BackgroundDefinition and concept of the ‘beginning of human life’ are weakened by co-existing contrasting hypotheses based on humanistic or religious beliefs rather than scientific foundations. This plethora of conceptually distant views have important common concerns in different fields of science and shape, in turn, several societal aspects including laws related, for instance, to inheritance eligibility or abortion, end-of-life care and euthanasia, and reproductive technology. Also, they are fundamental to evaluate opportunity for resuscitation vs. palliative care in extremely preterm infants. In (...) this article, we address one of the most common tenets in medicine: the acceptance that human life starts with first breath, even though several events are well-documented to take place before its occurrence.Main textSeveral studies show how pivotal physiological events take place before first breath. Evidence of a number of neurological events occurring before first breath opens the way to the primacy of the Central Nervous System, given its immediate extra-uterine activation at birth. This activation eventually sets specific physiological conditions that allow the complex sequence of events determining the muscle activity associated with the influx of air in the lung and the settling of a continuous and successful extra-uterine respiration. We would like to invite the scientific community to endorse a clear-cut position against the paradigm of ‘first breath’ as the beginning of life. Herein, we also assume how, a still undefined, yet possibly specific quid in the external environment triggers further physiological response in newborns. Better understanding of the critical events that occur at the beginning of human life is likely to cause great concern and expectations in scientists, researchers and physicians working in the domain of brain, and its physiology, and mental health.ConclusionsThe comparison between beliefs and evidence-based observations generates confusion, misperceptions and false expectations in society, hence, in the scientific and medical community. Different and more solid alternatives about the carachterization of the ‘beginning of human life’ are indeed available and require to be explored and defined. (shrink)

The article proposes looking at children's literature, particularly the form of the picture book, as an educational resource for producing body awareness in school. Eight reading steps for as many bodily actions aimed at naming the body, activating it, getting to know it and moving it in space, on and off the pages; between grounding, listening, breathing, playing and moving, the rediscovery of gestures and anatomical truths invites to deepen self-knowledge as a preliminary act to the encounter and relationship with (...) the other and with the environment. The picture books by their specificities of short form and cross-over, offer, even in non-fiction production, the possibility of bringing attention back to the body dimension within the school and educational debate, where it lives today in a state of malaise and oblivion. Meaningful conversations, explorations and relationships flow from the pages of the albums: research on language as a tool that gives dignity and value to each person, and encounters with the artistic representation of the world as an infinite mirror of its multiplicity and variety, constitute valuable opportunities for an education that is aware of the wholeness of learners and teachers and the integrated, erotic and embodied dimension of their relationship. (shrink)

Aristotle often describes virtue in an idealized way, indicating that the virtuous person will never err or have a bad desire. Yet, drawing from empirical work on character and personality, many philosophers and psychologists believe that most people’s behavior stems from situational factors and that good behavior often stems from the wrong motives, such as maintaining a good mood or relieving feelings of guilt. Further, some suggest that the variability in most people’s behavior raises a challenge to traditional categories of (...) character such as virtue, vice, continence, and incontinence. Thus, it may seem impossible to develop virtue and that people lack character as Aristotle conceived of it. Drawing from Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Politics, I develop accounts of actual virtue and the character of ordinary people and respond to these two concerns. (shrink)

El presente trabajo se propone reflexionar en torno al vínculo entre la noción de agencia material y el pensamiento posthumanista contemporáneo. Mas específicamente nos proponemos cuestionar la necesidad de que una postura filosófica no antropocéntrica deba contener necesariamente una concepción simétrica de agencia. Para esto, en primer lugar, se analizarán los desarrollos de Lambros Malafouris en torno a dicha problemática, con el fin de caracterizar una concepción simétrica de la capacidad agentiva. En contraposición a esto, en segundo término, se explicitará (...) la visión de Tim Ingold al respecto, con el fin de abrir paso a un nuevo enfoque. (shrink)

This contribution contextualizes the relationship between fragility and education in the light of people’s changing conditions and perspectives, and their impact on educational processes, focusing in particular on the consequences of the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. By doing so, it introduces this focus, illustrates its coherence, and explains the basic methodological choice, namely the adoption of the Systematic Review, to explore different aspects of the relationship between fragility and education.

