Medical imaging is predominantly a visual field. In this context, prenatal ultrasound images assume intense social, ethical, and psychological significance by virtue of the subject they represent: the fetus. This feature, along with the sophistication introduced by three-dimensional ultrasound imaging that allows improved visualization of the fetus, has contributed to the common impression that prenatal ultrasound scans are like photographs of the fetus. In this article we discuss the consistency of such a comparison. First, we investigate the epistemic role of (...) both analogic and digital photographic images as visual information-providing representations holding a high degree of objectivity. Second, we examine the structure and process of production of ultrasound scans and argue that a comparison between two-dimensional ultrasound and photography is justified. This is in contrast to 3D ultrasound images that, due to the intensive mathematical processing involved in their production, present some structural issues that obfuscate their ontological and epistemic status. (shrink)

BackgroundNormality is both a descriptive and a normative concept. Undoubtedly, the normal often operates normatively as an exclusionary tool of cultural authority. While it has prominently found its way into the field of medicine, it remains rather unclear in what sense it is used. Thus, our study sought to elucidate people’s understanding of normality in medicine and to identify concepts that are linked to it.MethodsUsing convenient sampling, we carried out a cross-sectional survey. Since the survey was advertised through social media, (...) we employed an online survey. We performed descriptive and inferential analyses. Predictors were chosen in a theory-driven manner.ResultsIn total, 323 persons from 21 countries completed the survey. Analysis revealed that the overall acceptance of normality in medicine was associated with notions of injustice, authority, discrimination, and with having a medical profession. More precisely, for the field of mental health, injustice insensitivity, genderism and transphobia, and authority were positively associated with a person’s acceptance of normality; and, for the field of physical health, injustice insensitivity and having a medical profession were positively associated with a person’s acceptance of normality. Finally, participants’ acceptance of the use of normality in the area of mental health was lower than in the area of physical health.ConclusionsWhat is considered normal has implications for clinical practice, both at an individual and at a policy-level. Acknowledging its normalistic condition, the discipline of medicine has to confront itself with its own contribution to the augmentation of social inequalities through the excessive reliance on the concept of normality. Research that centers the lived experiences of those who are being systematically marginalized because they are deemed abnormal is needed. By empirically elucidating the conceptual relationships between normality in medicine and other variables, we provide points of leverage to deprive normality of its normative power. For medicine, this is needed to first do no harm. (shrink)

Ce volume présente une nouvelle édition et la première traduction dans une langue moderne du Lexique platonicien de Timée le Sophiste. Il présente également une histoire, riche de nouveaux matériaux, de la lexicographie platonicienne ancienne. Le texte est préfacé d’une longue introduction de Jonathan Barnes. This book contains a new edition of the Greek text of the Lexicon to Plato by Timaeus the Sophist. There is a rich commentary, and a French translation―the first translation of the work into a modern (...) language. The text is prefaced by a long introduction, by Jonathan Barnes. (shrink)

In everyday reasoning - just as in science and art - knowledge is acquired more by "doing" than with long analyses. What do we "do" when we discover something new? How can we define and explore the pattern of this reasoning, traditionally called "synthetic"? Following in the steps of classic pragmatists, especially C.S. Pierce, Giovanni Maddalena's Philosophy of Gesture revolutionizes the pattern of synthesis through the ideas of change and continuity and proposes "gesture" as a new tool for synthesis. (...) Defining gesture as an action with a beginning and an end that carries on a meaning, Maddalena explains that it is a dense blending of all kinds of phenomena - feelings and vague ideas, actual actions, habits of actions - and of signs - icons, indexes, and symbols. When the blending of phenomena and signs is densest, the gesture is "complete," and its power of introducing something new in knowledge is at its highest level. Examples of complete gestures are religious liturgies, public and private rites, public and private actions that establish an identity, artistic performances, and hypothesizing experiments. A departure from a traditional Kantian framework for understanding the nature and function of reason, The Philosophy of Gesture proposes an approach that is more attuned with our ordinary way of reasoning and of apprehending new knowledge. (shrink)

