Previous studies consistently showed age-related differences in temporal judgment and temporal memory. Importantly, emotional valence plays a crucial role in older adults’ information processing. In this study, we examined the effects of emotions at the intersection between time and memory, analysing age-related differences in a temporal source memory task. Twenty-five younger adults (age range 18–35), 25 old adults (age range 65–74), and 25 old–old adults (age range 75–84) saw a series of emotional pictures in three sessions separated by a one-day (...) rest period. In the fourth session, participants were asked to indicate in which session (1, 2, or 3) they saw each picture. Results showed that old–old adults tended to collocate negative pictures distant in time, while positive stimuli were remembered as more recent than real, compared to neutral pictures. To a lower extent, people over 65 showed the same pattern of results. In contrast, emotional valence did not affect younger adults’ temporal positioning of stimuli. Current findings fit well with the Socio-Emotional Selectivity Theory’s assumptions and extended the literature on the positivity effect to temporal source memory. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to argue against the received view among Unamuno scholars that Miguel de Unamuno was defending a sort of pragmatic argument for religious faith and that his notion of religious faith as “querer creer” (“wanting to believe”) is to be identified with William James’s “the will to believe”. As I will show in this paper, one of the aspects that makes Unamuno’s reasoning philosophically relevant is his ability to formulate a non-pragmatist defense of religious faith (...) without a prior commitment to the truth of any religious or theological statement and grounded in our longing for an endless existence through God’s Salvation. (shrink)

Digital communication technologies led to a revolution in how people interact at work: relying on computer-mediated communication technologies is now a must, rather than an alternative. This empirical study investigates how colleagues in a virtual team use synchronous online communication platform in the workplace. Inspired by the conceptualisation of web-based communication platforms as tool, place or context of social construction, we explore the discursive strategies that contribute to the construction of the team’s shared sense of purpose and identity, a collegial (...) atmosphere and consequently lead to effective collaboration. The close analyses of real-life data from a multinational workplace provide insights into the everyday communication practices of virtual team members. Our findings supplement organisational literature based on etic observations of the effectiveness of virtual work and provide a basis for further theorisations about how communication technologies affect the ecology of and discourse practices in computer-mediated communication at work. (shrink)

A citizen of Early Renaissance Florence that stepped out into the streets and entered the spaces of his civic world joined a concert of creative formal behaviors in which he was at once an actor and a spectator. His problem here was to interpret the complex web of overlapping, conflicting and simultaneous meanings he would have read in the actions and images by which the community directed him and represented itself, and find his own place and set his standing. On (...) most occasions he would probably have elected for a state of suspension, a floating of multiple possibilities he was loath to precipitate in too stable a form: in ambiguity the citizen of Florence developed a richness of signification, and found a refuge. (shrink)

A citizen of Early Renaissance Florence that stepped out into the streets and entered the spaces of his civic world joined a concert of creative formal behaviors in which he was at once an actor and a spectator. His problem here was to interpret the complex web of overlapping, conflicting and simultaneous meanings he would have read in the actions and images by which the community directed him and represented itself, and find his own place and set his standing. On (...) most occasions he would probably have elected for a state of suspension, a floating of multiple possibilities he was loath to precipitate in too stable a form: in ambiguity the citizen of Florence developed a richness of signification, and found a refuge. (shrink)

Most of the existing studies on Bourdieu and the digital regards the social and class distinctions in the use of digital technologies, thus presupposing a certain transparency of technologies themselves. Our proposal is to refer to this attitude as “Bourdieu outside the digital.” Yet in this paper, another perspective called “Bourdieu inside the digital” is developed, which moves the focus on the effects of some emerging technologies on social distinctions and discrimination. The main hypothesis is that algorithms of machine learning (...) are producers and reproducers of habitus. Although their results present a greater granularity with respect to the standard techniques of the past, these algorithms still reduce individuals to categories, general trends, classes, and behaviors. Such a reduction has flattening effects on the individuals’ self-understanding, especially in terms of identity and interaction with the social world. This is the phenomenon described in the article as the “personalization without personality,” whose consequences are both existential and social-political. This idea will be illustrated through qualitative and comparative analysis between the correspondence analysis and the multiple correspondence analysis used by Bourdieu in his works and some of those techniques that are performed today in big data analytics. (shrink)

Cultural evolution studies are characterized by the notion that culture evolves accordingly to broadly Darwinian principles. Yet how far the analogy between cultural and genetic evolution should be pushed is open to debate. Here, we examine a recent disagreement that concerns the extent to which cultural transmission should be considered a preservative mechanism allowing selection among different variants, or a transformative process in which individuals recreate variants each time they are transmitted. The latter is associated with the notion of “cultural (...) attraction”. This issue has generated much misunderstanding and confusion. We first clarify the respective positions, noting that there is in fact no substantive incompatibility between cultural attraction and standard cultural evolution approaches, beyond a difference in focus. Whether cultural transmission should be considered a preservative or reconstructive process is ultimately an empirical question, and we examine how both preservative and reconstructive cultural transmission has been studied in recent experimental research in cultural evolution. Finally, we discuss how the relative importance of preservative and reconstructive processes may depend on the granularity of analysis and the domain being studied. (shrink)

