In this essay I try, first of all, to outline the development of Joachim's epistemology from his most significant book, The Nature of Truth (1906), to his posthumous Logical Studies (1948), which gathers together the lectures on Logic delivered by him at the University of Oxford in the years up to his death in 1938. The conception of truth as systematic coherence, upheld by him in his earlier work in a lively polemic against Bertrand Russell's empirical-realist 'correspondence theory of truth' (...) as well as against the intuitionist appeal to immediate self-evidence, shows the thorough- going influence of F.H. Bradley's epistemology in its declaredly idealistic orientation and its 'sceptical' outcome. I then criticise the arguments by which, in the final pages of The Nature of Truth, he supports his denial of truth's reality, pointing out that they are plainly self-refuting. Finally, I examine the further development of his conception of thought and truth in his Oxford lectures, where he subjects the above-mentioned arguments to a careful self-critique, which prompted his pupil Errol E. Harris to vindicate, against contemporary anti-metaphysical thought, the perennial theoretical value and moral significance of metaphysics in general, and of Hegel's Absolute Idealism in particular. (shrink)

Die Entwicklung der zeitgenossischen Philosophie ist durch Hegels Denken entscheidend beeinflusst worden. Die Grunde fur seine andauernde Aktualitat aber sind selten verstanden worden. Im Gegensatz zu vielen Hegel-Interpreten wird hier der -absolute Idealismus- als das Wesen der Philosophie Hegels erkannt. Die -dialektische Methode- und das -System- bilden eine untrennbare Einheit. Auf dieser Grundlage erfolgt in einer streng theoretisch-systematischen Perspektive eine konsistente Auslegung von Hegels -Philosophie des unendlichen Selbstbewusstseins-. Einen besonderen Schwerpunkt legt die Arbeit auf die Auseinandersetzung mit dem gegenwartigen amerikanischen (...) Hegelianismus. Ubereinstimmung besteht mit E.E. Harris und R.D. Winfield, wahrend R.B. Brandom entschieden kritisiert wird.<BR> Contemporary philosophy's development has been decisively influenced by Hegel's thought, yet only rarely have the grounds for its everlasting up-to-dateness been understood. Contrary to many Hegel-interpreters, -Absolute Idealism- is here regarded as the core of Hegel's philosophy. The -dialectical method- and the -system- constitute an inseparable unity. On this basis a consistent interpretation of Hegel's -philosophy of infinite self-consciousness- is outlined. Attention is focused especially on the discussion of contemporary American Hegelianism, largely agreeing with E. E. Harris and R. D. Winfield, while sharply criticizing R. B. Brandom.". (shrink)

La nostra via.--L'esempio dei grandi.--Il "verismo" e la musica.-- Influenze straniere.--Mascagni e il suo stile.--Puccini e la sua maniera.--Gli altri.--Sinfonismo e verismo.--Oltre a "realtà.".

A Fenomenologia e a História de Vida Resumo: A fenomenologia é uma corrente filosófica, caracterizada pelo estudo aprofundado de um determinado fenômeno, pois, a priori, o que se apresenta à mente das pessoas, vem em forma difusa ou em forma de aparência. Compreendendo-a em uma perspectiva que prioriza o ser-no-mundo, contextualizado com sua história, cultura, linguagem e movimento humano. Em vista disso, o presente artigo pretende compreender o entrecruzamento da fenomenologia e do método de História de vida, com intuito de (...) vislumbrar a contribuições para o processo educacional e suas nuances pelas ciências de forma dialética com as contradições do sujeito em relação a sua formação acadêmica.Palavras-chave: Fenomenologia. História de vida. Formação de professor. Phenomenology and the history of life: Phenomenology is a philosophical current, characterized by the depth study of a certain phenomenon, because, mainly, what appears to people’s mind, comes in a diffuse form or in the form of appearance. Comprehending it in a perspective that prioritizes the being-in-the-world, contextualized with its history, culture, language and human movement. Because of it, this article intends to understand the intertwining of the phenomenology and the method of Life history, with the intention of gleaming contributions to the educational process and its nuances by the sciences in dialectical form with the contradictions of the subject in relation to his academic formation.Keywords: Phenomenology. Life's history. Teacher training. La fenomenología y la historia de vida Resumen: La fenomenología es una corriente filosófica, caracterizada por el estudio profundo de un determinado fenómeno, ya que, principalmente, lo que parece a la mente de las personas, se presenta en forma difusa o en forma de apariencia. Comprenderlo en una perspectiva que prioriza el ser en el mundo, contextualizado con su historia, cultura, lenguaje y movimiento humano. Por ello, este artículo pretende comprender el entrelazamiento de la fenomenología y el método de la historia de la vida, con la intención de aportar contribuciones al proceso educativo y sus matices de las ciencias en forma dialéctica con las contradicciones del tema en relación con su formación académica.Palabras clave: Fenomenología. La historia de la vida. Formación del profesorado. Data de registro: 16/06/2020Data de aceite: 26/11/2020. (shrink)

