In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Phenomenology of Superstition or a Phenomenological Superstition?Elena Ibáñez-Guerra (bio)KeywordsBehaviorism, constructionism, intentionality, operant behaviorWhen the editors of Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology asked me to make some brief comments on two articles for the special issue edited by Pérez-Álvarez and Sass, I was delighted to accept, thinking that the task would be a straightforward one, and that I could easily meet the agreed deadline. But nothing could (...) be further from the truth. The articles were of such density and their content of such profundity that it took months of interpretation and study, and of bringing my own knowledge up to date, before I was in a position to understand the concepts, adjust my beliefs, and make some comments. I could certainly have delivered some kind of eulogy about the brilliance of their content; I might have countered with my own article. However, what seemed most coherent to me was to meet their arguments head on and deal with what I consider to be their principal weaknesses, leaving the bouquets for the end.The articles set out, as I understand them and within the clinical context, to relate phenomenology, in its most traditional form, with the most current form of Skinnerian behaviorism, situating themselves in a contextualism that is, at the same time, close to and removed from the most radical type of social constructionism.But let us begin by looking more closely at “Phenomenology and Behaviorism.” It is novel for me, though Professor Pérez-Álvarez had already proposed it several years ago (Pérez-Álvarez 1992), to view operant behavior as intentionality, or at least as involving final causality according to the Aristotelian classification. It is a surprising contention, not least because, as I recall, Skinner lived in a time and a context (historical reason) in which the basic goal of psychology was to convert itself into a natural science, comparable in all respects to physics, which it took as a model, focusing therefore on efficient causality (also according to Aristotle’s terminology), so that behavior was considered as the immediate consequence of a stimulus, and the stimulus–response association became the cornerstone of the discipline. It is true that the operant behavior concept refers to the functional relationship between behavior and reinforcement, but it is no less true that Skinner’s definition of reinforcement is totally empirical—“all that which increases or decreases the probability”—meaning that reinforcement can be considered neither as a motive nor as a reason for behavior, unless it be in the eyes of the observer. [End Page 251]Furthermore, even though Yela (1987) refers to Ortega y Gasset’s formula “I am myself and my circumstances” as a Skinnerian approach, the truth is that Yela himself argues that it is precisely the self that constitutes personality, such that I have a personality because I am me, and not vice versa, as Skinner would appear to argue. In this regard, Ortega’s celebrated formula has generally been interpreted, from the most personalist perspectives, as “the circumstances are myself”—to highlight the denial of the psychological subject by radical behaviorism (Mischel’s [1968] criticism of the concept of personality is relevant here). On top of this, Skinner’s rejection of all that was not directly observable, or at least, that could not be operationalized, calls into question the admissibility of anything called final cause or intentionality of behavior. In his philosophy, all the indications are that contingencies are what determine behavior; and that there would be no room for a structural causality, as Althusser would argue, or of a reciprocal determinism, in Bandura’s terms, or even of an interaction between subject and environment, as modern interactionists would maintain. “I am myself and my circumstances” seems in Skinner to become “the circumstances are me”, and indeed, the reinforcement history – which in the article in question is considered as something akin to the Sartrian idea of “life project” – is for Skinner nothing more than a continuous association of events. In my view, Ortega’s perspectivism would perhaps be closer to the sociology of the American action theorists, Merton, Parsons, etc., than to Skinnerian behaviorism, since “action”—as the action theorists... (shrink)

Dos místicos relativamente contemporáneos: Etty Hillesum y Benjamín González Buelta; dos estilos, dos contextos y una coincidencia establecida desde sus experiencias espirituales, en profunda conexión con la realidad, en medio de la vida y sus desafíos. Hillesum no habla propiamente de la experiencia mística, sin embargo, su proceso personal existencial en el duro contexto de guerra que le tocó vivir, la condujo a descubrirse profundamente habitada. Su experiencia de Dios le hizo posible comprender y gestionar el dolor en medio (...) de la guerra, así como la necesidad de ‘hacerse bálsamo sobre las heridas’ de sus hermanos judíos. Etty es una mística de ojos abiertos. Benjamín González Buelta ha profundizado en la comprensión de la mística, describiéndola y analizándola desde la experiencia de Dios en el contexto latinoamericano. Su reflexión permite hoy leer a Etty Hillesum desde la perspectiva del místico de ojos abiertos. (shrink)

