This study investigated how young Italian people experienced the period of peak spread of COVID-19 in their country by probing their emotions, thoughts, events, and actions related to interpersonal and community bonds. This approach to the pandemic will highlight social dimensions that characterized contextual interactions from the specific perspective of Community Psychology. The aim was to investigate young people's experiences because they are the most fragile group due to their difficulty staying home and apart from their peers and because they (...) are, at the same time, the most potentially dangerous people due to their urge to gather in groups. The research involved 568 university students, 475 females, and 93 males, with an average age of 21.82 years. The collected data were analyzed with the Grounded Theory Methodology, using the Atlas 8.0 software. From the textual data, representative codes were defined and grouped into 10 categories, which reflect the individuals' prosocial attitudes, behaviors, and values. These categories formed three macro-categories, called: “Collective Dimensions,” which includes Connectedness, Solidarity, Italian-ness, Social Problems, and Collective Mourning; “Prosocial Orientation,” which includes Trust and Hope; and “Collective Values,” which includes Values of Freedom, Respect of Social Rules, and Civic-Mindedness. All these macro-categories are indicative of the shared feelings experienced by Italians during the first time of the pandemic. Further practical implications of these results will be discussed, including a consideration of the risk of developing distress and improving well-being, as well as promoting preventive behaviors. (shrink)

The spread of COVID-19 in Italy resulted in the implementation of a lockdown that obligated the first time the general populace to remain at home for approximately two months. This lockdown interrupted citizens’ professional and educational activities, in addition to closing shops, offices and educational institutions. The resulting changes in people’s daily routines and activities induced unexpected changes in their thoughts, feelings and attitudes, in addition to altering their life perceptions. Consequently, the present study explores how young adults perceived their (...) lives under lockdown during the final week of March 2020, when the reported number of daily coronavirus infections reached its peak in Italy. The research was carried out among 293 university students (234 women and 59 men) with an average age of 20.85 years old (SD = 3.23). The researchers asked participants to describe the emotions, thoughts and experiences that characterized their time under lockdown. The study analyzed specific narratives related to time and space using grounded theory methodology, which was applied using Atlas 8 software, leading to the creation of 68 codes. The study organized these codes into three specific categories: confined in the present, confined in the past, and striving toward one’s goals. Finally, the researchers also created a core-category labeled “continuity of being.” The results showed that the closure of open spaces caused a division in participants’ perceptions of time continuity, with many viewing themselves as feeling fragmented and as living the present in a static and fixed way. Additionally, participants also saw the present as being discontinuous from the past, while, simultaneously, projecting toward the future and the changes it might bring. Finally, this study examined further implications surrounding individual projecting among young people in greater depth. (shrink)

On a widely held characterization, triadic joint attention is the capacity to perceptually attend to an object or event together with another subject. In the last four decades, research in developmental psychology has provided increasing evidence of the crucial role that this capacity plays in socio-cognitive development, early language acquisition, and the development of perspective-taking. Yet, there is a striking discrepancy between the general agreement that joint attention is critical in various domains, and the lack of theoretical consensus on how (...) to account for it. This paper pursues three interrelated aims: (i) it examines the contrast between reductive and non-reductive views of (triadic) joint attention, by bringing into focus the notion of recursive mindreading; (ii) it assembles, advances, and discusses a number of arguments against reductive views; (iii) finally, in dialogue with some prominent non-reductive views, it outlines the case for a non-reductive view that gives pride of place to the idea that co-attenders relate to one another as a ‘you’. (shrink)

We are walking too quickly down the road to physical and psychological utopia without pausing to assess the potential damage to our humanity from this brave new ...

This book presents some of the challenges bioethics in Latin America faces today. It considers them through the lenses of vulnerable populations, those incapable of protecting their own interests, such as the illiterate, women in societies disrespectful of their reproductive rights, and research subjects in contexts where resources are scarce.

Fotografía y pasado reciente. Entrevista pública al fotógrafo EduardoLongoni.

This essay examines the construction of a symbolic figure who has worked to support the reordering of power relationships. It is the invention of a foreign enemy, Islamic radicalism from which United States has served its objectives of establishing a new hegemony. Since the terrorist threat, has extended a speech level that adulterated and showed us a world divided into two opposite poles: a virtuous and civilized axis that is forced to attack to defend itself, and a barbaric and evil (...) axis that threatens global security. But this process is fraudulent, that has been able to violate international law, has a political, historical and economic issues should be unmasked. (shrink)

Volume I provides a detailed analysis of cylindric algebras, starting with a formulation of their axioms and a development of their elementary properties, and proceeding to a deeper study of their interrelationships by means of general algebraic notions such as subalgebras, homomorphisms, direct products, free algebras, reducts and relativized algebras.

