scheler and Heidegger extract (...) from that originally common thought divergent pathways of thinking: whereas the first one addresses the mode of being of the Person, the second derives to the “impersonal” (das Man). This text aims at showing precisely the way of that divergence. (shrink)

A comunicação situa-se na continuação do estudo apresentado ao II Congresso Internacional da AFFEN, intitulado A vida e o humano em Heidegger: a ontologia heideggeriana na aurora de uma biopolítica, e pretende considerar as consequência, na filosofia de Heidegger na transição entre os anos 20 e 30, do seu afastamento em relação ao conceito de vida. Ver-se-á como é este afastamento, determinado pela meditação em tomo do pensamento de Ernst Jünger e pela confrontação com o biologismo nacional-socialista, que conduz àquilo (...) a que se poderia chamar uma transformação interior da abordagem heideggeriana da essência do humano, e da sua determinação como ser-no-mundo. Uma tal transformação acontece em três passos fundamentais: 1. urna “radicalização filosófica” - para usar os terinos de Jean Grondin - do conceito de finitude (1929); 2. um enraizamento da não-verdade na essência da verdade (1930); 3. a transformação do conceito de mundo em pólo da unidade constituída pela relação agónica entre terra e mundo (1935). Através desta transformação, Heidegger confronta-se com a meditação jüngeriana acerca da “mobilização total” do mundo, surgindo assim a sua história do ser como a representação de um processo no qual o ser abandona o ente, a terra é destruída e o mundo é despojado de terra. Numa tal história, marcada, numa perspectiva geral, por aquilo a que Heidegger chama a “fuga dos deuses”, dir-se-ia que tudo no ente fica exposto e que o mundo - sendo aquilo que, no aparecer do ente, não aparece e se encobre enquanto condição do próprio aparecimento - chega ao fim. Heidegger apresenta então o fim do mundo, através do seu pensar de uma história do ser, para o recusar e resistir contra ele. O salto da “história do ser” para um “outro início” da história, aquilo a que Heribert Boeder chama o “pensar apocalíptico” constitutivo da meditação modema heideggeriana, traduz assim um recuo de Heidegger diante do fim do mundo. (shrink)

Heidegger occupies a special place within the logotectonic edifice. Determined by “Sein” (Being) or the “Sache” (topic) and not by thinking itself, Heidegger’s thought presents itself as the “end of philosophy”, which is the completion of what Boeder calls modernity (Moderne). However, in view of Heidegger’s transition from fundamental ontology to the history of Being, it is also possible to regard Boeder’s logotectonic as a response to, and perhaps even as demanded by, the intrinsic movement of Heidegger’s thinking. This would (...) mean that Heidegger’s Besinnung plays a role not only inside but also outside the logotectonic, namely, as the thought in confrontation with which logotectonic thinking can appear. (shrink)

Neuropalliative care developed to address the needs of patients living with life‐limiting neurologic disease. One critical consideration is that disease‐related changes to cognition, communication, and function challenge illness experiences and care practices. We conducted an ethnography to understand neuropalliative care as a phenomenon; how it was experienced, provided, conceptualized. Personhood served as our conceptual framework; with its long philosophical history and important place in nursing theory, we examined the extent to which it captured neuropalliative experiences and concerns. Personhood contextualized complex (...) losses, aligning the impact of functional and relational changes. Cognition, communication, and functional alterations stretched conceptions of personhood, insinuating it can be relational, fluid, adaptive. Although normative conceptions of personhood guided research and decision‐making, ethical considerations suggested personhood could be transformed, remade. We consider the implications of our findings through three themes. First, we examine how literature on illness experience fails to integrate the realities of people living with and dying from neurologic disease; we counter this by interrogating the concept of experience. Second, we turn to Ricoeur's work on recognition to illuminate relational conceptions of personhood to inform care practices. Finally, we reflect on how personhood can bridge the gap left by functional changes, enhance relational engagement, and promote dignity at the end of life. (shrink)

In this commentary to Leal (2013), we argue that the memorization of the names and symbols of the chemical elements is necessary in the study of that topic because this task is the key for the later understanding of the Periodic Table. We can make the memorization task in an enjoyable, but effective way, using some educational games in chemistry class. Some recent puzzles, card games, mnemonics rules or games based on drawings to learn the chemical elements are addressed in (...) this paper. (shrink)

Rouse’s masterful tome encompasses capacious domains but suffers from obscuration due to pleonasm and too many attempts to counter or unify the disparate views of too many other distinguished philosophers.