En el siguiente estudio se evalúa un panorama con respecto al comportamiento sociológico en un preámbulo tanto antes durante y después de esta crisis social que se está viviendo debido a la pandemia de hoy en día. Por ello para sustentar dicha investigación se realizó un censo en el cuál, mediante el uso de herramientas estadísticas, se pudo realizar una comparación entre un antes y un durante de la pandemia, lo cual facilitaría intrínsicamente a la predicción de una denominada post (...) pandemia. En este texto se pretende detallar el proceso y forma de la encuesta, al igual que los resultados obtenidos de la misma. Se proveen, además, posibles explicaciones para estos resultados, guiándose por las restricciones de salud nacionales como posibles razones para el cambio de comportamiento actual. Palabras Clave: coronavirus, pandemia, frecuencia de salida. Referencias [1]P. Byass, «Eco-epidemiological assessment of the COVID-19 epidemic in China, January-February 2020,» Web Of Science, vol. 13, nº 1, 2020. [2]P. Stefanoni, «Brasil: pandemia, guerra cultural y precariedad,» Nueva Sociedad, pp. 49-59, 2020. [3]M. J. Báguena Cervellera, «La pandemia de COVID-19 a la luz de la historia de la medicina,» Investigación y Ciencia, 2020. [4]A. Levy, «La pandemia de COVID-19 podr{ia ayudar a resolver una gran incógnita climática,» Investigación y Ciencia, 2020. [5]T. Marcel Ariel, «Relaciones en tiempos de pandemia: COVID-19 y bienestar animal, ambiental y humano,» Revista Facultad Nacional De Agronomia Medellin, vol. 2, 2020. [6]F. Manrique-Abril, «Modelo SIR de la pandemia de Covid-19 en Colombia/SIR model of the COVID-19 pandemic in Colombia,» Revista De Salúd Publica, vol. 22, pp. 1-6, 2020. [7]D. Arango-Londoño, «Predicciones de un modelo SEIR para casos de COVID-19 en Cali, Colombia/Predictions of a SEIR model for COVID-19 cases in Cali-Colombia,» Revista De Salúd Publica, vol. 22, nº 2, pp. 1-9, 2020. [8]J. Gonzales-Castillo, «Pandemia de la COVID-19 y las Políticas de Salud Pública en el Perú: marzo-mayo 2020/COVID-19 pandemic and Public Health Policies in Peru: March-May 2020,» Revista De Salúd Publica, vol. 22, nº2, pp. 1-9, 2020. [9]A. Valenzuela-Cazés y L. Becerra-Ostos, «Práctica clínica, ámbito laboral y riesgos de la fisioterapia ante el COVID-19/Clinical practice, work and risks of physical therapy in the face of COVID-19,» Revista De Salúd Publica, vol. 22, nº 2, pp. 1-4, 2020. [10]P. Montes-Alarcón y A. Campo-Arias, «Los médicos generales y la salud mental en la pandemia por COVID-19,» Duazary, vol. 17, nº 3, pp. 4-6, 2020. (shrink)

In recent years, a change in attitude in particle physics has led to our understanding current quantum field theories as effective field theories. The present paper is concerned with the significance of this EFT approach, especially from the viewpoint of the debate on reductionism in science. In particular, it is a purpose of this paper to clarify how EFTs may provide an interesting case-study in current philosophical discussion on reduction, emergence and inter-level relationships in general.

The enactive approach to cognition distinctively emphasizes autonomy, adaptivity, agency, meaning, experience, and interaction. Taken together, these principles can provide the new sciences of language with a comprehensive philosophical framework: languaging as adaptive social sense-making. This is a refinement and advancement on Maturana’s idea of languaging as a manner of living. Overcoming limitations in Maturana’s initial formulation of languaging is one of three motivations for this paper. Another is to give a response to skeptics who challenge enactivism to connect “lower-level” (...) sense-making with “higher-order” sophisticated moves like those commonly ascribed to language. Our primary goal is to contribute a positive story developed from the enactive account of social cognition, participatory sense-making. This concept is put into play in two different philosophical models, which respectively chronicle the logical and ontogenetic development of languaging as a particular form of social agency. Languaging emerges from the interplay of coordination and exploration inherent in the primordial tensions of participatory sense-making between individual and interactive norms; it is a practice that transcends the self-other boundary and enables agents to regulate self and other as well as interaction couplings. Linguistic sense-makers are those who negotiate interactive and internalized ways of meta-regulating the moment-to-moment activities of living and cognizing. Sense-makers in enlanguaged environments incorporate sensitivities, roles, and powers into their unique yet intelligible linguistic bodies. We dissolve the problematic dichotomies of high/low, online/offline, and linguistic/nonlinguistic cognition, and we provide new boundary criteria for specifying languaging as a prevalent kind of human social sense-making. (shrink)

