While rooted in careful study of Mead’s original writings and transcribed lectures and the historical context in which that work was carried out, the papers in this volume have brought Mead’s work to bear on contemporary issues in metaphysics, epistemology, cognitive science, and social and political philosophy.
The Philosophy of Gesture by Giovanni Maddalena is a multilayered volume: It is a "history of philosophy" book, endorsing a challenging anti-Kantian interpretation of Peirce and pragmatism. It is a "theoretical philosophy" book, dealing with classic issues—for example, the difference between synthetic and analytic, the definition of identity—and introducing a new concept, that of complete gesture. Finally, it is a book of "applied philosophy," pointing to a further application of the new concept of complete gesture to the fields of pedagogy, (...) morality, psychology, and literature.Dealing with all these three aspects in a single review would be impossible, maybe even unfair. Therefore, I will focus here mainly on the... (shrink)
The notion of politicization has been often assimilated to that of partisanship, especially in political and social sciences. However, these accounts underestimate more fine-grained, and yet pivotal, aspects at stake in processes of politicization. In addition, they overlook cognitive mechanisms underlying politicizing practices. Here, we propose an integrated approach to politicization relying on recent insights from both social and political sciences, as well as cognitive science. We outline two key facets of politicization, that we call partial indetermination and contestability, and (...) we show how these can be accounted for by appealing to recent literature in cognitive science concerned with abstract conceptual knowledge. We suggest that politicizing a concept often implies making its more abstract components more salient, hence legitimating its contestable character. Finally, we provide preliminary suggestions to test our proposal, using the concept of gender as case study. (shrink)
This article aims to apply the classification of incomplete gestures introduced by Maddalena as a tool for understanding and classifying different attachment patterns. In the first section the classification of incomplete gestures proposed by Maddalena will be reconstructed. In the second part the relationship between communication and attachment will be introduced through a brief critical survey of the psychological literature dedicated to this subject. In the third part I aim to show how the specific communication of the insecure avoidant pattern (...) is characterized by two specific types of incomplete gestures: schematization and projection. Specifically, the avoidant seems to adopt communicative strategies that allow to minimize, deactivate or at least limit the conjunction between the two phenomenological qualities of firstness and secondness. In the conclusions, I will briefly analyse some theoretical repercussions of the approach adopted, especially with regard to the relationship between incompleteness and completeness. (shrink)