A wide-ranging exploration of the present, and the future, of the Unconscious. The Unconscious knows no time, it has no before-and-after, it does not have a history of its own. Yet, it is not always the same. As it emerges in the life of people and societies, the Unconscious is shaped by ever-changing historical conditions: its form depends on the unique 'psychosphere' of each historical age. In the early twentieth century, Freud characterised the Unconscious as the dark side of the (...) well-ordered framework of Progress and Reason. At the end of the past century, Deleuze and Guattari described it as a laboratory: the magmatic force that ceaselessly brings about new possibilities of imagination. Today, at a time of viral pandemics and in the midst of the catastrophic collapse of capitalism, the Unconscious has begun to emerge in yet another form. In this book, Franco 'Bifo' Berardi vividly illustrates the form in which the Unconscious will make itself manifest for decades to come, and the challenges that it will pose to our possibilities of political action, poetic imagination, and therapy."--Publisher's description. (shrink)

Volume 16, Issue 4, September 2019, Page 381-388.

This paper provides a historical reevaluation of the originality and implications of Avempace's critique of Aristotle's causal explanation of the motion of projectiles. It also offers a serious revision of the place which has usually been assigned to Avempace in the history of science. The views regarding projectiles defended in Avempace's Arabic commentary are in sharp opposition to the anti-Aristotelian Avempace that was known in the Medieval West through Averroes. Avempace's commentary reveals only a moderate critic of Aristotle, a critic (...) who did not, in any case, break with the master, and who, therefore, did not even go as far as Philoponus in creating a new and more profound theory of projectile motion. (shrink)

This paper presents the Futurium platform used by Digital Futures, a foresight project launched by the European Commission's Directorate General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (DG CONNECT). Futurium was initially developed with the primary purpose of hosting and curating visions and policy ideas generated by Digital Futures (Digital Futures was launched in July 2011 by DG CONNECT's Director General Robert Madelin following a prior DG CONNECT exercise called Digital Science.). However, it has turned into a platform on which to (...) experiment with new policymaking models based on scientific evidence and stakeholder participation, referred to in this paper as ‘Policy Making 3.0’. The platform hosts an online foresight toolkit to facilitate the joint creation of ideas to help design future policies. It leverages the potential of social networks, open data, semantic and knowledge mining technologies as well as participatory brainstorming techniques to engage stakeholders and harness their views and creativity to better inform policies that matter to them. The Futurium distinguishes between different variables, reflecting the emotional vs. rational mindsets of the participants, and offers the possibility to frame the engagement and co-creation process into multiple phases of a workflow. Futurium was developed to support Digital Futures, but its open architecture makes it easily adaptable to any policymaking/decision-making context where thinking ahead, participation, scientific evidence and agility are needed. Futurium is an early prototype implementation of the Policy Making 3.0 model, which is a long-term vision requiring further investigation and experimentation. The Futurium production website can be seen here: ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/futurium. (shrink)

Este ensayo estudia la actitud asumida por Francisco Suárez frente al pensamiento de Nicolás Maquiavelo y la razón de Estado, en el marco de los estudios históricos sobre el pensamiento español de los siglos xvi y xvii (Maravall, Tierno Galván, Fernández Santamaría), los cuales han establecido una distinción entre autores “tácitos mayores” y “tácitos menores”, tradicionalistas e innovadores, “moralistas” y “arbitristas”. En el estudio se examinan dos tesis: la más radical de Carlo Giacon, quien contrapone el pensamiento del Teólogo de (...) Coimbra al del Secretario florentino, y la más ponderada de Cintia Faraco, que vislumbra cierto nexo entre la prudencia maquiavélica y la suareciana. A juicio del Autor, el problema se resuelve desde su raíz teniendo en cuenta que la ley del Príncipe debe ser siempre justa y recta, es decir, conforme a valores éticos, particularmente, a los expresados en la ley natural. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper analyses the discourses produced on their websites by the two organisations that conducted the official ‘leave’ and ‘remain’ campaigns in the Brexit referendum. The analysis, whi...