In this article the author examine the type of mobilization processes that occur via interactions between the UNESCO and other political actors, and how these processes led to the creation of standard-setting and monitoring instruments, like the Belèm Framework for Action (UNESCO 2009) and the Global Report on Adult Learning and Education (UIL 2003, 2013). The findings point at three concurrent processes or modes of mobilization in adult education: landmarking, brokering and framing. Landmarking refers to the process of co-constructing a (...) shared past for a broad set of actors with policy will in adult education; Brokering captures the process of supporting the transaction of values, ideas and information to envision a viable future for adult education; finally framing addresses the structuring of information and intentions to produce materials changes at governmental level in the field of adult education. Drawing on different data sources, for each mode the author present and discuss few of its incidences and visible marks. (shrink)

BackgroundCognitive dysfunctions, both subjective and detectable at psychometric testing, may follow SARS-CoV-2 infection. However, the ecological-functional relevance of such objective deficits is currently under-investigated. This study thus aimed at investigating the association between objective cognitive measures and both physical and cognitive, ecological-functional outcomes in post-COVID-19.MethodsForty-two COVID-19-recovered individuals were administered the Mini-Mental State Examination and the Montreal Cognitive Assessment. The Functional Independence Measure was adopted to assess functional-ecological, motor/physical and cognitive outcomes at admission and discharge.ResultsWhen predicting both T0/T1 FIM-total and-Motor scores (...) based on MMSE/MoCA scores, premorbid risk for cognitive decline and disease-related features, no model yielded a significant fit. However, the MoCA - but not the MMSE significantly predicted T0/T1 FIM-Cognitive scores. The MoCA was significantly related only to T0/T1 FIM-Cognitive Memory items.DiscussionCognitive measures are not associated with physical/motor everyday-life outcomes in post-COVID-19 patients. The MoCA may provide an ecological estimate of cognitive functioning in this population. (shrink)

Aim of this study was to investigate whether parental mental representations during pregnancy and after delivery differed between parents who conceived after Assisted Reproductive Treatments and spontaneous conceiving parents. Effects of specific ART variables were also taken into account. Seventeen ART couples and 25 SC couples were recruited at Santa Maria Nuova Hospital. At both 32 weeks of gestation and 3 months postpartum participants completed the Semantic Differential of the IRMAG, a self-report tool which measures specific domains of mental representations (...) pertaining either individual or parental characteristics. Results showed that ART parents had significantly more positive representations of the child compared to SC parents, while the scores at Partner dimension improved from T1 to T2 for SC parents only. With regards to ART history, scores at the Self-as-woman/man dimension were significantly less positive for ICSI than IVF parents and improved substantially from T1 to T2 only in case of mothers with previous ART attempts and of fathers at the first ART cycle. The representation of own parents increased from T1 to T2 in case of infertility diagnosis due to male factors, while a decrease emerged when infertility was due to female factors. Findings suggest the need to investigate parental mental representations after ART, in order to improve the understanding on the transition to parenthood of infertile couples and to target more specific intervention for parenting support. (shrink)

Lezioni tenute da Massimo Fagioli nel 2009 all'Università di Chieti-Pescara.

Lezioni tenute da Massimo Fagioli all'Università di Chieti-Pescara nel 2008.

El presente escrito propone una estrategia de lectura para las complejas reflexiones tardías de Merleau-Ponty en torno al concepto de carne. Se sostendrá en el desarrollo del artículo que esta noción debe ser comprendida a partir de las características propias del tipo de ontología que el autor pretende construir y de las notas distintivas de su objeto de estudio. Una vez explicitados estos fundamentos, ellos funcionan como un marco exegético de la problemática de la carne y como guía ordenadora de (...) los elementos que la componen. De acuerdo con esta premisa, el trabajo consta de tres partes. En la primera se expondrá lo que consideramos los rasgos principales de la ontología merleau-pontiana de sus últimos años de producción y el modo en que esta se configura para posicionar la experiencia sensorial como un legítimo objeto de estudio. En la segunda y en la tercera parte se analizará, a través del prisma de lo desarrollado, la cuestión de la carne sobre la base de una propuesta de lectura específica que involucra una dinámica específica entre los conceptos de diferencia y unidad. (shrink)

