1. Can “practice” and “practices” be used as epistemological tools to study history? Can these concepts be used to break up unilateral and teleological narratives one the one hand, and, on the other, to provide a basis for a new understanding and writing of history and histories? The twelve essays (by thirteen authors) collected by Francis Chateauraynaud and Yves Cohen under the title Histoires Pragmatiques (in the Ehess’s Raisons pratiques. Epistémologie, sociologie, théorie sociale series)...

The Italian «constitutional compromise» between the liberal, catholic, and socialist-communist traditions and the «fordist-keynesian compromise» between capital and labor are two frequent set expressions. They are often put together, and sometimes overlapped, insofar as they share an emphasis on the central role of labor, the former putting it at the very foundation of the Republic, the latter at the core of the virtuous circle of mass production and mass consumption. Starting from a discussion of these formulas, the essay will propose (...) some lines of research for the history of the Italian Republic, not without significance for contemporary political discourse. (shrink)

From the book: What is to be done with political ecology? Nothing. What is to be done? Political ecology!

As society progresses with newer technology choices and greater materialistic welfare, we also witness more incidences of aggression and violence among the youth and adolescents. This is partly due to the mental stress that they undergo. There has been a renewed interest to understand the causes of aggression and violence. More importantly, there is an interest to identify methods to manage these. This article is an attempt to showcase the usefulness of yoga in addressing this aspect. The present study was (...) conducted to find out the effect of 4 weeks’ yoga practice on 158 normal healthy adolescents’ attitude towards violence in comparison to practice of physical exercises. The study showed that both yoga and PE groups demonstrated significant reduction in their positive ATV strategies and increased positive use of non-violent strategies. Boys in the yoga group showed significant improvement, whereas the control group showed non-significant improvement. Girls in the yoga also displayed significant progress over the control group. Thus, the study points to the usefulness of introducing yoga to the adolescents in their formative years through a structured curriculum. This is likely to provide numerous benefits both for the individual and the society at large. (shrink)

This study analyses for the first time whether and when moral distress may be related to work-family conflict and burnout. Additionally, this study examines whether resilience and positive refocusing might protect healthcare professionals from the negative effects of moral distress. A total of 153 Italian healthcare professionals completed self-report questionnaires. Simple and moderated mediation models revealed that moral distress was positively related to burnout, directly and indirectly, as mediated by work-family conflict. Highly resilient professionals experienced low work-family conflict, regardless of (...) moral distress levels. Moreover, professionals who frequently used positive refocusing were less vulnerable to burnout following moral distress. (shrink)

We investigated motor resonance in children using a priming paradigm. Participants were asked to judge the weight of an object shortly primed by a hand in an action-related posture or a non action-related one . The hand prime could belong to a child or to an adult. We found faster response times when the object was preceded by a grasp hand posture . More crucially, participants were faster when the prime was a child’s hand, suggesting that it could belong to (...) their body schema, particularly when the child’s hand was followed by a light object . A control experiment helped us to clarify the role of the hand prime. To our knowledge this is the first behavioral evidence of motor simulation and motor resonance in children. Implications of the results for the development of the sense of body ownership and for conceptual development are discussed. (shrink)

Time, precarious lives and memories and multiple narrations related to crossing borders constitute the key meanings of a series of contemporary pieces of works produced by migrant artists and writers. Through an analysis of some of their works, this article focuses on some spatio-temporal images, actions and metaphors related to movement. Then it questions the exploration of narratives in visual arts, especially the relationship between imaginary fiction and reality stories. Theatre may become the very place where contemporary tales of migrant (...) people are translated, told, performed. The very meaningful notion of hospitality becomes a theatrical practice in one of the most relevant spectacles of the Théâtre du Soleil, Le Dernier Caravansérail. Another aspect of this creative hospitality — Leïla Sebbar’s Mes Algéries en France — concerns the interweaving of memories belonging to opposite sides of divided countries, after the colonial wars. This work of collection, transcription, translation from one to another gives an example of writing as a repairing work but also of revelation of unknown connections. (shrink)

Spatial memory relies on encoding, storing, and retrieval of knowledge about objects’ positions in their surrounding environment. Blind people have to rely on sensory modalities other than vision to memorize items that are spatially displaced, however, to date, very little is known about the influence of early visual deprivation on a person’s ability to remember and process sound locations. To fill this gap, we tested sighted and congenitally blind adults and adolescents in an audio-spatial memory task inspired by the classical (...) card game “Memory.” In this research, subjects had to find pairs among sounds displaced on an audio-tactile device composed of loudspeakers covered by tactile sensors. To accomplish this task, participants had to remember the spatialized sounds’ position and develop a proper mental spatial representation of their locations. The test was divided into two experimental conditions of increasing difficulty dependent on the number of sounds to be remembered. Results showed that sighted participants outperformed blind participants in both conditions. Findings were discussed considering the crucial role of visual experience in properly manipulating auditory spatial representations, particularly in relation to the ability to explore complex acoustic configurations. (shrink)

