On examinera la théorie stoïcienne des lekta en suivant les critiques formulées contre elle provenant de trois perspectives différentes : celle des Péripatéticiens, de Sextus Empiricus et celle formulée au sein même de l’école par Sénèque. Ces critiques se concentrent sur des questions relatives à une théorie du langage, mais une lecture minutieuse révèle que le cœur du problème réside dans un rejet profond de l’ontologie stoïcienne, constituée en partie, par les lekta. Les réactions des critiques tendent toutes à confirmer (...) leurs propres positions, soit en rejetant la possibilité de présence réelle des lekta, soit en considérant cette présence comme négligeable. Ces confirmations de la validité de ses propres convictions se font par le biais de déformations ou de raccourcis faits à la théorie stoïcienne. En dévoilant ces mécanismes d’escamotage, c’est pourtant bien l’importance de la théorie des lekta qui est percée à jour, et les sérieux défis qu’elle pose aux théories rivales, en remettant en question le contrôle supposé de l’homme sur ses pratiques linguistiques, et en complexifiant la relation de la logique à l’éthique. (shrink)

After Plato's Forms, and Aristotle's substances, the Stoics posited the fundamental reality of lekta - the meanings of sentences, distinct from the sentences themselves. This volume analyses the resulting unique, complex, and consistent cosmic view in which lekta are the keystones of the structure of reality: they are all there is to say.

The article places Game of Thrones within a tradition of pessimism, reaching back to Blaise Pascal and coloured by Nabokov’s vision of birth as a separation between two voids. This lineage provides a philosophical thread to analyse the motivations and actions of the protagonists of Game of Thrones, in particular their relation to child-killing. The void looms large in the world of Game of Thrones as the unchartered space beyond the wall. It is the awareness of the reality of this (...) void and the horrors it harbours which is shown to propel those who have it, to go to the greatest lengths to preserve the life of a child. (shrink)

In this wide-ranging study, Ada Bronowski reconstructs the Stoic account of lekta. Usually translated into English as "sayables," lekta—Bronowski transliterates all key Greek terms—number among the Stoics' most contentious proposals in antiquity and remain the subject of interpretative disagreement today. One clear Stoic commitment is that lekta are what is signified by human speech: my utterance "Dion walks" in normal circumstances signifies the lekton 'Dion walks.' Are lekta to be understood, then, simply as meanings? And is the existence (...) of lekta dependent on token utterances? No, claims Bronowski. 'Dion walks' is part of reality whether or not one utters "Dion walks." Lekta are "there to be said, but need not... (shrink)

This note does examine a recent volume by Ada Bronowski on the Stoic doctrine of the lekta. The first part summarizes its content, while the second discusses some critical and controversial points, in particular the Platonic tenor of the interpretation of the Stoic lekta offered by the Author. This interpretation gives an extra-linguistic and realistic function to items that the Stoics cautiously left under-determined from the ontological point of view.

Ada Bronowski’s The Stoics on Lekta: All There Is to Say offers a comprehensive reconstruction of the role of lekta in Stoic philosophy. Indeed, as one works one’s way through 496 pages, it is hard...

"A gem of enlightenment.... One rejoices in Bronowski's dedication to the identity of acts of creativity and of imagination, whether in Blake or Yeats or Einstein or Heisenberg."--Kirkus Reviews "According to Bronowski, our account of the world is dictated by our biology: how we perceive, imagine, symbolize, etc. He proposes to explain how we receive and translate our experience of the world so that we achieve knowledge. He examines the mechanisms of our perception; the origin and nature of (...) natural language; formal systems and scientific discourse; and how science, as a systematic attempt to establish closed systems one after another, progresses by exploring its own errors and new but unforeseen connections.... A delightful look at the inquiring mind."--Library Journal "Eminently enjoyable to read, with a good story or 'bon mot' on every page."--Nature "A well-written and brilliantly presented defense of the scientific enterprise which could be especially valuable to scientists and to teachers of science at all levels."--AAAS Science Books & Films Contents 1. The Mind as an Instrument for Understanding 2. The Evolution and Power of Symbolic Language 3. Knowledge as Algorithm and as Metaphor 4. The Laws of Nature and the Nature of Laws 5. Error, Progress, and the Concept of Time 6. Law and Individual Responsibility. (shrink)

: Standing before one of Ada Medina's works in a museum recently, I knew myself to be in the company of a distinct presence. The exquisite form was so novel, yet its layers of organicity were deeply familiar. The piece effectively conveyed complex relationality, and pointed toward innovative forms of being, without resorting to didacticism, melodrama, or cliché. I had a strong urge to hug it. I needed to step back and figure it out.