El siguiente trabajo parte del análisis de dos obras literarias que vieron su aparición en el Siglo XXI: Historia de los abuelos que no tuve, de Ivan Jablonka, y El gueto interior, de Santiago Amigorena, dos novelas que toman como eje temático y vertebrador de las narraciones la búsqueda e indagación del pasado reciente a través de dos historias de vida que guardan una profunda conexión con los hechos acontecidos durante el Holocausto. El objetivo es abordar y analizar la construcción (...) de la voz narrativa en cada una de las obras propuestas a partir de su articulación con la figura del silencio. En la obra de Jablonka, se observa, hay una identificación entre el narrador y sus abuelos paternos, mecanismo que se despliega al anular toda inconsistencia o vacío memorial; el silencio dejado por Mates e Idesa es el silencio de su nieto. Por su parte, en el relato de Amigorena, la voz del narrador toma distancia respecto a los acontecimientos al adoptar un punto de vista externo; a la vez que ficcionaliza la historia de su abuelo Vicente y la envuelve de un silencio absoluto e impotente, deja entrever que ese silencio desolador que atraviesa su historia familiar puede ser resignificado desde el presente. (shrink)

This is an essential book for every serious student of Plato, for anyone teaching the Republic, and for every library.

The poverty of stimulus argument is one of the most controversial arguments in the study of language acquisition. Here we follow previous approaches challenging the assumption of impoverished primary linguistic data, focusing on the specific problem of auxiliary (AUX) fronting in complex polar interrogatives. We develop a series of corpus analyses of child-directed speech showing that there is indirect statistical information useful for correct auxiliary fronting in polar interrogatives and that such information is sufficient for distinguishing between grammatical and ungrammatical (...) generalizations, even in the absence of direct evidence. We further show that there are simple learning devices, such as neural networks, capable of exploiting such statistical cues, producing a bias toward correct AUX questions when compared to their ungrammatical counterparts. The results suggest that the basic assumptions of the poverty of stimulus argument may need to be reappraised. (shrink)

En su sitio de Facebook, llamado “Fantasmas del Cordobazo”, Sebastián Cánepa, actualiza, por medio de la superposición de imágenes pasadas y presentes, la insurrección popular en las calles cordobesas. Aflora un tiempo superpuesto, condensado que se vuelve nítido con el contraste entre el color y las formas de las fotos actuales y el blanco y negro del año 69.

El artículo analiza algunas problemáticas centrales de la literatura caribeña, en particular de expresión francófona y anglófona, relacionadas, por un lado, con la falta de desarrollo y el funcionamiento colonial de sus sistemas literarios, y, por el otro, con el problema social, económico y político de la emigración en las Antillas. Como propongo, es la misma condición migrante de la literatura caribeña, en tanto sistema atravesado por el desplazamiento masivo de sus productores, la que en gran parte determina sus motivaciones (...) e intereses, enfocados a la identidad regional (y a la cultura regionalista) de modo recurrente. El artículo indaga, entre otros lugares-comunes (Glissant) del discurso literario caribeño, su estética geográficamente marcada que es enunciada aun desde un locus migrante (distante) con fines descolonizadores, los cuales se vinculan con la tradición anticolonialista, masculina y de sesgo militante del siglo pasado. Luego de una revisión de este legado a partir de dos aproximaciones críticas (Tinsley, Condé), se lee una serie de textos donde se observa la persistencia de la geoestética antillana, como A Small Place de Jamaica Kincaid, los cuales se apropian creativamente del discurso turístico desde una perspectiva geopolítica de resistencia a las dominaciones aún coloniales. (shrink)

Realist dialetheism is the view that there are contradictions in reality. One argument against this idea says that it is impossible because it has to make room for the possibility of a trivial reality, which is metaphysically impossible. Another argument against it says that the metaphysical structure of reality is such that it is impossible to have contradictions in it. I argue here that both arguments fail to establish the impossibility of realist dialetheism because they are based on a misconception (...) about the notions of negation and contradiction, which leads them, in the first case, to wrongly hold that dialetheism has to be compatible with trivialism, and, in the second case, to assume that the validity of the Aristotelian principle of non-contradiction prevents the existence of dialetheias. (shrink)