Should education serve external goals, or should it be non-instrumental? In this paper, I recognize a tension between these two views with respect to the question of the end and the means in education, and I suggest conceptual and practical ways to handle this tension. The paper comprises two parts: the first part discusses the problem, and the second part offers solutions. To expose the problem, I present a brief overview of the opposing views of purposiveness versus anti-instrumentalism in education, (...) based on old inspirations and new manifestations of each, and I present two examples of current theories that carry this tension as an inner contradiction. Additionally, I argue these theoretical tensions lead to professional confusions and practical dilemmas among teachers. In search of solutions, I lean on current theoretical arguments to reconcile the contradictions and offer ways to integrate the two views into one pedagogical approach. Finally, I draw a conceptual model that turns the tensions and confusions into a more reasonable complexity that educators can handle in their theoretical thinking and accommodate in their practical choices in school. My conclusions lead to a re-justified commitment to education for democracy, and to teachers’ autonomy. (shrink)

Dans un travail anterieur j’ai essaye de montrer que Heidegger a finalement refuse de faire place, dans sa philosophie, a la notion platonicienne d’idee, bien qu’elle semblait, selon un certain point de vue, etre une figure capable de representer l’ouverture originelle de l’être qui était au coeur des recherches de Heidegger dans les annees qui entourent Etre et Temps. La raison de cela, a mon avis, est que l’approche aristotelicienne de la philosophie de Platon par Heidegger explicitement adoptee conduisait au (...) bout du compte a interpreter l’idee de Platon comme une substance. Mais qu’en est‑il de l’idee du bien, qui pour sa determination teleologique et pour sa collocation au‑dela de l’ousia d’un cote semblait repondre aux besoins propres a la pensee heideggerienne, et d’un autre cote etait plus refractaire a la substantialisation aristotelicienne? La these que je soutiens est que Heidegger, tout en ayant cultive pour longtemps le projet d’utiliser l’idee du bien comme un precedent important de son ontologie, a finalement decide que ce projet n’etait pas possible, parce que la connotation ethique de cette idee etait largement dominante sur l’aspect ontologique. (shrink)

Concatenation, conjunction, and connection -- The sensitive infosphere -- Global skin : a trans-identitarian patchwork -- The aesthetic genealogy of globalization -- Language, limit, excess -- Avatars of the general intellect -- The swarm effect -- Social morphogenesis and neuroplasticity -- The transhuman -- The horizon of mutation -- Consciousness and evolution -- The end.

An examination of new forms of alienation in our never-off, plugged-in culture—and a clarion call for a “conspiracy of estranged people.” We can reach every point in the world but, more importantly, we can be reached from any point in the world. Privacy and its possibilities are abolished. Attention is under siege everywhere. Not silence but uninterrupted noise, not the red desert, but a cognitive space overcharged with nervous incentives to act: this is the alienation of our times... —from The (...) Soul at Work Capital has managed to overcome the dualism of body and soul by establishing a workforce in which everything we mean by the Soul—language, creativity, affects—is mobilized for its own benefit. Industrial production put to work bodies, muscles, and arms. Now, in the sphere of digital technology and cyberculture, exploitation involves the mind, language, and emotions in order to generate value—while our bodies disappear in front of our computer screens. In this, his newest book, Franco “Bifo” Berardi—key member of the Italian Autonomist movement and a close associate of Félix Guattari—addresses these new forms of estrangement. In the philosophical landscape of the 1960s and 1970s, the Hegelian concept of alienation was used to define the harnessing of subjectivity. The estrangement of workers from their labor, the feeling of alienation they experienced, and their refusal to submit to it became the bases for a human community that remained autonomous from capital. But today a new condition of alienation has taken root in which workers commonly and voluntarily work overtime, the population is tethered to cell phones and Blackberries, debt has become a postmodern form of slavery, and antidepressants are commonly used to meet the unending pressure of production. As a result, the conditions for community have run aground and new philosophical categories are needed. The Soul at Work is a clarion call for a new collective effort to reclaim happiness. The Soul at Work is Bifo's long overdue introduction to English-speaking readers. This Semiotext edition is also the book's first appearance in any language. (shrink)