The question of how we should engage with a philosopher’s racial thought is of particular importance when considering Kant, who can be viewed as particularly representative of Enlightenment philosophy. In this article I argue that we should take a stance of deep acknowledgment when considering Kant’s work both inside and outside the classroom. Taking a stance of deep acknowledgment should be understood as 1) taking Kant’s racial thought to be reflective of his moral character, 2) Kant being accountable for his (...) racial thought and 3) being willing to consider the possibility that Kant’s racial thought is consistent with and inextricable from his moral philosophy. Alternative forms of engaging with Kant’s racial work have either moral or pedagogical failings, which range from simply teaching the history of philosophy uncritically to outright deception. A stance of deep acknowledgement will allow philosophers to understand how Kant’s racial thought interacts with his moral philosophy and allow instructors to teach philosophy in a historically contextualized approach so as to not alienate students whose demographic was disparaged by Kant. (shrink)

East Asia’s economy is leading the world into the new Asian century. While meritocratic practices in the educational and private sectors are often considered pivotal conditions for East Asia’s economic success, experts have pointed out that the path ahead requires new approaches to ensure social cohesion and stability, which depend on the quality of relations across social divides. These considerations raise multiple questions for philosophers: What forms of social meritocracy are necessary to sustain social cohesion? Moreover, how can the detrimental (...) effects of meritocratic practices be contained? Is it possible to utilise some of the intellectual resources indigenous to East Asia to generate innovative solutions? This paper argues that the answers to these questions lie in the indigenous Confucian conceptual resources. Confucian ideas can inspire a more desirable societal ideal for the future of East Asia. In particular, the Confucian emphasis on cultivating reciprocal harmonious human relationships and others’ morality can guide new approaches to fostering social cohesion. As Confucian personal cultivation through harmonious relations is a process of social cohesion, these ideas inspire a) a multiple approach to policymaking that is not only grounded in economic redistribution, b) a richer understanding of societal progress, and c) a democratic approach to fostering social cohesion. Unlike Confucian meritocrats and scholars who defend the Confucian roots of East Asian forms of political and social meritocracy, this paper proves that Confucian conceptual resources can help formulate a societal vision that strengthens cohesion and mitigates the adverse effects of meritocratic practices. (shrink)

This essay argues that according to feminist existential phenomenology, feminist pragmatism, and feminist genealogy, our embodied condition is an important starting place for ethical living due to the inevitable role that habits play in our conduct. In bodies, the phenomenon of habit uniquely holds together the ambiguities of freedom and determinism, transcendence and immanence, and stability and plasticity. Seeing habit formation as a matter of self-growth and social justice gives fresh opportunity for thinking of “assuming ambiguity” as a lifelong endeavor (...) made up of many small projects and practices of situated resistance to stagnation. Transcendence, understood as ameliorative transformation, is found in cultivating habits of learning from our bodily living. I articulate this argument via a reading of Simone de Beauvoir's The Coming of Age, John Dewey's Human Nature and Conduct, and Ladelle McWhorter's Bodies and Pleasures. I discuss two domains wherein the ethical significance of habit formation appears: cognitive psychological research on neural plasticity, and certain projects of self-cultivation that risk turning into overdetermining “cult of the self ” practices that close off possibilities for personal and collective transformation. (shrink)

"Now in its third edition, this classic text remains the seminal resource for in-depth information about major concepts and principles of the cultural-historical theory developed by Lev Vygotsky, his students, and colleagues, as well as three generations of neo-Vygotskian scholars in Russia and the West. Featuring two new chapters on brain development and scaffolding in the zone of proximal development, as well as additional content on technology, dual language learners, and students with disabilities, this new edition provides the latest research (...) evidence supporting the basics of the cultural-historical approach alongside Vygotskian-based practical implications. With concrete explanations and strategies on how to scaffold young children's learning and development, this book is essential reading for students of early childhood theory and development"--. (shrink)