Spatial region concepts such as “front,” “back,” “left,” and “right” reflect our typical interaction with space, and the corresponding surrounding regions have different statuses in memory. We examined the representation of spatial directions in the auditory space, specifically in how far natural response actions, such as orientation movements toward a sound source, would affect the categorization of egocentric auditory space. While standing in the middle of a circle with 16 loudspeakers, participants were presented acoustic stimuli coming from the loudspeakers in (...) randomized order, and verbally described their directions by using the concept labels “front,” “back,” “left,” “right,” “front-right,” “front-left,” “back-right,” and “back-left.” Response actions varied in three blocked conditions: (1) facing front, (2) turning the head and upper body to face the stimulus, and (3) turning the head and upper body plus pointing with the hand and outstretched arm toward the stimulus. In addition to a protocol of the verbal utterances, motion capture and video recording generated a detailed corpus for subsequent analysis of the participants’ behavior. Chi-square tests revealed an effect of response condition for directions within the left and right sides. We conclude that movement-based response actions influence the representation of auditory space, especially within the sides’ regions. Moreover, the representation of auditory space favors the front and the back regions in terms of resolution, which is possibly related to the physiological characteristics of the human auditory system, as well as to the ecological requirements of action control in the different regions. (shrink)

This qualitative classroom study investigated the development of pragmatic competence in academic discussions through content analysis of student reflective writing. The aims of the study were: to understand the greatest challenges that students faced during the learning process, the causes of those challenges, and the most successful strategies that students employed to overcome the challenges. In addition, the analysis investigated other significant themes in the reflective writing that related to the students’ experiences in developing their pragmatic competence in discussions. Five (...) advanced English for Academic Purposes (EAP) students at a Sino-US institution in China participated over the course of a semester. Results showed that common challenges included: hesitation resulting in missed opportunities to speak, lack of clarity when speaking, inability to repair communication breakdowns, and difficulty with listening comprehension. Self-reflection allowed the learners to understand the various reasons for the challenges they faced and to develop appropriate pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic strategies for coping with them. It also enabled the instructor to make suggestions suited to learners’ specific needs. In addition to revealing specific challenges, causes, and strategies that students employed, themes that emerged through content analysis included the impact of students’ emotional lives on their learning and performance, as well as the value of authentic communication in the development of pragmatic competence for academic discussions. This exploratory classroom investigation provides suggestions for teaching pragmatic competence in academic discussions and for additional classroom explorations that empower learners to develop autonomy. (shrink)

As a scientific, materialist worldview becomes increasingly difficult to repudiate, and as philosophers increasingly uncover and articulate the conceptual nature of morality and distinctively moral normativity, the threat of moral anti-realism becomes more and more real. This perspective is argued in Chapter One. Chapter Two discusses how laws and bioethical trends that pertain to the clinical management of patients in a vegetative coma differ from country to country and continue to give rise to unresolved legal debates and scientific controversy. Chapter (...) Three covers how caregivers in palliative care must be supported to better understand patients hopes and needs, making them comfortable to decide when or how much they want to eat. Chapter Four synthesises findings from four empirical studies conducted in Western Africa (Togo) on topics related to the autonomy (end of life decision-making among terminally-ill patients), benevolence and non-malevolence (breaking bad news to elderly patients and their families), and justice (informal payments to physicians, criminal prosecution in cases of HIV transmission) principles of bioethics. Finally, Chapter Five argues that expert members in Ethics committees have an unfair upper-hand, with their decisions trumping other debates in committee deliberations. Qualitative research is brought to bear which illustrates this and which also notes how expertise dilutes the training given to newly appointed ethics committee members. (shrink)

The globalism objection poses two distinct challenges to Aristotelian views of virtue. On the one hand, the consistency thesis demands that a virtue is behaviorally expressed in a wide range of trait-relevant situations. On the other hand, the evaluative integration thesis suggests that the presence of one virtue increases the probability of other, similar virtues, posing a problem for Aristotle’s reciprocity of the virtues thesis. I show that, by contrast to contemporary Aristotelian views and views attributed to Aristotle, Aristotle’s own (...) theory of virtue escapes the globalism objection. I address the consistency thesis by showing that each of Aristotle’s moral virtues are narrower than commonly assumed. I then address the evaluative integration thesis through a discussion of practical wisdom, showing that Aristotle believed one could fall short of perfect virtue, while still being fully virtuous. The upshot is that, despite idealizations of virtue throughout the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle held a realistic account of virtue, one that is different from contemporary Aristotelian views, and one that is empirically adequate insofar as it allows for more than a few virtuous people. (shrink)