In this book, the contributors expand on their use of Mayes archetypal pedagogy in volume 1 to apply its principles to a wide variety of venues, purposes, and projects. Each essay explores from its own disciplinary angle the difference between what Mayes has called "educational processes" (which are those practices that take place in the dedicated space of the classroom, through the medium of the curriculum, and under the stewardship of the teacher) and "educative acts" (which are those deep transactions (...) between individuals in joint pursuit of existential truth, wherein one is alternately the teacher and student in conversation, and sometimes even communion, with one's dialogical partner"). (shrink)

Although mouse‐tracking has been taken as a real‐time window on different aspects of human decision‐making processes, whether purely semantic information affects response conflict at the level of motor output as measured through mouse movements is still unknown. Here, across two experiments, we investigated the effects of semantic knowledge by predicting participants’ performance in a standard keyboard task and in a mouse‐tracking task through distributional semantics, a usage‐based modeling approach to meaning. In Experiment 1, participants were shown word pairs and were (...) required to perform a two‐alternative forced choice task selecting either the more abstract or the more concrete word, using standard keyboard presses. In Experiment 2, participants performed the same task, yet this time response selection was achieved by moving the computer mouse. Results showed that the involvement of semantic components in the task at hand is observable using both standard reaction times (Experiment 1) as well as using indexes extracted from mouse trajectories (Experiment 2). In particular, mouse trajectories reflected the response conflict and its temporal evolution, with a larger deviation for increasing word semantic relatedness. These findings support the validity of mouse‐tracking as a method to detect deep and implicit decision‐making features. Additionally, by demonstrating that a usage‐based model of meaning can account for the different degrees of cognitive conflict associated with task achievement, these findings testify the impact of the human semantic memory on decision‐making processes. (shrink)

We review major developmental evidence on the continuity from action to gesture to word and sign in human children, highlighting the important role of caregivers in the development of multimodal communication. In particular, the basic issues considered here and contributing to the current debate on the origins and development of the language-ready brain are: (1) links between early actions, gestures and words and similarities in representational strategies; (2) importance of multimodal communication and the interplay between gestures and spoken words; (3) (...) interconnections between early actions, gestures and signs. The innovation of this report is in connecting these themes together to relevant findings from studies on children between 6 and 36 months of age and highlighting interesting parallels in studies on ape communicative behavior. (shrink)

Kant’s critique/doctrine distinction tracks the difference between a canon for the understanding’s proper use and an organon for its dialectical misuse. The latter reflects the dogmatic use of reason to attain a doctrine of knowledge with no antecedent critique. In the 1790s, Fichte collapses Kant’s distinction and redefines dogmatism. He argues that deriving a canon is essentially dialectical and thus yields an organon: critical idealism is properly a doctrine of science or Wissenschaftslehre. Criticism is furthermore said to refute dogmatism, by (...) which Fichte means Spinozism. Schelling repudiates Fichte’s position in his Philosophical Letters by reviving Kant’s distinction. First, ‘critique’ for Schelling names a canon that is valid for all systems—including Spinozism—and thus favours none—not even the Wissenschaftslehre. Second, Schelling coins ‘dogmaticism’ to refer to what Kant calls ‘dogmatism’: reason’s uncritical claim to doctrine. Hence, he says all systems—even Fichte’s—are susceptible to the ‘enthusiasm’ of mistaking themselves for doctrines or ‘objects of knowledge’, instead of subjectively valid ‘objects of freedom’. I reconstruct Schelling’s argument for reviving Kant’s distinction, while noting two consequences for German idealism. First, if criticism favours no system, a system’s origin cannot be an act of knowledge, e.g., intellectual intuition, but only an act of endorsement. Second, if dogmaticism entails enthusiasm, a system’s goal cannot be absolute knowledge, but only infinite striving. Hence, by retrieving Schelling’s notion of dogmaticism, we can both gain a better understanding of the Letters and register the impact of a core Kantian distinction on the German idealist project. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed numerous weaknesses in pandemic preparedness and response, including underfunding, inadequate surveillance, and inequitable distribution of countermeasures. To overcome these weaknesses for future pandemics, WHO released a zero draft of a pandemic treaty in February, 2023, and subsequently a revised bureau's text in May, 2023. COVID-19 made clear that pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response reflect choices and value judgements. These decisions are therefore not a purely scientific or technical exercise, but are fundamentally grounded in ethics. The latest (...) treaty draft reflects these ethical considerations by including a section entitled Guiding Principles and Approaches. Most of these principles are ethical—they establish core values that undergird the treaty. Unfortunately, the treaty draft's set of principles are numerous, overlapping, and show inadequate coherence and consistency. We propose two improvements to this section of the draft pandemic treaty. First, key guiding ethical principles should be clearer and more precise than they currently are. Second, the link between ethical principles and policy implementation should be clearly established and define boundaries on acceptable interpretation, ensuring that signatories abide by these principles. (shrink)