The justification of democracy, while widely debated, is hindered by a sub-optimal conceptual framework. For a start, there is confusion about the basic terms in the discussion. Many theorists claim to support either the ‘intrinsic’ or the ‘instrumental’ value of democracy, but it is unclear what this exactly means. Can democracy have other kinds of values? What does it mean to value democracy intrinsically? As a result, at certain points, scholars are talking past one another and their assessments of their (...) respective approaches to democracy are less clear than what they intended. This paper develops a conceptual framework of the values of democracy. I use this framework to classify theories of democracy under three main groups: theories that value democracy intrinsically, instrumentally, or contributorily (necessarily and non-necessarily). Through this analysis, the points of engagement among the different approaches will emerge and flawed arguments about democracy will be revealed. (shrink)

Coordination is a widely employed term across recent quantitative and qualitative approaches to intersubjectivity, particularly approaches that give embodiment and enaction central explanatory roles. With a focus on linguistic and bodily coordination in conversational contexts, I review the operational meaning of coordination in recent empirical research and related theorizing of embodied intersubjectivity. This discussion articulates what must be involved in treating linguistic meaning as dynamic processes of coordination. The coordination approach presents languaging as a set of dynamic self-organizing processes and (...) actions on multiple timescales and across multiple modalities that come about and work in certain domains (those jointly constructed in social, interactive, high-order sense-making). These processes go beyond meaning at the level that is available to first-person experience. I take one crucial consequence of this to be the ubiquitously moral nature of languaging with others. Languaging coordinates experience, among other levels of behavior and event. Ethical effort is called for by the automatic autonomy-influencing forces of languaging as coordination. (shrink)

The denial of voting rights to certain types of persons continues to be a moral problem of practical significance. The disenfranchisement of persons with mental impairments, minors, noncitizen residents, nonresident citizens, and criminal offenders is a matter of controversy. This book makes a contribution to this largely neglected yet key topic.

Villeneuve d’Ascq, Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2018, 404 p. Cette collection d’essais commence avec une question provocatrice : d’autres cours d’Europe offrent-elles une place « aussi éminente » aux femmes que la cour de France à l’époque moderne? Les études réunies ici montrent de façon évidente l’importance et la centralité des femmes à la cour de France, des reines et princesses au sommet du pouvoir jusqu’aux demoiselles de musique, nourrices, femmes d’officiels et autres. Cet...

This essay frames systemic patterns of mental abuse against women of color and Indigenous women on Turtle Island (North America) in terms of larger design-of-distribution strategies in settler colonial societies, as these societies use various forms of social power to distribute, reproduce, and automate social inequalities (including public health precarities and mortality disadvantages) that skew socio-economic gain continuously toward white settler populations and their descendants. It departs from traditional studies in gender-based violence research that frame mental abuses such as gaslighting--commonly (...) understood as mental manipulation through lying or deceit--stochastically, as chance-driven interpersonal phenomena. Building on structural analyses of knowledge in political epistemology (Dotson 2012, Berenstain 2016), political theory (Davis and Ernst 2017), and Indigenous social theory (Tuck and Yang 2012), I develop the notion of cultural gaslighting to refer to the social and historical infrastructural support mechanisms that disproportionately produce abusive mental ambients in settler colonial cultures in order to further the ends of cultural genocide and dispossession. I conclude by proposing a social epidemiological account of gaslighting that a) highlights the public health harms of abusive ambients for minority populations, b) illuminates the hidden rules of social structure in settler colonial societies, and c) amplifies the corresponding need for structural reparations. (shrink)

The idea for this issue of the Rivista di Estetica comes from a conference that was held at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory in Belgrade, June 2011. The question that the speakers were asked to tackle was “What keeps society together?”. At least since John Searle’s 1995 book, The Construction of Social Reality, a popular answer to that question has been that collective intentionality lies at bottom of all manifestations of social reality – from interactions in informal groups (...) to... (shrink)