Proprioception is a crucial sensory modality involved in the control and regulation of coordinated movements and in motor learning. However, the extent to which proprioceptive acuity is influenced by local muscle fatigue is obscured by methodological differences in proprioceptive and fatiguing protocols. In this study, we used high resolution kinematic measurements provided by a robotic device, as well as both frequency and time domain analysis of signals captured via surface electromyography (sEMG) to examine the effects of local muscle fatigue on (...) wrist proprioceptive acuity in 16 physically and neurologically healthy young adults. To this end, participants performed a flexion/extension ipsilateral joint position matching test (JPM), after which a high-resistive robotic task was used to induce muscle fatigue of the flexor carpi radialis (FCR) muscle. The JPM test was then repeated in order to analyze potential changes in proprioceptive acuity. Results indicated that the fatigue protocol had a significant effect on movements performed in flexion direction, with participants exhibiting a tendency to undershoot the target before the fatigue protocol (-1.218°), but overshooting after the fatigue protocol (0.587°). In contrast, in the extension direction error bias values were similar before and after the fatigue protocol as expected (pre = -1.852°, post = -1.237°) and reflected a tendency to undershoot the target. Moreover, statistical analysis indicated that movement variability was not influenced by the fatigue protocol or movement direction. In sum, results of the present study demonstrate that an individual’s estimation of wrist joint displacement (i.e., error bias), but not precision (i.e., variability), is affected by muscular fatigue in a sample of neurologically and physically healthy adults. (shrink)

Dans cet article j’analyse quelques extraits de la traduction latine du De anima d’Alexandre d’Aphrodise, faite par Girolamo Donato (1457-1511), noble vénitien, ambassadeur de la Serenissima auprès de plusieurs cours en Italie et en Europe, homme de lettres ami de Poliziano, Marsilio Ficino et Aldo Manuzio. En comparant les extraits avec l’original grec, le but est d’en vérifier la valeur : la fidélité du latin au grec, la compréhension générale du contenu et, en l’occurrence, la possibilité de rendre plus clairs (...) certains passages obscurs du texte d’Alexandre. (shrink)

Prenatal ultrasound is a non-invasive diagnostic examination. Despite the recognized diagnostic value, this technology raises complex ethical questions. The aim of this study is to provide a comprehensive analysis that coherently maps the ethical challenges raised by prenatal ultrasound examination, both 2D and 3D. We performed a systematic literature review. Six databases were systematically searched. The results highlight how concerns related to beneficence, informed consent, and autonomy are mainly related to routine use of prenatal ultrasound in the clinical context, while (...) considerations linked to overmedicalization of pregnancy, discrimination, and fetal ontology were often reported in relation to the impact ultrasound is having on medicine and society. Ethical issues in the context of pre-abortion ultrasound, obstetric practices in low-income settings, and keepsake ultrasound imaging were also greatly discussed. Since prenatal ultrasound practices critically impact pregnant people’s autonomy and their role within pregnancy, we conclude that information providing strategies should be developed to appropriately inform pregnant people about the nature, purpose, risks, and choices revolving around prenatal ultrasound. In addition, as it is becoming increasingly difficult to separate the social and clinical dimensions of prenatal ultrasound, future research should focus on examining if and how such dimensions should be reconciled. (shrink)

This paper wishes to clarify the definitions of the central terms relating to assessment. It argues that all assessment begins with summative assessment and that formative assessment is in fact summative assessment plus feedback which is used by the learner.

We analyze the role of ethical values in the determination of the social cost of carbon, arguing that the familiar debate about discounting is too narrow. Other ethical issues are equally important to computing the social cost of carbon, and we highlight inequality, risk, and population ethics. Although the usual approach, in the economics of cost-benefit analysis for climate policy, is confined to a utilitarian axiology, the methodology of the social cost of carbon is rather flexible and can be expanded (...) to a broader set of social-welfare approaches. [Open access]. (shrink)

Derrida’s reading of Heidegger’s 1962 lecture On Time and Being concludes the last session of the 1978–79 seminar published in Donner le temp II. There, Heidegger suggests that the task of thinking consists of thinking Being without regard to metaphysics, while ceasing all overcoming of metaphysics as such. What is given as the task for thought is that which onto-theology makes impossible to think, that is, the constitutive aporetic remainder of metaphysical thinking. This essay contends that for both Heidegger and (...) Derrida the task of thought consists in this same matter of thinking, with which the question of the gift primarily deals. It maintains that in order to think the giving of the gift without regard to metaphysics, the gift could be thought in terms of anxiety. In this perspective, anxiety emerges as a thoughtful affect that gives an access to thinking the impossible, cutting through the onto-theological order of metaphysics. Finally, bringing together Heidegger and Lacan’s accounts of anxiety allows us to creep deeper into this liminal dimension of what is to be thought. (shrink)

El presente artículo tiene como objetivo principal presentar y discutir el concepto de las hiperescrituras del yo como prácticas de producción de memorias. A partir de estas escrituras, practicadas y compartidas en la pandemia, se pretende pensar la ficción como táctica de (re)existencia. Finalmente se presenta una experiencia en la plataforma Moodle, diseñada con estudiantes durante el 2020, que tuvo la ficción como punto de partida de la propuesta didáctica.