Algunas de las preguntas fundamentales de la filosofía del arte son: 1) ¿Qué es una obra de arte?, 2) ¿Qué es Arte?, 3) ¿Qué es el arte? Responderlas es determinar el sentido del arte. Este tipo de preguntas están planteadas bajo la fórmula ¿Qué es X?, es decir, preguntas en las cuales en lo simple esta lo complejo, preguntas en donde lo simple no quiere decir que sean sencillas; son preguntas que traen dentro de si su naturaleza y carácter metafísico-ontológico-gnoseológico, (...) y hasta axiológico. No es el propósito de este trabajo hacer frente o resolver estos problemas, sino proporcionar una aproximación al concepto de “obra de arte” en la época actual y como podría entenderse en relación a ciertos problemas ontológicos y epistemológicos actuales. -/- [Extended Version of: Vélez León, Paulo (2006). «Aproximaciones a la ¿obra de arte?». En Políticas al borde. Una investigación sobre el arte contemporáneo cuencano en los discursos políticos actuales, editado por Paulo Vélez León y Hernán Pacucuru. Cuenca: Universidad de Cuenca/Bienal Internacional de Cuenca, 2006, pp. 1-12]. (shrink)

In this article I examine several criticisms of the concept of vulnerability. Rather than rejecting the concept, however, I argue that a sufficiently rich understanding of vulnerability is essential to bioethics. The challenges of international research in developing countries require an understanding of how new vulnerabilities arise from conditions of economic, social and political exclusion. A serious shortcoming of current conceptions of vulnerability in research ethics is the tendency to treat vulnerability as a label fixed on a particular subpopulation. My (...) paper examines the role of this “label” metaphor in current statements of research ethics. In contrast to this prevailing “label” metaphor, my own positive account of vulnerability develops a dynamic way of understanding the structure of the concept of vulnerability based on the idea of “layers of vulnerability.” I examine several cases involving women, as they are sometimes labeled as a vulnerable population and sometimes not. My analysis demonstrates the essential role of this revised concept of vulnerability in bioethics and research ethics. (shrink)

The specialist literature has investigated extensively the link between Benjamin and German Romanticism and, less frequently, his relation to Kant. However, these contributions tend to take up these links separately, and therefore do not analyse in detail the process which begins with the theoretical sketches on Kant and concludes with the writing of the doctoral thesis on the Frühromantik. This paper argues that there is a marked continuity between the objectives which led Benjamin to plan, in the first place, his (...) doctoral investigation on Kant and those which were finally realized. I try to demonstrate that such continuity consists in a displacement of the problem of the justification of knowledge, from the field of the criticism of knowledge in general to a particular sphere: that of art criticism. In this shift the purpose of linking the justification of knowledge with a messianic philosophy of time and history is also preserved. (shrink)

In this paper I state that throughout Walter Benjamin’s writings a constant element can be found: the aim to ground knowledge on demand of redemption of the object. I show that in the four realms where the Benjaminian theory of knowledge is developed –philosophy, art criticism, translation and historical knowledge–, the principal categories of his conception stress this demand by a peculiar use of the suffix “barkeit”, present in the concepts of “solutionabiliy” of the philosophical task, the “criticizability” of the (...) artwork, the “translatability” of language and the “now of cognizability” of the past. (shrink)

ResumenEl trabajo investiga la relación entre las nociones de «imagen dialéctica» [dialektisches Bild] y de recuerdo [Erinnerung] en la obra tardía de Walter Benjamin. Parte de la hipótesis de que, para comprender dicho vínculo, es necesario recurrir a la categoría de «mímesis» como mediación entre ellas. El abordaje de la mímesis busca recuperar su íntima relación con lo figurativo y la experiencia sensible, relegada frente al énfasis que los estudios sobre el tema han puesto en la filosofía del lenguaje. Con (...) este objetivo, se indaga el diálogo velado de Benjamin con la tradición warburguiana, cuyo tema central es la imagen.Palabras claveBenjamin, Warburg, imagen dialéctica, recuerdo, mímesisAbstractIn this paper we research the connection between the concepts of «dialectical image» and «memory» in Walter Benjamin’s late work. We start from the hypothesis that, in order to understand this relationship, it is necessary to turn to the notion of «mimesis» as a link betweenthem. We draw attention to the intimate connection of mimesis with the figurative and sensible experience, generally left out by the studies that emphasize its relationship with the philosophy of language. To reach our aim we investigate the veiled dialogue between Benjamin and the Warburgian tradition, whose main topic is the image.KeywordsBenjamin, Warburg, dialectical image, memory, m. (shrink)