This paper aims to envisage neoliberal capitalism through the prism of the Marxian notion of «primitive accumulation» and to verify this theoretical framework in contemporary Chile. The first part is an exploration of the actual debate about the notion of primitive accumulation. The second part characterizes neoliberal capitalism as a new form of primitive accumulation. For this I identify an objective pole, which I will call neoliberalism as a form of «dispossession» and a subjective pole, as a part of a (...) I will call neoliberalism as a form of technology. In the third part I will use the post-coup period in Chile to shed light on the founder function of violence in neoliberal capitalism. (shrink)

Stephen Davies taught philosophy at the University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand. His research specialty is the philosophy of art. He is a former President of the American Society for Aesthetics. His books include Definitions of Art (Cornell UP, 1991), Musical Meaning and Expression (Cornell UP, 1994), Musical Works and Performances (Clarendon, 2001), Themes in the Philosophy of Music (OUP, 2003), Philosophical Perspectives on Art (OUP, 2007), Musical Understandings and Other Essays on the Philosophy of Music (OUP, 2011), The Artful (...) Species: Aesthetics, Art, and Evolution (OUP, 2012), The Philosophy of Art (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016 second ed.), and Adornment: What Self-decorations Tells Us about Who We Are, (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020). (shrink)

ArgumentFollowing an international trend, Italy has reformed its university system, especially concerning methods and tools for research evaluation, which are increasingly focused on a number of bibliometric indexes. To study the effects of these changes, we analyze the changing profiles of economists who have won competitions for full professorship in the last few decades in the country. We concentrate on individual characteristics and on scientific production. We show that the identification of a univocal and standardized concept of “research quality” within (...) the new research assessments has progressively imposed a strategy of “homologation,” especially for women. We find that women economists are at a higher risk of discrimination than their male colleagues and thus they are more likely to conform their research activities to the standardized profile imposed by the gender-blind application of simplistic bibliometric methods. (shrink)

La presente reflexión se propone explorar los tratamientos de antropólogo Tim Ingold en torno al concepto de ambiente. El objetivo será desprender de ellos un aporte hacia una concepción no antropocéntrica de la noción de naturaleza. Clasificaremos los planteos del autor en dos grandes teorías que estructurarán las diferentes secciones del trabajo: por un lado su “teoría de los materiales”, y por el otro, su “teoría de las líneas”. En la primera analizaremos las bases que conforman su concepción del ambiente (...) fundada en la contraposición materialidad vs. materiales. En la segunda parte analizaremos su denominada linealogía a partir de tres figuras: nudo, suelo y aire. De la conjunción de ambas teorías se deriva un concepto de naturaleza renovado que armoniza con las coordenadas de los nuevos materialismos y posthumanismos contemporáneos. Nuestra hipótesis es que en los planteos del antropólogo se trasluce una comprensión de naturaleza en términos intersticiales. Más específicamente, se pone el acento ya no en la relación entre un humano espectador y una naturaleza como escenario, sino en la tensión entre el ambiente y la experiencia, concebidas ambas esferas como mutuamente conformantes. (shrink)

El trabajo se propone pensar el estatuto de la técnica en el marxismo operaísta y postoperaísta y los objetivo que tiene son tres. En primer lugar mostrar cómo una concepción de la técnica que podemos definir como anti instrumental, sobre todo en virtud del postulado de anti-neutralidad valorativa que acarrea, subyace a los planteamientos operaístas. En segundo lugar elucidar cómo esta perspectiva constituye una línea de continuidad entre el primer operaísmo y los trabajos contemporáneos de autores postoperaístas como Negri y (...) Virno. En tercer lugar plantear que un punto de ruptura conceptual importante entre el operaísmo y el «marxismo oficial» reside en la distintas formas de pensar el espacio en que se producen valores de uso. A partir de la diferenciación entre neutralidad metodológica y neutralidad fáctica postulada por Rapp, defenderemos que ambas perspectivas rechazan la neutralidad valorativa de los medios de producción, pero no piensan la neutralidad de la misma manera. (shrink)