In this paper I shall try to give you a good reason for sharing with Peirce his doubts on Pragmatism. What I am going to maintain is that Peirce found in his Semeiotic, through which he was looking for a real “proof” for pragmatism, hints, vanishing points that made him think that pragmatism was just a part of a richer logical realm and of a far richer reality. What he doubted was not pragmatism in itself but that it could comprehend (...) the whole realm of logic. The key of the point that I want to make is the famous “rational instinct”, but in order to understand its role and function I have to go through some clues that it is possible to find in the first branch of semeiotics and then to confirm my analysis with a brief reference to Methodeutics. In the end I will suggest that these reasons, which urged Peirce to increase the importance of the rational instinct, are the same that lie beneath his latest and worse known ideas on continuity and infinity. It is well known that in his late years Peirce was dealing with many things: he was writing “The Amazing Mazes of Mathematics”, he was trying to develop his theory of continuity and he was trying to re-publish his papers on Pragmatism with some correction. In the confused manuscripts of this last period of his life you can find, whatever was the topic he was talking about, questions on which he kept pondering again and again. In doing this kind of analysis Peirce often stated points that do not have a precise development or that cannot find a precise collocation in his synthetic statements. Therefore, what I am going to do is to underline these points and then to try drawing a conclusion that can account for them. The only problem of this task is due to the unavoidable brevity of a paper so that my discourse will probably look more a chain not stronger that is its weakest link than a cable whose every fiber helps the strength of the whole. (shrink)

L'antitesi di Talete. Anassimandro e l'infinito come simultaneità. L'aria di Anassimene come mediazione. Il principio d'Eraclito come equilibrio. Il fuoco eracliteo come divenire. Il fuoco eracliteo come armonia.

This paper is a contribution to the study of the four classical Italian pragmatists: Papini, Prezzolini, Vailati and Calderoni. They are seen more as representatives of a pragmatist movement than as singular systematic thinkers. The center of Italian pragmatism was the periodical, Leonardo, where these authors discussed and presented an original and provocative understanding of pragmatist philosophy. Thier understanding of pragmatist philosophy has often been underestimated by the subsequent literature. They showed a good comprehension of the novelty brought by American (...) pragmatism but, ignoring some of the most important epistemic aspects of Peirce’s and James’s theories, their philosophical proposals often missed consistency. However, even in their misunderstandings, they signaled a need and possibly a weakness of the whole pragmatist movement. Italian pragmatists underlined the importance of the concreteness of individuals in the realization of universal laws of mathematics and logic, physics and psychology. But, this attitude suffered from some serious tensions between metaphysical assumptions and methodological claims. (shrink)

Although questionable for its style and method, irritating in its conclusions and judgments, and political in the broad sense of the word, Carlin Romano’s book is a courageous work that fully belongs to the pragmatist tradition. It recalls the style and the tone of some Italian pragmatists like Papini and Prezzolini, whose books lacked perhaps some deep technical tools but were apt to shake the intellectual world and substantially to the point in many critiques. As the Italian pragmatists for...