Questo utile ed interessante volume – frutto di una tesi in Filologia bizantina elaborata presso l'Università Cattolica di Milano sotto la guida di C. M. Mazzucchi – offre l'editio princeps della Parafrasi Ambrosiana allo Strategicon di Maurizio, un manuale di tattica militare fra i più significativi della letteratura greca, composto verisimilmente nell'ultima decade del VI secolo ovvero agli inizi del VI; la parafrasi, a sua volta, è testimoniata dal codice Ambrosianus B 119 sup. = gr. 139 (A), una importantissima raccolta (...) di tattici greci le cui caratteristiche paleografiche rinviano agli anni immediatamente successivi alla metà del X secolo; di più, l'esame interno del manoscritto permette di corroborare e precisare questa deduzione, riportandoci con tutta probabilità all'ambiente di corte ed ad una delle personalità più significative e potenti di quegli anni, Basilio παϱαϰοιμώμενος, figlio naturale di Romano Lecapeno e fratellastro dell'imperatrice Elena, la consorte di Costantino VII Porfirogenito: ne sono prova, fra l'altro, le eccezionali caratteristiche librarie e la presenza di un dizionario nautico – i cosiddetti Naumachica di Basilio – preceduto da esametri e da un proemio espressamente dedicati al Παϱαϰοιμώμενος, dati che sembrano riportarci ai preparativi per una spedizione navale per Creta che già negli anni 958–959 si andava allestendo. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 45, Issue 11, November 2021.

The question whether AI systems have agency is gaining increasing importance in discussions of responsibility for AI behavior. This paper argues that an approach to artificial agency needs to be teleological, and consider the role of human goals in particular if it is to adequately address the issue of responsibility. I will defend the view that while AI systems can be viewed as autonomous in the sense of identifying or pursuing goals, they rely on human goals and other values incorporated (...) into their design, and are, as such, dependent on human agents. As a consequence, AI systems cannot be held morally responsible, and responsibility attributions should take into account normative and social aspects involved in the design and deployment of the said AI. My argument falls in line with approaches critical of attributing moral agency to artificial agents, but draws from the philosophy of action, highlighting further philosophical underpinnings of current debates on artificial agency. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss a proposal for reform in the teaching of Euclidean geometry that reveals the symbiotic relationship between axiomatics and pedagogy. We examine the role of intuition in this kind of reform, as expressed by Mario Pieri, a prominent member of the Schools of Peano and Segre at the University of Turin. We are well aware of the centuries of attention paid to the notion of intuition by mathematicians, mathematics educators, philosophers, psychologists, historians, and others. To set (...) a context for Pieri’s proposal, we only seek to open a small window on views of the pedagogical role of intuition, from primary education to university study that may have informed early 20th century efforts to improve the teaching of geometry at the secondary school level. Pieri addressed the topic of intuition in many of his axiomatizations, including those in projective geometry which was his main area of concentration in foundations. We focus here primarily on his axiom systems for elementary geometry, which embraced the transformational approach of Felix Klein’s vision for the subject. Our goal is to convey Pieri’s thoughts on how to integrate two types of intuition, denoted as sensible and rational, in his endeavors to improve the teaching of the geometry of Euclid. We show how Pieri’s views on geometric intuition and pedagogical reform were either ignored or misrepresented in several notable publications at the turn of the 20th century. In particular, we give Pieri a voice in response to specific comments made in the early 1900s by Federigo Enriques, Ugo Amaldi, and Florian Cajori in widely circulated publications inspired by Klein. (shrink)

This article compares the ‘enfranchisement lottery’, a novel method for allocating the right to vote, with universal suffrage. The comparison is conducted exclusively on the basis of the expected consequences of the two systems. Each scheme seems to have a relative advantage. On the one hand, the enfranchisement lottery would create a better informed electorate and thus improve the quality of electoral outcomes. On the other hand, universal suffrage is more likely to ensure that elections are seen to be fair, (...) which is important for political stability. This article concludes that, on balance, universal suffrage is prima facie superior to the enfranchisement lottery. Yet the analysis shows that the instrumental case for the ‘one person, one vote’ principle is less conclusive than democratic theorists usually suppose. (shrink)

Confucian meritocratic rule has been recently advocated on the basis of the economic performance of Western democracies and the political ignorance of their average voters. These arguments are grou...

