The article relates to the experience of a P4C workshop in a nonformal educational context as the Children’s Recreation Centre of the 1st Municipality of Naples. Through the description of the Recreation Centre activities with children between 5 and 9 years of age, the educational importance of game, especially for children living in neighborhoods with a strong social unrest, is analyzed. In such contexts, workshop activities, which are often complementary to school, are very important. These activities are defined as gamelike (...) because their purposes are learning and educational development through practical activities. Also P4C is described as a gamelike activity and, on this assumption, the idea of holding a P4C workshop in the Children’s Recreation Centre formed. The application of P4C in a ludic context, required some necessary changes in the traditional curriculum. The teaser text was replaced by gamelike activities, the board paper and the questions were avoided because children identified these instruments with school activities, and one or more topics following by gamelike activities were focused directly to start a discussion. Above changes did not fail the purposes of the curriculum, thus proving that P4C can be applied in educational contexts different from school contexts. (shrink)

The article examines the need to increase an education toward the development of complex thinking in urban areas where there is a considerable amount of social unrest. The school often fails to bridge the gap between educator/education and learner and this happens in particular when it comes to kids ‘disadvantaged’. The P4C is a pedagogical method that can heal this divide, inter alia, through its dialogic practice. The practice of philosophy can became a way to bridge the sense of fragmentation (...) that the learner feels during his school track when he is having to do with a series of parceled knowledge, because it facilitate the cognitive access to them. The risk to which the student meets with the traditional education, as Freire says, is to undermine the faculty to make aware and to problematize his learning process. To built complex thinking opens the possibility of a 360-degree access to the real and increases the development of critical, creative and caring cognitive spheres. The P4C methodology application should be widespread in many school settings possible, but not only. The article continues with a brief description of some non-formal educational services offered to minors in situations of social disadvantage in Naples, focusing in particular on the Territorial Educational Laboratories. In one of these, L’Officina dei Sogni, an organization working in the territory of the 1st Municipality of the city, I carried out from October 2010 to June 2011 a P4C laboratory with children between 8 and 12 years old, driven by the reflection that this educational methodology can improve on cognitive skills in children and adolescents who are living in situations of high social problems and difficulties at school, in order to reduce for them the risk of social exclusion. The success encountered by the laboratory has had a positive effect also on the other daily Territorial Educational Laboratories activities. The aim of this article is to demonstrate that the use of this philosophical practice is not only possible but necessary in the educational fields that attend in urban areas where there is a strong presence of social problems. (shrink)

Razón, poesía, historia.--La cuestión del estoicismo español.--El querer.

Dibujar el pensamiento de Seneca es dibujar su figura viva, trazar el esquema de su persona. Seneca es un mediador que para alzarse sobre nosotros necesita de nuestra necesidad, pues solo apoyado en nuestra indigencia tiene sentido. Maria Zambrano lleva a cabo un lucido estudio de la figura y significacion del pensador cordobes y presenta una seleccion de sus escritos.

Hilary Putnam is one of the world’s leading philosophers. His highly original and often provocative ideas have set the agenda for a variety of debates in philosophy of science, philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. His now famous philosophical thought experiments, such as the ‘Twin earth’ and ‘the brains in the vat’ have become part of the established canon in philosophy and cognitive science. _Reading Putnam_ is an outstanding overview and assessment of Hilary Putnam’s work by a team of (...) international contributors, and includes replies by Putnam himself. Divided into clear sections, it contains chapters on key aspects of Putnam’s large body of writing, including: Scientific realism and the changes that Putnam’s thought has undergone on this topic analyticity and ontology, including the important interconnections between the views of Putnam and Quine Putnam’s arguments concerning externalist views of meaning and reference, questions of conceptual relativity, and his preoccupation with ethics through a denial of the fact–value dichotomy Putnam’s developing views on perception. Offering an excellent survey of Putnam’s work, _Reading Putnam_ is essential for those studying philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science, as well as for anyone interested in contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

I discuss a difficulty concerning the justification of the Axiom of Choice in terms of such informal notions such as that of iterative set. A recent attempt to solve the difficulty is by S. Lavine, who claims in his Understanding the Infinite that the axioms of set theory receive intuitive justification from their being self-evidently true in Fin(ZFC), a finite counterpart of set theory. I argue that Lavine's explanatory attempt fails when it comes to AC: in this respect Fin(ZFC) is (...) no better off than the iterative notion. (shrink)