The article is a continuation of a paper published in “Etyka”, vol. 21, Concepts of Man in the Náhuatlan Culture and contains an overview of the fundamental types of education provided by the Aztecs, with special emphasis on moral ideals. The investigation of Indian education not only furthers historical knowledge but also plays a role in the search of the origins of the specific religious, moral and behavioural expression of contemporary Mexico, due to the fact that some elements of the (...) education preceding the Spanish conquest became an integral part of the culture of that country. The analysis to which this article bears a testimony permits the author to say that before the conquest, the Aztecs had an integral educational system, an ideal to be put into practice, adequate institutions, competent teachers, didactic material elaborated by specialists. Skill formation practised at all levels of education, was complemented by moral instruction and intellectual, religious and aesthetic guidance. The norms inculcated through training had been worked out through the ages in the náhuatl tribes and served to protect the principal values of the family and social life. They had the function of elementary moral rules and emerged from the conditions of the perennial culture of Mexican Indians. Aside from setting models of behaviour and values, the norms that the author finds in all forms of education display some differentiation which is a reflection of the multi-layered, complex structure of that culture. It embraced two different lifestyles and two ideals. Beneath the dominant religious and military habits of the Aztecs survived the old morality of the Toltecs, preserved most conspicuously in the traditional norms of family life. It has also been expressed in the poetry of the 16th and early 17th centuries. (shrink)

The article discusses a concrete case of historiosophic theodicy, viz. the conception of August Cieszkowski, in order to present the structure of such conceptions and discuss theoretic and practical problems involved in them. The starting point of Cieszkowski’s deliberations on evil is a historical fact. To substantiate for his historiosophic optimism Cleszkowski must find not only the sense of the times in which he was living but must also explain the past, with all its moral evil: social catastrophes, misery, suffering, (...) and toil of the millions of people. Concentration on historical facts does not eliminate from the scope of his deliberations the problem of God’s acceptance of evil. This problem is simply shifted to another plane of reflections. (shrink)

The Ancient Age introducesuncountless problems to the specialists of the same one. On one hand, wehave problems related with the direct sources, and, for other, with the indirectsources. Same Plato points out, in the Letter VII, that his dialogues don’tcontain the fundamental teachings, but it belon..

“Vulnerability” is a key concept for research ethics and public health ethics. This term can be discussed from either a conceptual or a practical perspective. I previously proposed the metaphor of layers to understand how this concept functions from the conceptual perspective in human research. In this paper I will clarify how my analysis includes other definitions of vulnerability. Then, I will take the practical‐ethical perspective, rejecting the usefulness of taxonomies to analyze vulnerabilities. My proposal specifies two steps and provides (...) a procedural guide to help rank layers. I introduce the notion of cascade vulnerability and outline the dispositional nature of layers of vulnerability to underscore the importance of identifying their stimulus condition. In addition, I identify three kinds of obligations and some strategies to implement them. This strategy outlines the normative force of harmful layers of vulnerability. It offers concrete guidance. It contributes substantial content to the practical sphere but it does not simplify or idealize research subjects, research context or public health challenges. (shrink)

It is widely assumed that language in some form or other originated by piggybacking on pre-existing learning mechanism not dedicated to language. Using evolutionary connectionist simulations, we explore the implications of such assumptions by determining the effect of constraints derived from an earlier evolved mechanism for sequential learning on the interaction between biological and linguistic adaptation across generations of language learners. Artificial neural networks were initially allowed to evolve “biologically” to improve their sequential learning abilities, after which language was introduced (...) into the population. We compared the relative contribution of biological and linguistic adaptation by allowing both networks and language to change over time. The simulation results support two main conclusions: First, over generations, a consistent head-ordering emerged due to linguistic adaptation. This is consistent with previous studies suggesting that some apparently arbitrary aspects of linguistic structure may arise from cognitive constraints on sequential learning. Second, when networks were selected to maintain a good level of performance on the sequential learning task, language learnability is significantly improved by linguistic adaptation but not by biological adaptation. Indeed, the pressure toward maintaining a high level of sequential learning performance prevented biological assimilation of linguistic-specific knowledge from occurring. (shrink)

According to Bronislaw Baczko, utopias may be considered as different forms—they are not linked to any precise literary genre—of critique of social reality and the quest for alternatives. Some consist of a detailed description of a new social order, whereas others confine themselves to an overall design, which solely defines a series of values and principles. They all contain an ideal of perfection: a utopian view of the world always stems from the awareness of a breach between what must be (...) and social reality, which is deemed to be in crisis and dominated by evil. There is, thus, no utopia without an ideal opposed to reality. That said, idealized as they may be, utopias do allow such reality to cease to be deemed.. (shrink)

Se trata de la reseña bibliográfica del libro de Emmanuel Biset et. al., Sujeto, una categoría en disputa.

The Hungry Soul is a fascinating exploration of the natural and cultural act of eating. Kass brilliantly reveals how the various aspects of this phenomenon, and the customs, rituals, and taboos surrounding it, relate to universal and profound truths about the human animal and its deepest yearnings. "Kass is a distinguished and graceful writer. . . . It is astonishing to discover how different is our world from that of the animals, even in that which most evidently betrays that we (...) too are animals--our need and desire for food."--Roger Scruton, Times Literary Supplement "Yum."--Miss Manners. (shrink)