The Cambridge Platonist Henry More was fiercely averse to the Lurianic Kabbalah, with which he became acquainted through the two tomes of the Kabbala denudata. More contributed to the first tome substantially and was highly influential in shaping the reception of this work, edited by Christian Knorr von Rosenroth. He denounced the incompatibility of the Christian religion with Luria's system and in his last contribution, the Fundamenta, he put forward an apagogical argument meant to show the inconsistency of Luria's teaching. (...) The article aims at exploring the nature of More's argument so as to highlight the philosophical essence of his criticism, the intention of which was to emphasize the incompatibility of the Kabbalah with any form of rational speculation. Luria's doctrine appeared to More to be a compromise between materialism and spiritualism, a sort of hybrid theory that was even worse than materialism, given its misleading theistic appearance as well as the lack of internal coherence. This compromise was also morally unacceptable, being symptomatic of weakness of the will. (shrink)

This study employs the scale of Value from Pictorial Assessment of Interpersonal Relationships to investigate the links between the importance attributed by primary students to their teachers and two independent measures of scholastic wellbeing, provided by teachers and parents. During middle childhood, the teacher is one of the most significant adults with whom children interact daily; a student–teacher relationship warm and free from excessive dependency and conflict is very important for children wellbeing; however, children’s recognition of teacher importance as an (...) authority figure has been seldom studied. Children aged 7–11 years were individually asked to draw themselves and one of their teachers in two situations ; the scale of Value from PAIR was used as a proxy of the importance attributed to teachers in each situation. Teachers completed the Student–Teacher Relationship Scale for Closeness, Conflict, and Dependency of each child; parents answered two items about their children’s School Adjustment. All the study variables were firstly analyzed to check gender and age differences. Boys valorized more than girls the teacher’s figure; however, teachers perceived more Closeness and less Conflict with girls. Dependency and Conflict decreased with age, as well as School Adjustment. To assess the links between pictorial valorization of the teacher in Wellbeing and Distress and teachers’ and parents’ evaluations, four separate hierarchical regressions were performed, namely, Closeness, Dependency, Conflict, and School Adjustment, controlling children’s sex and age. The teacher’s pictorial Value in Wellbeing appeared to be related to Closeness and School Adjustment, while a negative relationship emerged between Value and Dependency in Distress. In sum, the recognition of the teacher’s role as an authority figure does not hinder a warm student–teacher relationship and impacts positively on school adjustment. In situations of Distress, dependent pupils showed a diminished appreciation of the teacher’s importance, possibly as a result of a defensive stance. (shrink)

El objetivo del presente artículo se centra en la labor contestataria y filógina del escritor siciliano Vincenzo di Blasi en relación con las teorías misóginas de Aristóteles expuestas en sus obras _La reproducción de los animales _y _Política, _ambas escritas en el siglo IV a.C_._ El artículo se abre con una introducción sobre los estudios que se han emprendido sobre las definiciones aristotélicas de la mujer para definir un marco teórico de partida. Posteriormente, se exponen de manera contrastada las teorías (...) de Aristóteles y las réplicas de Vincenzo di Blasi en el capítulo XIV de su _Apologia filosofico-storica in cui si mostra il sesso delle donne superiore a quello degli uomini_ (1737), demostrando la inclusión del autor dentro de la _Querella de las Mujeres_ en Italia. (shrink)

Taking the cue from the translation of Land und Herrschaft by Otto Brunner, the essay explores how his work challenges the historian as well as the translator. Using ideologized concepts as Staat, Land, Herrschaft, Friede, Recht, Brunner gives to these expressions a specific value from the temporal point of view. After the transformation of the social and political concepts between the XVIII and XIX centuries, which made many concepts so temporally determined that they are of little use, Brunner redefines them (...) radically and makes intelligible a language which is otherwise obscure. (shrink)

In order to explain ancient myths rationally, Vico claims that one must affect to have no erudition whatever (in his words, “ridursi in uno stato di somma ignoranza di tutta l'umana e divina erudizione”), for myths are not fables but accounts of the beginnings of civil history as primitive minds, comparable to the minds of children, might have been expected to relate them. Later thinkers who dwelled on these “narrations” with their own civilized minds, failed to seek in them the (...) very framework of the primitive and poetic world they described. (shrink)

John Locke's account of personal identity is one of his most discussed theories. Opposing the Cartesian ontology of mind, Locke argued that the soul does not always think - for thinking is simply one of its operations, but not its essence -, and that personal identity consists in consciousness alone. Against Locke, an anonymous commentator published the Remarks upon an Essay concerning Humane Understanding charging Locke's view with possible immorality. Catharine Cockburn rebuffed the Remarker's objections, in her Defence of Mr. (...) Locke's Essay, depicting his view as more dangerous for morality than Locke's. This paper shifts the focus from Cockburn's defence of Locke's moral thought, to her apology for his theory of personal identity, including his probabilistic arguments in favour of the immortality of the soul. This shift of focus yields an alternative account of Cockburn's originality: first, because she offered a non-substance interpretation of Locke's theory of personal identity, that, for its time, was unusual, and remains relevant for contemporary philosophical debates over Locke; and second, because, following Kristeller, in the very act of defending and articulating anew Locke's theory, Cockburn in some sense appropriated it. (shrink)

This short methodological insert appears like a homage to Otto Brunner, that in some Italian historical literature continue to be, all things considered, remarkable. Instead it is a homage to my wife Giuliana Nobili, co-founder with me and few others of the journal «Scienza & Politica», died the 5 th January 2015.