La ciencia aritmética ha sido un interés constante en toda la reflexión de Giovanni Piana. El objetivo de este ensayo es mostrar de qué forma este interés pueda ayudar para ilustrar las articulaciones principales del pensamiento del fenomenólogo italiano. Este camino pasa por la diferencia, establecida por Piana, entre un nivel pre-aritmético y un nivel aritmético como re-flejo de la distinción husserliana entre un nivel ante-predicativo y un nivel predicativo. Ade-más, el par prearitmético/aritmético, trae la distinción entre antepredicativo y predicativo (...) más allá de la esfera del lenguaje verbal en el que tiene lugar la predicación. Como se verá, el re-sultado es una diferenciación generalizada entre un nivel pre-lingüístico y un nivel lingüístico, cuyo alcance potencial encuentra en la música un ejemplo de grande valor. (shrink)

La ciencia aritmética ha sido un interés constante en toda la reflexión de Giovanni Piana. El objetivo de este ensayo es mostrar de qué forma este interés pueda ayudar para ilustrar las articulaciones principales del pensamiento del fenomenólogo italiano. Este camino pasa por la diferencia, establecida por Piana, entre un nivel pre-aritmético y un nivel aritmético como re-flejo de la distinción husserliana entre un nivel ante-predicativo y un nivel predicativo. Ade-más, el par prearitmético/aritmético, trae la distinción entre antepredicativo y predicativo (...) más allá de la esfera del lenguaje verbal en el que tiene lugar la predicación. Como se verá, el re-sultado es una diferenciación generalizada entre un nivel pre-lingüístico y un nivel lingüístico, cuyo alcance potencial encuentra en la música un ejemplo de grande valor. (shrink)

This article sets out the overall framework within which American music phenomenologists operates. A widely accepted definition of the word phenomenology, together with a basically eclectic attitude and a boundary issue between musicology and philosophy, is identified. The impetus to the article is provided by an anti-positivistic polemic and a plea in defence of the meaning and concreteness of musical experience. These aspects then combine in a critique of traditional musical analysis in its positivistic matrix. S.K. Langer's philosophy, as the (...) inspiration of this polemic, is examined in the central part of the article. However, the author's distancing from the idealistic aspects of his esthetics is covered, in particular the downplaying of the sound-sensitive level and the condemnation of musicology in general. Sense and sensitive materials, wide philosophical options and concrete procedures of music analysis are what these authors look for in phenomenology as a means to reconcile humanistic and technical culture. Therefore, the article is not so much a condemnation as an attempt to refound musicology in its entirety, with particular reference to contemporary music. (shrink)

We have been teaching gender issues and feminist theory for many years, and we know that there is certainly a diversity of views among women, and men, about what counts as feminist or as good for women. Some may see a competent woman running for V.P as inevitably a step forward for women's equality. But consider this.

In this paper we develop the elementary theory of modules in the category Sh of sheaves over right-sided idempotent quantales. The main ingredient is the construction of a logic sound for Sh . As an application we prove that in Sh , a finitely generated projective module is free , a result that is relevant to the study of representation of non-commutative C ∗ -algebras.

Special groups [M. Dickmann, F. Miraglia, Special Groups : Boolean-Theoretic Methods in the Theory of Quadratic Forms, Memoirs Amer. Math. Soc., vol. 689, Amer. Math. Soc., Providence, RI, 2000] are a first-order axiomatization of the theory of quadratic forms. In Section 2 we investigate reduced special groups which are a lattice under their natural representation partial order ; we show that this lattice property is preserved under most of the standard constructions on RSGs; in particular finite RSGs and RSGs (...) of finite chain length are lattice ordered. We prove that the lattice property fails for the RSGs of function fields of real algebraic varieties over a uniquely ordered field dense in its real closure, unless their stability index is 1 . We show that Open Problem 1 has a positive answer for the RSG of the field Q . In the final section we explore the meaning of Open Problem 1 for formally real fields, in terms of their orders and real valuations; we introduce the notion of “parameter-rank” of a positive-primitive first-order formula of the language for special groups. (shrink)

1. Premessa Nel filone di studi che prende il nome di “ontologia sociale” l’espressione “intenzionalità collettiva”, o “we-intention”, si riferisce agli stati soggettivi indicati dall’uso (appropriato) della prima persona plurale – ad esempio “noi vogliamo x”, “noi facciamo y”, “noi crediamo z” ecc. Come è noto, tutta la ricostruzione teorica che John Searle, il punto di riferimento di questa letteratura, propone della realtà socio-politica si basa su tre nozioni principali, di cui una è prop...