ENTREVISTA COM PROFESSORAS (ES) DE FILOSOFIA DO ENSINO SUPERIOR DO CEARÁ – BLOCO ICom: Ada Beatriz Gallicchio Kroef, Vicente Thiago Freire Brazil, Roberta Liana Damasceno Costa, Elizabeth Bezerra FurtadoPor: Antônio Alex Pereira de Sousa, Paulo Willame Araújo de Lima.

Media representations are presently a determinant form in fixing and promoting memory in modern times. These representations are synthetic cultural formations, complex abstractions which function under pre-determined options. The search for and selection of objects and their images, usually fo..

This book brings Søren Kierkegaard's nineteenth-century existentialist project into our contemporary age, applying his understanding of "freedom" and "despair" to science and science studies, queer, decolonial and critical race theory, and disability studies. The book draws out the materialist dimensions of belief, examining the existential dynamics of phenomena like placebos, epigenetics, pedagogy, and scientific inquiry itself. Each chapter dramatizes the ways in which abstractions like "race" or "genes" and even "belief" are sites of contested practices with pressing political significance. Focusing (...) on the existential dangers posed by neo-liberal and finance capitalist systems, the book brings to life the resources for resistance found within science studies and critical approaches to race, secularity, and disability. Throughout the book, Kierkegaard becomes an ally with ecological and developmental evolutionary theorists, as well as with science studies, critical race, and crip theorists who foreground the relational and impassioned nature of existence. (shrink)

Family businesses are often seen as key players in efforts to increase sustainability due to their transgenerational focus. Researchers have reported that companies strengthen their commitment to sustainability as they consolidate their entrepreneurial commitment, but the existing knowledge about drivers of family firms' sustainability choices is limited. This study sought to fill related research gaps by exploring the relationships between five entrepreneurial orientation (EO) components—risk taking, innovativeness, proactiveness, competitive aggressiveness and autonomy—and family businesses' sustainability initiatives. These companies comprise a unique (...) research context in terms of the EO-sustainability link due to their focus on continuity and propensity to create value for future generations. In addition, women increasingly hold leadership positions within family businesses, and studies have categorised both entrepreneurship and sustainability as gendered processes. Thus, this research also explored female chief executive officers' (CEOs) moderating role as corporate change agents who influence the EO-sustainability initiatives relationship. Analyses were conducted using primary data collected from 195 privately held family firms in Poland. The results indicate that only one EO component (innovativeness) is significantly associated with family businesses' sustainability initiatives and that CEO gender moderates the links between two EO components (proactiveness and autonomy) and sustainability. Thus, this article contributes to the management literature by exploring the role of women leaders as change agents for sustainability in family firms. Other significant theoretical and practical implications are also discussed. (shrink)

Sexual selection provides an adequate partial explanation for the difference in means between the distributions, but fails to explain the difference in variance, that is, the overrepresentation of both boys with outstanding mathematical reasoning ability and boys with mental retardation. Other genetic factors are probably at work. While spatial ability is correlated with OMRA, so are other cognitive abilities. OMRA is not reducible to spatial ability; hence selection for navigational skill is unlikely to be the only mechanism by which males (...) have gained an advantage in OMRA. (shrink)

There is a problem with the definition of talent as presented by Howe et al. that makes it dependent on experts' ability to detect it in the untrained. In addition, the choice of musical performance as the example for innate talent is inappropriate, and musical board results are selective and biased tests of it. Outstanding mathematical reasoning ability offers much better evidence of genetic influence.