The present study investigates the types of verb and symbolic representational strategies used by 10 deaf signing adults and 13 deaf signing children who described in Italian Sign Language 45 video clips representing nine action types generally communicated by five general verbs in spoken Italian. General verbs, in which the same sign was produced to refer to several different physical action types, were rarely used by either group of participants. Both signing children and adults usually produced specific depicting predicates by (...) incorporating, through a representational strategy, the object and/or the modality of the action into the sign. As for the different types of representational strategies, the adults used the hand-as-object strategy more frequently than the children, who, in turn, preferred to use the hand-as-hand strategy, suggesting that different degrees of cognitive complexity are involved in these two symbolic strategies. Addressing the symbolic iconic strategies underlying sign formation could provide new insight into the perceptual and cognitive processes of linguistic meaning construction. The findings reported here support two main assumptions of cognitive linguistics applied to sign languages: there is a strong continuity between gestures and language; lexical units and depicting constructions derive from the same iconic core mechanism of sign creation. (shrink)

Entailment relations, introduced by Scott in the early 1970s, provide an abstract generalisation of Gentzen’s multi-conclusion logical inference. Originally applied to the study of multi-valued logics, this notion has then found plenty of applications, ranging from computer science to abstract algebra. In particular, an entailment relation can be regarded as a constructive presentation of a distributive lattice and in this guise it has proven to be a useful tool for the constructive reformulation of several classical theorems in commutative algebra. In (...) this paper, motivated by these concrete applications, we state and prove a cut-elimination result for inductively generated entailment relations. We analyse some of its consequences and describe the existing connections with analogous results in the literature. (shrink)

This book presents G. A. Cohen's Gifford Lectures, delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1996. Focusing on Marxism and Rawlsian liberalism, Cohen draws a connection between these thought systems and the choices that shape a person's life. In the case of Marxism, the relevant life is his own: a communist upbringing in the 1940s in Montreal, which induced a belief in a strongly socialist egalitarian doctrine. The narrative of Cohen's reckoning with that inheritance develops through a series of sophisticated (...) engagements with the central questions of social and political philosophy. In the case of Rawlsian doctrine, Cohen looks to people's lives in general. He argues that egalitarian justice is not only, as Rawlsian liberalism teaches, a matter of rules that define the structure of society, but also a matter of personal attitude and choice. Personal attitude and choice are, moreover, the stuff of which social structure itself is made. Those truths have not informed political philosophy as much as they should, and Cohen's focus on them brings political philosophy closer to moral philosophy, and to the Judeo-Christian ethical tradition, than it has recently been. (shrink)