In the 1920s and 1930s, some of the most talented linguists of the Soviet Union, among whom one can highlight N. F. Jakovlev and E. D. Polivanov, were involved in the process of "language building". Their role in the success of this process is examined from the point of view of the phonological theory that they developed for creating scripts for the numerous peoples of the Soviet Union, Turkic and Caucasian above all. Jakovlev's phonology, that Polivanov termed "social phonology", was (...) very different from the one that N. Trubetskoj proposed some 10 years later. We will try to explain their ambitious script projects, which remain difficult to understand from the point of view of the modern phonology. (shrink)

Prompted by our commentators, we take this response as an opportunity to clarify the premises, attitudes, and methods of our enactive approach to human languaging. We high-light the need to recognize that any investigation, particularly one into language, is always a concretely situated and self-grounding activity; our attitude as researchers is one of knowing as engagement with our subject matter. Our task, formulating the missing categories that can bridge embodied cognitive science with language research, requires avoiding premature abstractions and clarifying (...) the multiple circularities at play. Our chosen method is dialectical, which has prompted several interesting observations that we respond to, particularly with respect to what this method means for enactive epistemology and ontology. We also clarify the important question of how best to conceive of the variety of social skills we progressively identify with our method and are at play in human languaging. Are these skills socially constituted or just socially learned? The difference, again, leads to a clarification that acts, skills, actors, and interactions are to be conceived as co-emerging categories. We illustrate some of these points with a discussion of an example of aspects of the model at play in a study of gift giving in China.Keywords: Enactive epistemology, Enactive ontology, Dialectics, languaging, Shared know-how. (shrink)

Este artículo describe un estudio realizado con docentes de primaria y secundaria en varias comunidades españolas. El estudio se centra en la percepción del profesorado sobre el uso del Aprendizaje Basado en Juegos (ABJ) en el aula, tratando de averiguar en qué medidas los docentes implementan el uso de esta metodología en sus aulas. Un cuestionario fue creado ad hoc para este propósito y fue debidamente validado. Los resultados de este estudio muestran que la mayoría de los docentes son proclives (...) a la utilización del ABJ, y que lo perciben como algo positivo para el aprendizaje significativo del alumnado. (shrink)

In our contemporary age, where a combination of individualism and mutual distrust is unhappily common among people and society is “liquid” and disoriented, so-called intermediate units are a precious resource that promotes positive coexistence within organizations and in local communities, too. The present contribution describes an example of such an intermediate unit, the Talent Club, located in a peripheral neighborhood of a metropolitan area in northern Italy. This case study shows the development of positive living and working together in organizations (...) and their transformation in the tool for community development and good coexistence. Qualitative and quantitative data show that the relational aspect is crucial because it promotes authentic exchange among people, supporting participation and social cohesion against self-referential habits and isolation. Although at present the Talent Club is mostly functioning in a affiliating coexistence among members, seeds of a more generativ... (shrink)

Following a usage-based approach to language acquisition, lexically specific patterns are considered to be important building blocks for language productivity and feature heavily both in child-directed speech and in the early speech of children (Arnon, Inbal & Morten H. Christiansen. 2017. The role of multiword building blocks in explaining L1-L2 differences. Topics in Cognitive Science 9(3). 621–636; Tomasello, Michael. 2003. Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press). In order to account for patterns, the traceback (...) method has been widely applied in research on first language acquisition to test the hypothesis that children’s utterances can be accounted for on the basis of a limited inventory of chunks and partially schematic units (Lieven, Elena, Dorothé Salomo & Michael Tomasello. 2009. Two-year-old children’s production of multiword utterances: A usage-based analysis. Cognitive Linguistics 20(3). 481–508). In the current study, we applied the method to code-mixed utterances (n = 1,506) of three German-English bilingual children between 2 and 4 years of age to investigate individual differences in each child’s own inventory of patterns in relation to their input settings. It was shown that units such as I see X as in I see a Kelle ‘I see a trowel’ could be traced back to the child’s own previous productions. More importantly, we see that each child’s inventory of constructions draws heavily on multiword chunks that are strongly dependent on the children’s language input situations. (shrink)

The first to use Judith Butlers work as a reading of how the legal subject is formed, this book traces how Butler comes to the themes of ethics, law and ...

This essay offers an overview of the diversity of women’s prose writing that emerged on the Czech cultural scene in the post-communist era. To that end it briefly characterizes the work of eight Czech women authors who were born within the first two decades after World War II and began to create during the post-1968 era of ‘normalization’. In this broad sense they belong to a single generation. With rare exception their work was not officially published in their homeland until (...) the 1990s. The writers included are: Lenka Procházková, Tereza Boučková, Alexandra Berková, Zuzana Brabcová, Daniela Hodrová, Sylvie Richterová, Iva Pekárková, and Eva Hauserová. The overview is followed by a concise comparative analysis of texts by three very different writers (Procházková, Pekárková, and Hodrová), using a feminist critical approach. There is also an appendix of works by these writers available in English translation. (shrink)