Peirce did not achieve a final systematization of his work. Beyond the difficulties in explaining so many philosophical tools that he introduced—suffice it to mention semiotic, abductive logic, a heuristic based on continuity, scholastic realism—, there is a theoretical reason for this incompletion. All those new philosophical tools indicated a conception of synthesis very different from the one he received from Kant. Peirce did not realize the profound direction of his enquiry so that he did not directly question neither Kant’s (...) legacy on this issue nor the idea of necessity that presides over it. Starting from Peirce’s conception of continuity and change, this paper will give a new definition of synthetic and analytic judgments and reasoning, completing the picture with a third “vague” judgment and reasoning. In this new definition a synthetic judgment is a judgment that recognizes identity through changes. An analytical judgment is a judgment that loses identity through changes. A vague judgment is a judgment that it is blind to identity through changes. How do we perform synthetic reasoning? Following Peirce’s semiotic study of elements of Gamma Graphs as the sheet of assertion and the line of identity, the paper will first individuate the semiotic characteristics necessary for the recognition of identity. These characteristics lead us to discover “complete gesture” as the tool that we use in our every-day reasoning in order to acquire new knowledge synthetically. “Complete gestures” are actions through which we carry and recognize significant meanings. This new paradigm should provide an improved account of common-sense knowledge as well as of particular creative and hypothetic stages of conception in both scientific and humanistic thought. (shrink)

The paper will focus on Rorty’s project as it emerges in the compelling introductions to his books from Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature onwards. Even disagreeing with his conclusions, some interesting items suggest that Rorty was a legitimate member of the pragmatist family and that he shared with classic pragmatists much more than a reader can see at first glance. First, Rorty understood better than anyone else that the fight against Kant’s rationalism is crucial to pragmatism considered as a (...) whole. He paralleled Kantism with the history of explaining knowledge as a mirroring representation and he wanted to get rid of it. Second, Rorty shared with classic pragmatists what I call the “synthetic drive” of philosophy, namely, the view of philosophy as the habit of action of looking at anything in a way that makes it “hang together with everything else.” Third, the outcome of the synthetic drive is conceiving philosophy as a transformative activity. In all these cases, Rorty took roads at odds with classic pragmatism but he did not betray the general aim and spirit of the American movement of thought. (shrink)

The Italian Pragmatists were a group of philosophers in the early 20th century. They gathered around the journal _Leonardo_, which was published in Florence. This volume emphasizes what they all shared, as well as their value for philosophy and culture.

I. Introduction Can phenomenology and pragmatism, two early twentieth century theories, be alive today and furnish a valid possibility in our philosophical landscape? Moreover, can they work together? The operation does not seem impossible since Peirce himself held a phenomenology, which is an indispensable part of his never-finished system; James’s psychology is often a phenomenology, and Husserl recognized James as an interesting author because of his phenomenological insights. However, the...

In this paper I propose to read and understand gestures as logical tools within a synthetic paradigm of knowledge. This interpretation of gesture is drawn from a new pragmatist reading of reasoning in general, and synthetic reasoning in particular. Complete gestures are actions with a beginning and an end that bear a meaning. It is our regular way to embody vague ideas into singular actions with general meaning. The tool is forged by a dense blending of icons, indices, and symbols (...) and by a complexity of phenomenological characteristics as feelings, actual actions, general concepts and habits. The paper illustrates this new way to look at gestures and different kinds of complete and incomplete gestures. (shrink)

Dans le commentaire d’Alexandre d’Aphrodise sur la Métaphysique d’Aristote, nous trouvons plusieurs passages concernant « les intermédiaires » (τὰ μεταξύ). Dans cet article, j’en considérerai quelques-uns, tirés des commentaires sur les livres Alpha (6, 987b14-18) et Beta (2, 997a34-b3 ; 997b25-28 ; 998a7-9), car dans ces passages on ne trouve pas une simple paraphrase de ce qu’Aristote dit (comme c’est fréquent chez Alexandre), mais une prise de position qui me semble fort originale. À partir de cette analyse, nous trouverons une (...) confirmation de ce que l’on dit souvent, à savoir qu’Alexandre ne s’intéresse pas aux philosophes (passés et contemporains) en tant que tels, mais seulement en tant qu’objets de considération, souvent polémique, d’Aristote et des aristotéliciens « purs et durs » comme lui. On trouvera aussi une autre confirmation, à savoir qu’Alexandre essaye toujours et à tout prix d’expliquer systématiquement Aristote, même lorsque les thèses aristotéliciennes ne paraissent pas cohérentes ou bien harmonisées entre elles. D’ailleurs, il faudra constater aussi que les passages du commentaire d’Alexandre que l’on analysera ont le mérite de souligner et d’expliquer clairement les difficultés sérieuses que nous rencontrons lorsque nous réfléchissons sur les μεταξύ des Platoniciens : la difficulté de concevoir leur rapport avec la réalité sensible si on les considère comme les objets de certaines sciences mathématiques ; la difficulté de considérer leur existence si on les conçoit comme des objets immanents au réel. (shrink)