Giordano Bruno's notorious public death in 1600, at the hands of the Inquisition in Rome, marked the transition from Renaissance philosophy to the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. In his philosophical works he addressed such delicate issues as the role of Christ as mediator and the distinction, in human beings, between soul and matter. This volume presents new translations of Cause, Principle and Unity, in which he challenges Aristotelian accounts of causality and spells out the implications of Copernicanism (...) for a new theory of an infinite universe, and of two essays on magic, On Magic and A General Account of Bonding, in which he interprets earlier theories about magical events in the light of the unusual powers of natural phenomena. (shrink)

L'origine dell'anima umana secondo Dante.--La dottrina d'Alberto Magno sull'Inchoatio formae.--Alberto Magno e san Tommaso.--La posizione di Alberto Magno di fronte all'averroismo.--L'anima umana secondo Sigieri.--Anima e corpo nel pensiero di san Tommaso.--L'aristotelismo della scolastica e i francescani.--Individualità e immortalità nell'averroismo e nel tomismo.

Fichte assigns ‘intellectual intuition’ a new meaning after Kant. But in 1799, his doctrine of intellectual intuition is publicly deemed indefensible by Kant and nihilistic by Jacobi. I propose to defend Fichte’s doctrine against these charges, leaving aside whether it captures what he calls the ‘spirit’ of transcendental idealism. I do so by articulating three problems that motivate Fichte’s redirection of intellectual intuition from being to acting: (1) the regress problem, which states that reflecting on empirical facts of consciousness leads (...) only to further facts and so cannot yield a first principle; (2) the rhapsody problem, which states that the categories form a haphazard set and so lack necessity unless they derive from a first principle; and (3) the nihilism problem, which states that a first principle cannot lie outside our cognition of it, lest it be the cause of our cognition and, being first, the cause of all our actions, reducing us to machines. Crucially, Fichte’s three motivating problems are in fact aspects of a single problem. Leaving any aspect unsolved spoils putative solutions to the other two. Consequently, Fichte requires a single unified solution to all three, which his doctrine of intellectual intuition provides. (shrink)

This article calls for a rethinking of critical sociology. Representing classical critical sociology, the Bourdieusian paradigm illustrated domination, but its negative foundation removed actors’ power, privileging sociological knowledge as capable of identifying (social) transcendental categories of thought. Latour’s constructivism challenged this privilege, giving actors the political power of aggregating collectives around their common concerns at the cost of emphasizing domination and critique. We propose a critical approach that evades a transcendental perspective reliant on pure negation, producing a more positive critical (...) sociology founded on processualist phenomenological and pragmatic perspectives, principally Merleau-Ponty and Dewey. Actors and researchers can collectively ruminate on their perspectives and concerns to challenge power structures and transform their worlds. At the center of this is the social-mien, a creative reimagination of habitus. A brief discussion of the protests and scholarship surrounding the Notre-Dame-des-Landes activists’ practice of democracy highlights the utility of the approach and serves as a model for future application. (shrink)

One of the most debated questions in psychology and cognitive science is the nature and the functioning of the mental processes involved in deductive reasoning. However, all existing theories refer to a specific deductive domain, like syllogistic, propositional or relational reasoning.Our goal is to unify the main types of deductive reasoning into a single set of basic procedures. In particular, we bring together the microtheories developed from a mental models perspective in a single theory, for which we provide a formal (...) foundation. We validate the theory through a computational model (UNICORE) which allows fine‐grained predictions of subjects' performance in different reasoning domains.The performance of the model is tested against the performance of experimental subjects—as reported in the relevant literature—in the three areas of syllogistic, relational and propositional reasoning. The computational model proves to be a satisfactory artificial subject, reproducing both correct and erroneous performance of the human subjects. Moreover, we introduce a developmental trend in the program, in order to simulate the performance of subjects of different ages, ranging from children (3–6) to adolescents (8–12) to adults (>21). The simulation model performs similarly to the subjects of different ages.Our conclusion is that the validity of the mental model approach is confirmed for the deductive reasoning domain, and that it is possible to devise a unique mechanism able to deal with the specific subareas. The proposed computational model (UNICORE) represents such a unifying structure. (shrink)

The combination of increased availability of large amounts of fine-grained human behavioral data and advances in machine learning is presiding over a growing reliance on algorithms to address complex societal problems. Algorithmic decision-making processes might lead to more objective and thus potentially fairer decisions than those made by humans who may be influenced by greed, prejudice, fatigue, or hunger. However, algorithmic decision-making has been criticized for its potential to enhance discrimination, information and power asymmetry, and opacity. In this paper, we (...) provide an overview of available technical solutions to enhance fairness, accountability, and transparency in algorithmic decision-making. We also highlight the criticality and urgency to engage multi-disciplinary teams of researchers, practitioners, policy-makers, and citizens to co-develop, deploy, and evaluate in the real-world algorithmic decision-making processes designed to maximize fairness and transparency. In doing so, we describe the Open Algortihms project as a step towards realizing the vision of a world where data and algorithms are used as lenses and levers in support of democracy and development. (shrink)

