Ethnomethodology research has systematically investigated discursive practices of categorisation, looking at the various ways by which social actors ascribe both themselves and others to identity categories to accomplish various kinds of social actions. Drawing on a data corpus of oncological visits collected in an Italian hospital, involving both native and non-native patients, the present work analyses how participants in these intercultural medical encounters invoke and make relevant social identity categories by the marking of collective pronouns in their talk. Our results (...) showed that whilst institutional identities prevailed, categorial formulations related to cultural or linguistic identities were rarely displayed in interactions with non-native patients. Conversational participants made very little of their linguistical or cultural background and when they did so, their cultural and linguistic identities were deployed for rhetorical and pragmatical aims, such as testing and negotiating common knowledge and epistemic authority. This study shows how even speakers’ minimal lexical choices, such as marked pronouns, impact the negotiation of meanings and activities in life-saving sites such as oncological visits. (shrink)

Recensione: Failla, M. Existencia, necesidad, libertad. En camino hacia la crítica, CTK E-Books 2017/Ediciones Alamanda, Madrid 2018, 222 pagine. ISBN: 978-84-940241- 5-3.

The chapter of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason entitled “Table of the categories of liberty, in relation to the concepts of good and evil”, to which this year the Bonn conference “Kant und die ‘Kategorien der Freiheit’” was devoted, today still arouses many questions: is the table of the categories of liberty sufficient to cover the whole practical domain, including that of the empirically conditioned? And if this is the case, what is the meaning of the genitive “of liberty”, and (...) to which Kantian concept of liberty do the categories owe their name? Are they concepts of autonomous volition, referable exclusively to good and evil as Gut and Böse or also to Wohl and Weh? And since “practical concepts a priori … soon become knowledge” (KpV A 116), in what does practical knowledge consist, and what is its relationship with the practical conscience of the subject, with Gewissen? In the present panorama of German research on Kant, Heiner F. Klemme, Jochen Bojanowski, Dieter Sturma, José M. Torralba, Christian Krijnen, Stephen Zimmermann and Hans F. Fulda endeavour to give an answer to such issues and make an important contribution to present-day research on Kantian problems of practical judgment and the meanings of liberty and of the logical functions of the categories. (shrink)

_Abstract_: In philosophy and cognitive science, the tension between cognitivism and the 4E-Cognition approach is both deep and polarizing. A lack of serious engagement with the theoretical and empirical work generated by the opposing framework seems problematic on both sides. In this paper, we closely discuss data on early socio-cognitive development produced by an influential nativist current of thought in the cognitivist paradigm. We consider these data from the point of view of a 4E-Cognition perspective called “the pairing hypothesis”, which (...) originates in phenomenological philosophy. We show that a close examination of these cognitivist-nativist data strengthens the phenomenological 4E-Cognition perspective by significantly expanding the range of findings it can account for. By addressing the debate between rich and lean explanations in early social cognition, we corroborate the idea that careful interaction between cognitivism and the 4E-Cognition approach can lead to progress in cognitive science. _Keywords_: Development of Social Cognition; Cognitivist Nativism; Direct Social Perception; Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences; Action Production and Perception _Spiegazioni ricche o parsimoniose? Un’alternativa fenomenologica per lo sviluppo della prima cognizione sociale_ _Riassunto_: Un’accesa e radicale tensione nelle scienze cognitive è quella tra il cognitivismo e il cosiddetto approccio delle quattro E (_Embodied, Enactive, Embedded_ e _Extended_). La mancanza di una riflessione aperta e sostanziale sul lavoro teorico ed empirico proposto dall’approccio opposto appare problematica da entrambe le parti. Il presente contributo analizza a fondo le evidenze empiriche presentate da una delle maggiori correnti innatiste del paradigma cognitivista nello studio dello sviluppo socio-cognitivo. Queste evidenze sperimentali vengono esaminate dal punto di vista della “ipotesi dell’appaiamento”, ipotesi inserita nel quadro della prospettiva teorica 4E e che proviene dalla filosofia fenomenologica. Il presente contributo mostra come una considerazione approfondita dei dati generati dal cognitivismo innatista può rafforzare il potere esplicativo della prospettiva fenomenologica 4E, ampliandone in misura significativa la gamma di evidenze scientifiche che essa può contribuire a spiegare. Affrontando il dibattito sullo sviluppo della prima cognizione sociale tra spiegazioni ricche e parsimoniose, viene corroborata l’idea che un’attenta interazione tra cognitivismo e approccio 4E può essere un modo per far progredire le scienze cognitive. _Parole chiave_: Sviluppo della cognizione sociale; Innatismo cognitivo; Percezione sociale diretta; Fenomenologia e scienze cognitive; Produzione e percezione di azioni. (shrink)

Review of: Marcus Willaschek, Jürgen Stolzenberg, Georg Mohr & Stefano Bacin (eds.), Kant-Lexikon, De Gruyter (2015) .