In this paper, I argue that Michelangelo Antonioni, in his first full-length colour feature, Red Desert (Il Deserto Rosso, 1964), uses cinematic language to explore what contemporary psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, decades later, has called the crisis of primary narcissism, one of the 'new maladies' afflicting the modern subject, that she describes in Tales of Love (1983). In examining the struggles of subject formation, Antonioni poetically describes the devastating breakdown of both subjectivity and intersubjectivity in conditions of late modernity that Kristeva (...) details through her own psychoanalytic account. Into Antonioni's infamous statement 'Eros is sick', we can read Kristeva's suggestion that Narcissus, our capacity for love and loss, separateness and idealization—the very foundation for our being with others—is in a state of serious affliction. Through the trials of his main protagonist, Giuliana, Antonioni reveals that the acquisition of a distinct, differentiated identity, one that allows the subject to establish and maintain meaningful relationships and ethical bonds, without the risk of psychic disintegration, has become highly problematic—reaching the level of a collective crisis, rather than remaining an issue of individual illness. For Antonioni, psychic survival in the modern world is not merely a question of seamless integration, but a form of (dis)adaptation: the recognition of severance and of separation, both from nature and our own nature, that allows one to affirm her environment and act as an responsive agent in the world, without being overwhelmed or engulfed by otherness, or alterity. In Kristeva's terms, this involves the capacity to bear and, even, to creatively elaborate, the necessity of loss and separation from the primal (m)other—a painful process to which Giuliana eventually submits. (shrink)

This meta-analysis synthesizes quantitative findings of the gender differences in moral sensitivity retrieved from 19 primary studies. We found the average effect size of 0.25, favoring women, with a standard deviation of 0.14. The variation in the observed effect sizes could not be attributed to differences in participants' educational level, the utilized measure of moral sensitivity, or the publication format in which the study was reported. This suggests that gender differences in moral sensitivity are consistent across different levels of participants' (...) education regardless of the instrument used to assess moral sensitivity or the format in which the research was reported. (shrink)

Rest's hypothesis that the components of morality (i.e., sensitivity, reasoning, motivation, and implementation) are distinct from one another was tested using evidence from a dental ethics curriculum that uses well-validated measures of each component. Archival data from five cohorts (n = 385) included the following: (1) transcribed responses to a measure of ethical sensitivity collected at the end of the third year; (2) pre- and post-test moral judgment scores; (3) pre- and post-test motivation scores; and (4) implementation scores – performance (...) on eight cases completed during the third and fourth years. Because the ethical sensitivity test had been scored by multiple raters, and interrater reliability did not meet acceptable standards, 120 portfolios were randomly selected from the five cohorts and responses were rescored prior to analysis. Correlations among the measures were low, ranging from −.08 to.34, supporting Rest's contention that the processes are distinct from one another and competence in one does not predict competence in another. The findings have implications for moral and character education programs. (shrink)

IntroductionIn recent years, with the popularity of many social media platforms worldwide, the role of “virtual social network platforms” in the field of cross-cultural communication has become increasingly important. Scholars in psychology and neuroscience, and cross-disciplines, are attracted to research on the motivation, mechanisms, and effects of communication on social media across cultures.Methods and AnalysisThis paper collects the co-citation of keywords in “cultural psychology,” “cross-culture communication,” “neuroscience,” and “social media” from the database of web of science and analyzes the hotspots (...) of the literature in word cloud.ResultsBased on our inclusion criteria, 85 relevant studies were extracted from a database of 842 papers. There were 44 articles on cultural communication on social media, of which 26 were from the perspective of psychology and five from the perspective of neuroscience. There are 27 articles that focus on the integration of psychology and neuroscience, but only a few are related to cross-cultural communication on social media.ConclusionScholars have mainly studied the reasons and implications of cultural communication on social media from the perspectives of cultural psychology and neuroscience separately. Keywords “culture” and “social media” generate more links in the hot map, and a large number of keywords of cultural psychology and neuroscience also gather in the hot map, which reflects the trend of integration in academic research. While cultural characteristics have changed with the development of new media and virtual communities, more research is needed to integrate the disciplines of culture, psychology, and neuroscience. (shrink)