General-elimination harmony articulates Gentzen’s idea that the elimination-rules are justified if they infer from an assertion no more than can already be inferred from the grounds for making it. Dummett described the rules as not only harmonious but stable if the E-rules allow one to infer no more and no less than the I-rules justify. Pfenning and Davies call the rules locally complete if the E-rules are strong enough to allow one to infer the original judgement. A method is given (...) of generating harmonious general-elimination rules from a collection of I-rules. We show that the general-elimination rules satisfy Pfenning and Davies’ test for local completeness, but question whether that is enough to show that they are stable. Alternative conditions for stability are considered, including equivalence between the introduction- and elimination-meanings of a connective, and recovery of the grounds for assertion, finally generalizing the notion of local completeness to capture Dummett’s notion of stability satisfactorily. We show that the general-elimination rules meet the last of these conditions, and so are indeed not only harmonious but also stable. (shrink)

_Badiou and Politics_ offers a much-anticipated interpretation of the work of the influential French philosopher Alain Badiou. Countering ideas of the philosopher as a dogmatic, absolutist, or even mystical thinker enthralled by the force of the event as a radical break, Bruno Bosteels reveals Badiou’s deep and ongoing investment in the dialectic. Bosteels draws on all of Badiou’s writings, from the philosopher’s student days in the 1960s to the present, as well as on Badiou’s exchanges with other thinkers, from (...) his avowed “masters” Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan, to interlocutors including Gilles Deleuze, Slavoj Žižek, Daniel Bensaïd, Jacques Derrida, Ernesto Laclau, and Judith Butler. Bosteels tracks the philosopher’s political activities from the events of May 1968 through his embrace of Maoism and the work he has done since the 1980s, helping to mobilize France’s illegal immigrants or _sans-papiers_. Ultimately, Bosteels argues for understanding Badiou’s thought as a revival of dialectical materialism, and he illuminates the philosopher’s understanding of the task of theory: to define a conceptual space for thinking emancipatory politics in the present. (shrink)

Cette étude s’insère dans une recherche-action ethnométhodologique sur la vie des pères et de mères divorcés. Dans le groupe étudié, après le divorce, hommes et femmes ont connu un vécu parental différent, qui tient sans doute à une répartition différenciée des rôles pendant la vie conjugale. La co-parentalité subsiste après séparation, ce qui entraîne la persistance d’un lien et requiert la mise en place délicate d’une juste distance. Ce qui, corollairement, rend plus difficile le deuil de la relation conjugale, l’ex-conjoint (...) restant présent à travers les enfants. (shrink)

O termo respeito é derivado do latim respectus, que corresponde ao uso substantivo do particípio passado do verbo respicere, cujo significado literal é "olhar para trás", "olhar de volta", "olhar novamente", "considerar" (do latim re "de novo" e spicere "olhar"). Derivações do termo latino respectus são encontradas tanto no francês antigo (sec. VIII-XIX), cujo termo respit significa "descansar", "repousar", quanto no inglês médio (sec. XI-XV), cujo termo respect aparece, assumindo a função de nome, no sentido de "relação ou referência a (...) uma coisa ou situação específica" e, na função de verbo, no sentido de "ser digno de consideração ou estima". Na linguagem comum, respeito é uma das palavras cotidianas que aparece em uma multiplicidade de contextos. De um modo mais amplo, poder-se-ia definir respeito como o reconhecimento do valor e da dignidade de algo, do qual decorre um conjunto de comportamentos e estados de ânimo como resposta. Em primeira instância, é importante observar que o conceito de respeito implica sempre uma relação, como no caso em que utilizamos a locução "a respeito de". O respeito leva em conta uma relação responsiva entre sujeito e objeto na qual o sujeito responde ao objeto devido ao reconhecimento de certas características nele. Como o termo latino nos sugere, essa relação envolve um "olhar de volta" que é, ao mesmo tempo, um "considerar", ou seja, trata-se de um certo tipo de apreciação do objeto baseada em elementos tais como a atenção, o julgamento, o conhecimento, a valorização e a deferência. Nesse sentido, respeitar é uma maneira particular de se apreender objeto, na qual uma atenção especial é requerida com o propósito de reconhecer o objeto, não segundo as distorções perpetradas pela nossa subjetividade, mas em sua própria dignidade. Embora o ato de respeitar tenha origem no sujeito, ele não diz respeito primariamente ao sujeito, mas, em vez disso, ao objeto, na medida em que envolve o reconhecimento de uma propriedade que o objeto reivindica para si. Este é o motivo pelo qual respeitar não é meramente uma questão discricionária, baseada em nosso querer e não querer, mas uma experiência [...]. (shrink)

pt. I. En tout temps, l'art comme figure du bonheur -- pt. II. La réinitialisation artistique de la culture -- pt. III. La réinitialisation des perceptions bienheureuses du monde.