La noción de carne, perteneciente a la última etapa del pensamiento de Merleau-Ponty, ocupa un lugar determinante en las investigaciones especializadas sobre el autor. Sin embargo, en escasas publicaciones se destaca la inmensa influencia de esta última en el pensamiento actual, especialmente en las corrientes posthumanistas y materialistas de la contemporaneidad filosófica. Nos proponemos, en las páginas que siguen, analizar dicha categoría desde el punto de vista de una filosofía de la relación, interpretándola desde la figura de la medialidad o (...) emparentándola a una noción de medio. Para esto, en la primera parte, se dilucidará la noción merleau-pontiana de medio en _Fenomenología de la percepción_ y la postulación de la experiencia como punto de partida. En la segunda, se explicitarán las múltiples dimensiones en las cuales se despliega la noción de carne en la filosofía tardía del autor. Una vez abordados los aspectos epistemológico, fenomenológico y ontológico de la ontología de la carne se analizará su potencial filosófico proyectando los tratamientos a la problemática de la naturaleza, cuestión que consideramos de vital importancia para las reflexiones filosóficas actuales. (shrink)

Las reflexiones que conforman el presente artículo intentan brindar un aporte a la cuestión de la naturaleza y de la problemática medioambiental desde el punto de vista de lo que denominaremos una filosofía del suelo. Se emprenderá dicha tarea a través de los planteos de una serie de autores y autoras pertenecientes a la contemporaneidad filosófica, que se han preocupado, en distinta medida y de modos muy diferentes, por la problemática de la tierra o el suelo: Donna Haraway, Tim Ingold (...) y Bruno Latour. Para esto, nos serviremos de una serie de elementos que extraeremos de la experiencia visual y táctil de las Líneas de Nazca, legado de nuestro pasado amerindio en el desierto peruano. El trabajo se dividirá en tres partes, dedicada cada una de ellas a explicitar ciertas reflexiones de los autores que puedan asociarse a una filosofía como la que pretendemos mentar. El enfoque priorizará los entrelazos entre los mismos y el desarrollo de elementos que nos permitan un entrecruzamiento de sus respectivas teorías. (shrink)

El artículo se propone abordar el concepto de multitud tal y como ha sido elaborado por el filósofo italiano Antonio Negri, incluyendo los trabajos escritos con Michael Hardt. El texto reconstruye la oposición del concepto de multitud al de pueblo, central en el pensamiento y en las instituciones políticas modernas; y la diferencia entre el concepto de multitud y el de clase obrera moderna, del que va más allá. Finalmente se hará hincapié en el pasaje del ser al hacer multitud.

This article presents and discusses the results of a systematic review on the role of schools in enhancing students’ civic engagement through collaboration with community. Based on the analysis of 21 selected studies, the authors inductively identified the main educational practices aimed at improving civic engagement. The results show that these practices are aimed primarily at school-age students, and only to a limited extent to adult students, as well as that they mostly involve the ‘local’ more than the ‘global’ community. (...) Albeit derived from studies conducted with different methods and purposes, the results also allow some general considerations on the definition of civic engagament, the effects of educational practices on students’ civic engagement and the factors that facilitate the effectiveness of such practices. (shrink)

A large and growing body of research in computational psychiatry draws on Bayesian modelling to illuminate the dysfunctions and aberrations that underlie psychiatric disorders. After identifying the chief attractions of this research programme, we argue that its typical focus on abstract, domain-general inferential processes is likely to obscure many of the distinctive ways in which the human mind can break down and malfunction. We illustrate this by appeal to psychosis and the social phenomenology of delusions.

Increasingly, biologists are using computers to model and to create biological representations. However, the exponential growth in available biological dataposes a challenge for experimental and theoretical researchers in both Biology and in Computer Science. In short, when even the simple retrieval of relevant biological information for a researcher becomes a complex task — its analysis and synthesis with other biological information will become even more daunting and unlikely. In this context, specially organized ‘structures of representation’ are needed for the efficient (...) interpretation of experimentally generated data. The “semantic Web” is a recent trend in networking techniques that we will examine here as a possible strategy for the computation of biological data — one that may allow us to take into account both the semiotic dimensions of biological processes, as well as their dynamic organization into stable and systemic levels. Thereupon, we propose that a semantic network for biology could benefit from principles rooted in such previous representation efforts as computer-generated ‘landscapes’ and ‘physical attractors’ — and that such principles could, in turn, then be better integrated into biological research through the development of a more semiotically informed user / computer interface design. (shrink)