The first half of this article follows Mario Bunge’s early realist moves, his efforts to articulate the achievements of theoretical physics as gains in the quest for objective truth and understanding, particularly in the context of the fights against the idealist and subjectivist interpretations of quantum mechanics that, at least until the mid-1970s, prevailed in physics. Bunge’s answers to the problems of quantum mechanics provide a good angle for understanding how his realist positions grew on the “battlefield.” The second half (...) discusses Bunge’s general conception of the scientific realist stance and confronts it with some current approaches to realism in the mainstream literature. (shrink)

This contribution explores the role that the Sense of Responsible Togetherness (SoRT) exerts with reference to Participation and Sense of Community. The study was conducted on a university campus, as campuses represent places where academic and community lives go hand in hand and the community is heterogeneous. A questionnaire with the SoRT scale, the Participation scale and the Italian Scale of the Sense of Community (SISC) was administered to 130 university students. SoRT had a significant indirect effect on the students’ (...) Participation via their Sense of Community, suggesting that the promotion of individuals’ Sense of Responsible Togetherness within their community, along with the emotional and affective bond to it, may allow us to recover symbolic and physical spaces in which participation can be fostered. A need for and significance of interventions aimed at promoting collective actions within intermediate systems (groups, educational systems, work ones, etc.). (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to analyse the concept of love —understood in the broad and Christian-inspired sense of love as agape-charis love— in relation to the animes Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z. I first comment on the character of Piccolo —and how his friendship with Son Gohan— leads to him losing all his original villainous traits. I argue that the evolution of the character of Piccolo through his friendship with Son Gohan illustrates the philosophical claim that a (...) loving and giving of oneself to the other —far from being a sign of weakness— is a courageous and self-affirming exercise. The result may move the individual to an inner transformative experience that leads to the enjoyment of a renewed and authentic life that is worth living. I then argue that Son Goku’s respectful attitude towards his opponents is ultimately a loving attitude. Last, I argue that it is the inspiring and loving example of Son Goku that ultimately explains why characters such as Vegeta —who are at first presented as villains— end up losing their villainous traits after fighting against Son Goku. (shrink)

El objetivo de este artículo es ofrecer una exposición sistemática de la propuesta filosófica de Joaquim Xirau (Figueras, 1895 – Ciudad de México, 1946), señalando así su interés filosófico al tiempo que se vinculan sus dos grandes obras ensayísticas de madurez, Amor y mundo (1940) y Lo fugaz y lo eterno (1942).

Introduction: Jai Mata Di (praise the mother goddess) -- Sutra 1: Samadhi, or yogic ecstasy -- Sutra 2: realization, or the practice of yoga -- Sutra 3: the Siddhis, or the magical powers -- Sutra 4: absolute freedom.

In this paper I will argue that Unamuno was conceiving of God (and ordinary, non-religious fictional characters more generally) in realist, though non-evidentially grounded, terms. I will point out that this way of conceiving of God allowed Unamuno to claim the actual existence of God (though as a fictional, purely humanly created character) and, with this, the possibility of there being an actual relationship between the concrete religious person and God without having to dispense with his own core claim that (...) religious faith is just a subjective, though natural and thus inevitable, human reaction. (shrink)

In Ockhamist branching-time logic [Prior 67], formulas are meant to be evaluated on a specified branch, or history, passing through the moment at hand. The linguistic counterpart of the manifoldness of future is a possibility operator which is read as `at some branch, or history (passing through the moment at hand)'. Both the bundled-trees semantics [Burgess 79] and the $\langle moment, history\rangle$ semantics [Thomason 84] for the possibility operator involve a quantification over sets of moments. The Ockhamist frames are (3-modal) (...) Kripke structures in which this second-order quantification is represented by a first-order quantification. The aim of the present paper is to investigate the notions of modal definability, validity, and axiomatizability concerning 3-modal frames which can be viewed as generalizations of Ockhamist frames. (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to analyze the movie Fight Club, directed by David Fincher, written by Jim Uhls, and first released in the fall of 1999. The movie is based on the homonym novel by Chuck Palahniuk, published in 1996. I will argue that Fight Club is to be understood in primarily existentialist, nonethical, and nonevidential terms, showing the struggle felt by each and every one of us to find a convincing answer to the question of what (if (...) anything) counts as an authentic life that is worth living. Moreover, I will argue that the movie does not merely illustrate the struggle and the existential angst it engenders; it also advances, if not strictly speaking a theoretical answer grounded in an indisputable philosophical reasoning, then at least a practical way to face it. It is only after positively endorsing the claim that absolutely nothing (whatever it may be) externally imposed on a person can give their life ultimate meaning that a person is free to engage in a conscious, laborious, and exhausting attempt at self-affirmation, a full and positive endorsement of one’s own authenticity. (shrink)

In _Plotinus on Love_, Alberto Bertozzi argues that love is the origin, culmination, and regulative force of the double movement that characterizes Plotinus' metaphysics: the derivation of all reality from the One and the return of the soul to it.