This article advances three claims. The first is that the standard instrumentalist case for minimal age and sanity requirements for voting is weak and inconclusive in such a way that the evaluation of such requirements should be made exclusively on the basis of procedural fairness considerations. The second claim is that fairness requires the inclusion of all and only those persons who have the franchise capacity: the minimum necessary cognitive and moral powers to experience the benefits of enfranchisement. The third (...) and final claim is that current age and sanity prerequisites for voting in most places fail to comply with the demands of fairness and ought to be revised. (shrink)

The ubiquitous human practice of spontaneously gesturing while speaking demonstrates the embodiment, embeddedness, and sociality of cognition. The present essay takes gestural practice to be a paradigmatic example of a more general claim: human cognition is social insofar as our embedded, intelligent, and interacting bodies select and construct meaning in a way that is intersubjectively constrained and defeasible. Spontaneous co-speech gesture is markedly interesting because it at once confirms embodied aspects of linguistic meaning-making that formalist and linguistic turn-type philosophical approaches (...) fail to appreciate, and it also forefronts intersubjectivity as an inherent and inherently normative dimension of communicative action. Co-speech hand gestures, as linguistically meaningful speech acts, demonstrate both sedimentation and spontaneity (in the sense of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s dialectic of linguistic expression ( 2002 )), or features of convention and nonconvention in a Gricean sense ( 1989 ). Yet neither pragmatic nor classic phenomenological approaches to communication can accommodate the practice of co-speech hand gesturing without some rehabilitation and reorientation. Pragmatic criteria of intersubjectivity, normativity, and rationality need to confront the non-propositional and nonverbal meaning-making of embodied encounters. Phenomenological treatments of expression and intersubjectivity must consider the normative nature of high-order social practices like language use. Reciprocally critical exchanges between these traditions and gesture studies yield an improved philosophy that treats language as a multi-modal medium for collaborative meaning achievement. The proper paradigm for these discussions is found in enactive approaches to social cognition. Co-speech hand gestures are first and foremost emergent elements of social interaction, not the external whirring of an isolated internal consciousness. In contrast to current literature that frequently presents gestures as uncontrollable bodily upsurge or infallible imagistic phenomenon that drives and dances with verbal or “linguistic” convention (McNeill 1992 , 2005 ), I suggest that we study gestures as dynamic, embodied, and shared tools for collaborative sense-making. (shrink)

Desde la visión de Ortega y Gasset y Julián Marías aparece el pensador Árabe Ibn Jaldún como uno de los principales puentes tendidos entre Oriente y Occidente, tanto que es considerado por ambos como el primer filósofo de la historia. Según afirmaciones de Ortega, el pensador árabe es el cimiento que heredaron las generaciones de ambos pensadores españoles.

A common approach for measuring the effectiveness of an education system or a school is the estimation of the impact that school interventions have on students’ academic performance. However, the latest trends aim to extend the focus beyond students’ acquisition of knowledge and skills, and to consider aspects such as well-being in the academic context. For this reason, the 2015 edition of the international assessment system PISA incorporated a new tool aimed at evaluating the socio-affective variables related to the well-being (...) of students. It is based on a definition focused on the five dimensions proposed in PISA theoretical framework: cognitive, psychological, social, physical and material. The main purpose of this study is to identify the well-being components that significantly affect student academic performance and to estimate the magnitude of school effects on the well-being of students in OECD countries, the school effect being understood as the ability of schools to increase subjective student well-being. To achieve this goal, we analyzed the responses of 234,000 students from thirty-five OECD countries to PISA 2015 questionnaires. Specifically, we considered non-cognitive variables in the questionnaires and student performance in science. The results indicated that the cognitive well-being dimension, composed of enjoyment of science, self-efficacy and instrumental motivation, as well as the test anxiety all had a consistent relationship with student performance across countries. In addition, the school effect, estimated through a two-level hierarchical linear model, in terms of student well-being was systematically low. While the school effect accounted for approximately 25% of the variance in the results for the cognitive dimension, only 5-9% of variance in well-being indicators was attributable to it. This suggests that the influence of school on student welfare is weak, and the effect is similar across countries. The present study contributes to the general discussion currently underway about the definition of well-being and the connection between well-being and achievement. The results highlighted two complementary concerns: there is a clear need to promote socio-emotional education in schools, and it is important to develop a rigorous framework for well-being assessment. The implications of the results and proposals for future studies are discussed. (shrink)