The relationship between q-spaces (c.f. [9]) and quantum spaces (c.f. [5]) is studied, proving that both models coincide in the case of Spec A, the spectrum of a non-commutative C*-algebra A. It is shown that a sober T 1 quantum space is a classical topological space. This difficulty is circumvented through a new definition of point in a quantale. With this new definition, it is proved that Lid A has enough points. A notion of orthogonality in quantum spaces is introduced, (...) which permits us to express the usual topological properties of separation. The notion of stalks of sheaves over quantales is introduced, and some results in categorial model theory are obtained. (shrink)

Drawing on recent findings, this study examines whether valence concordant electromyography (EMG) responses can be explained as an unconditional effect of mere stimulus processing or as somatosensory simulation driven by task-dependent processing strategies. While facial EMG over the Corrugator supercilii and the Zygomaticus major was measured, each participant performed two tasks with pictures of album covers. One task was an affective evaluation task and the other was to attribute the album covers to one of five decades. The Embodied Emotion Account (...) predicts that valence concordant EMG is more likely to occur if the task necessitates a somatosensory simulation of the evaluative meaning of stimuli. Results support this prediction with regard to Corrugator supercilii in that valence concordant EMG activity was only present in the affective evaluation task but not in the non-evaluative task. Results for the Zygomaticus major were ambiguous. Our findings are in line with the view that EMG activity is an embodied part of the evaluation process and not a mere physical outcome. (shrink)

_Jane and Louise Wilson_ With Essays by Jeremy Millar and Claire Doherty London: Ellipsis, 2000 ISBN 1-84166-027-2 84 pp., inc. 120 b/w photograph.

We give a version of L´os’ ultraproduct result for forcing in Kripke structures in a first-order language with equality and discuss ultrafilters in a topology naturally associated to a partial order. The presentation also includes background material so as to make the exposition accessible to those whose main interest is Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence and/or Philosophy.

The coloniality of power is understood by Anibal Quijano as at the constituting crux of the global capitalist system of power. What is characteristic of global, Eurocentered, capitalist power is that it is organized around two axes that Quijano terms “the coloniality of power” and “modernity.” The coloniality of power introduces the basic and universal social classification of the population of the planet in terms of the idea of race, a replacing of relations of superiority and inferiority established through domination (...) with naturalized understandings of inferiority and superiority. In this essay, Lugones introduces a systemic understanding of gender constituted by colonial/modernity in terms of multiple relations of power. This gender system has a light and a dark side that depict relations, and beings in relation as deeply different and thus as calling for very different patterns of violent abuse. Lugones argues that gender itself is a colonial introduction, a violent introduction consistently and contemporarily used to destroy peoples, cosmologies, and communities as the building ground of the “civilized” West. (shrink)

Scholars have long been intrigued by the Buddha's defining action (karma) as intention. This book explores systematically how intention, agency, and moral psychology were interpreted in all branches of early Theravada thought, paying special attention to the thought of the 5th-century commentator Buddhaghosa.

This article on James Tenney, the American music theorist and composer, sets out the overall framework of his theory of music, in particular the systematic analysis conducted in his essay entitledMeta+hodos. Although these reflections cannot be included in the sphere of American musical phenomenology, they show remarkable similarities with phenomenological themes. A Gestalt approach centred on the description of sound phenomena is delineated, together with a conceptualization hinging on the phenomenal nature of music and the idea of perceivable structures and (...) expressive valencies. A theory of musical wholes and parts — from the cohesion and segregation viewpoint — is followed by a theory of form predicated on an original and significant definition: that form is the perception of differences. Finally, the methodological development of Tenney's theory is traced and criticized, in particular the conflict between descriptive and non-descriptive moments. (shrink)

We introduce the Profinite Hull functor of special groups, showing that it gives rise to a new local - global principle, the subform reflection property. We also indicate applications of this principle to the abstract algebraic theory of quadratic forms.

Ignorance is often a perfectly good excuse. There are interesting debates about whether non-culpable factual ignorance and mistake subvert obligation, but little disagreement about whether non-culpable factual ignorance and mistake exculpate. What about agents who have all the relevant facts in view but fail to meet their obligations because they do not have the right moral beliefs? If their ignorance of their obligations derives from mistaken moral beliefs or from ignorance of the moral significance of the facts they have in (...) view, should they be excused for failing to meet their moral obligations? It is not obvious that they should. In this paper we argue that the best non-skeptical accounts of moral responsibility acknowledge that factual ignorance and mistake will diminish moral responsibility in a way that moral ignorance and mistake will not. That is because factual ignorance is often non-culpable so long as it meets certain merely procedural epistemic standards but the same is not true of moral ignorance. Our argument is that the assumption that it is gets the standards of culpability for moral ignorance wrong, and that the mistake is encouraged by the thought that culpability in general requires an instance of known wrongdoing: that acting wrongly requires de dicto unresponsiveness to one’s obligations at some stage. We deny this and conclude that, therefore, ignorance and mistaken belief are indeed often perfectly good excuses – but far less often than some philosophers claim. (shrink)