Contemporary international migration is directly related to the construction of the nation-state. The variations in this migration are multiple, depending on the type of mobility, the territories and the characteristics of the people who practice it. One kind of migration that has been particularly important at the end of the twentieth century and so far in the twenty-first century is that of minors who migrate without being accompanied by their parents. The legal definitions, bureaucratic practices and rights of these minors-turned-migrants (...) vary across European states and in the international literature. This paper aims to analyse the terminology used colloquially in the media and academically to refer to this group of people. In the early days of the phenomenon, the acronym MENA (unaccompanied migrant minors) has been the most common in Spain. It was intended to be a “neutral” term used in the legal sphere and migration studies. Still, in recent times, MENA has become more than a descriptive category. It has become a way of criminalising a group of young people who are in national territory and come from another country (usually an African country and, especially, a Maghreb country). However, not everything is determined by the circumstances surrounding us or our lives as social beings. Social pressure, with its narrative, cannot mean leaving aside history, legal culture, and learning. We need a new language to talk about this group of people. Currently, the negative connotation hides the most human aspect of this condition; the term “MENA” is a banner to mystify a fundamental fact: we are talking about children and adolescents who, not being able to count on the protection of an adult or family member, are condemned to social exclusion. This article approaches the migrant child as a critical figure who embodies the paradox of humanitarian reasoning, which is also a legal and political paradox, encapsulating the tension between structural rejection and the individual capacity of the human subject. By focusing on the theoretically productive role of minors without parental guardianship as subjects of ethnographic examination, this paper aims to understand better how current anthropological knowledge redefines the concepts of childhood, adulthood, and migration. The first part of this paper focuses on examining the terminologies used at the European and international levels, with their respective social implications. The second part focuses on the Spanish case, with the different impacts the term produces at the local level. The third and final part focuses on the terminology of refugee children and opens the discussion on scapegoating in Spain. (shrink)

A highly original reading of Immanuel Kant that demonstrates his interest in the social realm of human interaction.

Containing selected papers on the fundamentals and applications of Complexity Science, this multi-disciplinary book presents new approaches for resolving complex issues that cannot be resolved using conventional mathematical or software models. Complex Systems problems can occur in a variety of areas such as physical sciences and engineering, the economy, the environment, humanities and social and political sciences. Complexity Science problems, the science of open systems consisting of large numbers of diverse components engaged in rich interaction, can occur in a variety (...) of areas such as physical sciences and engineering, the economy, the environment, humanities and social and political sciences. The global behaviour of these systems emerges from the interaction of constituent components and is unpredictable but not random. The key attribute of Complex Systems is the ability to self-organise and adapt to unpredictable changes in their environment. (shrink)

A leading figure in neuroaesthetics makes the case that aesthetic experience can be meaningfully measured by the tools of neuroscience.

Outlines a systematic historical account of the developments of Hegel's logic, both in his own works and those of his most significant followers. This study then provides an interpretation and internal criticism from an idealistic-transcendental philosophical perspective.

Fichte assigns ‘intellectual intuition’ a new meaning after Kant. But in 1799, his doctrine of intellectual intuition is publicly deemed indefensible by Kant and nihilistic by Jacobi. I propose to defend Fichte’s doctrine against these charges, leaving aside whether it captures what he calls the ‘spirit’ of transcendental idealism. I do so by articulating three problems that motivate Fichte’s redirection of intellectual intuition from being to acting: (1) the regress problem, which states that reflecting on empirical facts of consciousness leads (...) only to further facts and so cannot yield a first principle; (2) the rhapsody problem, which states that the categories form a haphazard set and so lack necessity unless they derive from a first principle; and (3) the nihilism problem, which states that a first principle cannot lie outside our cognition of it, lest it be the cause of our cognition and, being first, the cause of all our actions, reducing us to machines. Crucially, Fichte’s three motivating problems are in fact aspects of a single problem. Leaving any aspect unsolved spoils putative solutions to the other two. Consequently, Fichte requires a single unified solution to all three, which his doctrine of intellectual intuition provides. (shrink)

G.E. Moore, more than either Bertrand Russell or Ludwig Wittgenstein, was chiefly responsible for the rise of the analytic method in twentieth-century philosophy. This selection of his writings shows Moore at his very best. The classic essays are crucial to major philosophical debates that still resonate today. Amongst those included are: * A Defense of Common Sense * Certainty * Sense-Data * External and Internal Relations * Hume's Theory Explained * Is Existence a Predicate? * Proof of an External World (...) In addition, this collection also contains the key early papers in which Moore signals his break with idealism, and three important previously unpublished papers from his later work which illustrate his relationship with Wittgenstein. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI XII Coda Appendix Acknowledgements.

A model for the ideal state includes discussions of the nature and application of justice, the role of the philosopher in society, the goals of education, and the effects of art upon character.