:Recent attempts to engage and develop modes of ethological practice that avoid deterministic and mechanistic accounts of animal action have often relied on affect as a way of articulating how animal bodies affect and are in turn affected by the animate and inanimate bodies around them. In this context affect has often functioned as an instigating site of change that opens up the experience of a particular animal to new possibilities for action and relation. This paper seeks to bring the (...) significant role that affect has played in opening up new directions in ethological theory and practice in contact with a discussion of two currents in affect theory – one shaped by the genealogy of philosophical thought that stretches from Spinoza, through Gilles Deleuze, to contemporary thinkers such as Brian Massumi, and the other emerging from the reception of the American psychologist and cybernetics thinker Silvan Tomkins, in the context of queer theory, through the work of Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank. The locus of intersection for these different modes of theoretical practice is the site-specific case study of monk parakeets who have drawn on and incorporated the ornamental elaborations of human architecture into their own complex architectural nest constructions at Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery. (shrink)

The essential nature of science is revealed in an amplification of the relation between the arts and science.

This article provides a brief overview of the efforts to develop and refine the Critical thinking Assessment Test and its potential for improving the design of classroom assessments. The CAT instrument was designed to help faculty understand their students’ strengths and weaknesses using a short answer essay format. The instrument assesses a broad collection of critical thinking skills that transcend most disciplines. The questions were deliberately designed around real-world scenarios that did not require specialized knowledge from any particular discipline. Various (...) faculty who collaborated in the national dissemination of the CAT instrument found that it was a helpful model for designing better course assessments to grade student work. Classroom assessments modeled on the CAT emphasize more critical thinking within the discipline and less rote retention of factual information. We describe the ongoing work to help faculty successfully adapt the CAT to applications that can be used in each discipline’s courses to evaluate and encourage students’ critical thinking. (shrink)

Perspective taking is conceptualized as a multidimensional construct characterized by three components: cognitive, affective, and visual. The experience of psychological maltreatment impairs the child’s emotional competence; in particular, maltreated children present difficulty in understanding and regulating emotions and in social understanding ability. In addition, the literature contains several contributions that highlight maladaptive behaviors of children with a history of maltreatment in peer interactions in the school context. Perspective taking ability has rarely been studied in maltreated children and the existing studies (...) have produced different and often conflicting results that require further insights. On the grounds of these premises, the main objective of the present research is to investigate perspective taking ability in preschool children from maltreating and non-maltreating family contexts and its role in social adjustment, in terms of prosocial and aggressive behavior toward peers inside the kindergarten. A second objective is to verify the effectiveness of a training aimed to promote perspective taking ability in victims of psychological maltreatment. This research, organized into two separate studies, involved 249 preschool children: 206 children from non-maltreating family contexts and 43 brought up in psychologically maltreating families. Perspective taking was measured via the administration of several tests, and prosocial behavior and aggressiveness were observed via non-participant observations in the school context. The training involved maltreated children in small-group meetings based on familiar and appealing activities within the mother–child community. The overall results show that children’s perspective taking ability, in particular the affective perspective taking, contributed to social adjustment. In fact, greater affective perspective taking ability was correlated to a higher frequency of prosocial behaviors toward peers and minor frequency of aggressiveness. Finally, the results of the training showed an increase in perspective taking, especially in the affective dimension, and a consequent increase in prosocial behaviors and a decrease in aggressive ones. Therefore, the affective perspective taking ability seems to represent a very significant protective factor, which should be focused and strengthened in order to improve the social adaptation of preschool children who are victims of psychological abuse. (shrink)

This paper explores the contradiction of positing the existence of a God who is at once omnipotent and not omnipotent in respect of his power that arises in the thought of two African philosophers of religion, John A.I. Bewaji and Ademola Kazeem Fayemi who accept the limitation thesis that projects a limited God and deny the legitimacy of the transcendence view in Yoruba and, by extension, African thought. I demonstrate in this paper that the contradiction arises from the fact that (...) while Bewaji and Fayemi explicitly deny the legitimacy of the transcendence view in Yoruba and, by extension, African thought, they implicitly accept the view and unwittingly and illegitimately attempt to reconcile the conflicting views through the analysis of the notions of God’s creatorship, co-creatorship, and controllership. I conclude by recommending that instead of attempting to reconcile the antinomy of God’s existence in African philosophy of religion, African philosophers should acknowledge the legitimacy of the two conflicting theses constituting the antinomy and, accordingly, sustain logical consistency by strictly thinking within either the framework of limitedness or the framework of transcendence. (shrink)