Porphyry’s Expositio per interrogationem et responsionem can help us to understand some obscure passages of chapter seven of Aristotle’s Categories, focused on the relative. The Porphyrian analysis of πρός τι presents indeed developments which are both useful for the understanding of the Aristotelian text and very innovative too. First, we can mention the general Porphyrian thesis according to which categories are predicates. This theory fits very well with πρός τι, which are predicates corresponding to properties that subjects only possess because (...) of an observed reciprocal relationship. This brings us to the second novelty of Porphyry’s analysis, really important for modern developments of the notion of relation, namely the difference between σχέσις and πρός τι, which depends on it. Finally, we will mention the important Porphyry’s contribution to the understanding of a particularly obscure issue concerning the relationship between the two definitions of πρός τι that Aristotle provides. Porphyry points out the Platonic origin of the first definition, without dismissing it though: instead, he will just consider it too vast and encompassing the true πρός τι, object of the second definition. (shrink)

Nynfa Bosco (1929-2013) was an interesting, important and eccentric character in Italian post-World War II philosophy studies. She was one of the first women to successfully pursue a university career, capable of mastering several languages when few in Italy could decently speak one, and gifted with an agile and compelling writing style. Nynfa Bosco published in 1959 the first Italian monograph on Peirce and in 1977 a translation of some important articles of the founder of pragmatism. Despite the technical approximation, (...) mainly determined by the texts available at that time, Bosco understood the original ethical and metaphysical dimension of Peirce's logical writings, anticipating some readings that would emerge only many years later. (shrink)

It is difficult to devise a new approach to any topic in Peirce scholarship, and it is also difficult to convincingly bring one to life. Tullio Viola's book, Peirce on the Uses of History, elegantly accomplishes this second trick, making it well worth reading. Viola is one of the many representatives of a new generation of Italian Peirce scholars who are connecting a solid philological and historical work about Peirce's writings with a vivid theoretical depth. Similar works by Chiara Ambrosio, (...) Francesco Bellucci, Maria Regina Brioschi, Claudia Cristalli, Gabriele Gava, Maria Luisi, and Marco Stango on various aspects of Peirce's thought testify to the vitality of studies inspired by this profound... (shrink)

Chemical visualizations and models are special kinds of situated, inductive arguments. In this paper, I examine several historical case studies—an archive of images from museums, special collections, and popular magazines—as examples of emergent practices of physical modeling as theoretical play which became the basis for molecular biology and structural chemistry. Specifically, I trace a legacy of visualization tools that starts with Archibald Scott Cooper and Friedrich Kekulé in the late 1800s, crystallizes as material manipulatives in Kekulé’s student Jacobus Henricus Van’t (...) Hoff and his folded paper “toys,” is legitimized in the California lab of Linus Pauling, and is glorified in the popular imaginary with James Watson and Francis Crick’s model of DNA. My tracing then follows several threads into contemporary modeling practices. I ultimately argue that modeling play, originally outside of the boundary of deductive, positivist science, is now an accepted mode of inductive reasoning in these related chemical fields. (shrink)

This article considers the use of flag telegraphy by the US Signal Corps during the Civil War as it functioned as a proto-technical medium that preceded wire telegraphy as a military communications technology. Not only was flag telegraphy a historical step towards contemporary technical media, it was also an early iteration of the digitization of communication. Our treatment ties together three main theoretical threads as a way of seeing ‘the digital’ in material communication practices: (1) Friedrich Kittler’s concept of technical (...) media as a remediation between the 19th and 20th centuries, (2) Foucault’s docile bodies as means of reproducing culture, and (3) James Carey’s argument that the telegraph reconfigured communication. The Signal Corps is a rich historical moment in terms of media history and history of technology because it illustrates the convergence of historical exigencies at work in the war machine: mobility, secrecy, precision, and speed. Each contributes, we argue, to a digital telos that privileges digital ways of knowing and being. (shrink)

Perhaps due to the period of international crisis, appeals to creativity multiplied in any field. Sure enough, when the status quo cannot grant welfare conditions anymore, something new is needed. And the problem of novelty intertwines that kind of thought that goes by the name of creativity. Philosophically speaking, this request means to question what creativity really is, which are its cognitive processes, whether it is teachable, and where it comes from. A first methodological question is...