We survey the literature that has explored the implications of decision-making under ambiguity for financial market outcomes, such as portfolio choice and equilibrium asset prices. This ambiguity literature has led to a number of significant advances in our ability to rationalize empirical features of asset returns and portfolio decisions, such as the failure of the two-fund separation theorem in portfolio decisions, the modest exposure to risky securities observed for a majority of investors, the home equity preference in international portfolio diversification, (...) the excess volatility of asset returns, the equity premium and the risk-free rate puzzles, and the occurrence of trading break-downs. (shrink)

It is almost unanimously acknowledged that the formation of Hegel’s philosophy was largely determined by the appropriation and further development of some fundamental achievements of Kant’s transcendental idealism - first of all his polemic against the “old metaphysics” or, as Hegel also said, the “empty metaphysics of the understanding”. The most decisive assumption of this metaphysics consisted, indeed, in the belief that the totality of our universe could be exhaustively resolved into a plurality of isolated entities, devoid of any “internal,” (...) essential, mutual relations. Each entity was, as a consequence, considered to be only abstractly self-identical and so different from any other. In such a perspective, the absolute, the infinite, the divine, could not but be conceived as being substantially alien to the human mind’s innermost life and essence, as a merely motionless object, absolutely transcendent to the self-creative process in which our rational subjectivity essentially consists. Kant’s critique - especially by virtue of his conception of knowledge as an “a priori synthesis” of intuition and category, of experience and concept, which finds the ultimate condition of its possibility not in its conformity to a presupposed objectivity, but precisely in the original unity of self-consciousness, the “I-think-in general” - has certainly by now rendered unsustainable the strict dualism typical of such a metaphysics, and in particular its pretension of rationally “demonstrating” the existence and the most general properties of the alleged merely transcendent absolute. Whereas Kant’s idealism seems nevertheless to limit itself to the statement and foundation of this simply critical and negative outcome of the transcendental analysis of our knowledge, the ultimate aim of Hegel’s whole philosophy consists rather in the attempt explicitly and systematically to develop a conception of the universe, according to which the universe, far from dividing into a plurality of absolutely different and exclusive entities, instead constitutes itself as a unique, absolute, organic totality, in which any immediate difference and opposition tends to merge, to “reconcile” itself in a superior and deeper “dialectical” unity, which is both divine and human, infinite and finite, identical and different, ideal and real, eternal and in a process of becoming, transcendent and immanent. Every one of its determinate aspects and grades of development, every element into which it differentiates itself, thus turns out to be intimately immanent in, and connected with, every other, and finally in and with the absolute totality itself. Totum in toto et in qualibet parte. “Outside” of such unique, concrete totality, there appear to be but empty, irrational, unreal abstractions: first of all the A = A of formal logic and the absolutely transcendent God of the “old metaphysics.”. (shrink)

The philosophic, historical, and literary Italian culture of the first half of our century was largely dominated by a trend of thought that can be correctly called “Neo-idealist,” the most prominent exponents of which were Giovanni Gentile and Benedetto Croce. The latter’s very broad scientific activity moved, and attained its highest and most durable achievements, in the ambit of the theory and history of Italian and European literature, of civil historiography, and of social and political theory. We cannot here attempt (...) even a very sketchy explanation, interpretation, and evaluation of the undoubtedly remarkable contribution which Croce’s scientific work was able to offer to the development of our century’s European culture. Here we shall confine our critical interest only to the philosophical theories stricto sensu elaborated by Croce in the course of his wider historiographic activities. They stem indeed from a personal reading, interpretation, and criticism of Hegel’s speculative idealism; and he proposed them to contemporary scholars as the extreme and most mature stage of modern thought’s whole development. Thus, should they turn out to be generally tenable, any attempt today to vindicate Hegel’s thought as fully up-to-date and valid, at least with respect to its deepest logical-metaphysical and methodological-dialectical “substance,” could not but appear to be openly anachronistic. Whence, then, the inescapable need for a careful critical examination of their content, meaning, and real plausibility in the present historical-cultural situation. (shrink)

This article offers a general “immanent” critique of Derrida’s Deconstructionism, whose positive outcome is an argument for the continuing viability of a Hegel-oriented idealistic metaphysics. Derrida’s thought is construed as an unspokenly skeptical and nihilistic development of Heidegger’s existential ontology and of the sensu latiori “structuralist” trend of contemporary human sciences. The main difficulties pointed out hinge on (§ 1) the relationship deconstructionism establishes between thought and language, speech and writing, and phonetic and non-phonetic writing, (§ 2) its paradoxical concept (...) of “transcendental writing” as the “origin” of empirical writing and of the “trace” as more “original” than original reality; and, finally, (§ 3) its specification of the alleged “radical other” to metaphysical thought as writing, difference, and literature. (shrink)