O artigo propõe abordar a construção da imagem de Isabel, a Católica aproximando duas perspectivas historiográficas, a História Política e a História das Emoções. Limita-se à observação das emoções e dos gestos emocionais revelados na articulação da condição feminina de Isabel ao modelo masculino de rei, destacando como tópicos o amor e a autoridade. Focando esses dois tópicos, destaca as emoções reveladas nas crônicas do período e no Testamento da Rainha e os ajustes das manifestações emocionais de Isabel em diferentes (...) espaços sociais. Salienta que as emoções e os modos de expressão emocional foram utilizados não só como formas de expressar sentimentos, mas, sobretudo, como recursos usados para radicalizar uma imagem ideal da Rainha dentro de comunidades emocionais específicas, composta por reis, nobreza e o público ao qual foram dirigidos os escritos. (shrink)

Relating Narratives is a major new work by the philosopher and feminist thinker Adriana Cavarero. First published in Italian to widespread acclaim, Relating Narratives is a fascinating and challenging new account of the relationship between selfhood and narration. Drawing a diverse array of thinkers from both the philosophical and the literary tradition, from Sophocles and Homer to Hannah Arendt, Karen Blixen, Walter Benjamin and Borges, Adriana Cadarero's theory of the `narratable self' shows how narrative models in philosophy and (...) literature can open new ways of thinking about formation of human identities. By showing how each human being has a unique story that can be told about them, Adriana Cavarero inaugurates an important shift in thinking about subjectivity and identity which relies not upon categorical or discursive norms, but rather seeks to account for `who' each one of us uniquely is. (shrink)

The human voice does not deceive. The one who is speaking is inevitably revealed by the singular sound of her voice, no matter “what” she says. We take this fact for granted—for example, every time someone asks, over the telephone, “Who is speaking?” and receives as a reply the familiar utterance, “It’s me.” Starting from the given uniqueness of every voice, Cavarero rereads the history of philosophy through its peculiar evasion of this embodied uniqueness. She shows how this history—along with (...) the fields it comprehends, such as linguistics, musicology, political theory, and studies in orality—might be grasped as the “devocalization of Logos,” as the invariable privileging of semantike over phone, mind over body. Female figures—from the Sirens to the Muses, from Echo to opera singers—provide a crucial counterhistory, one in which the embodied voice triumphs over the immaterial semantic. Reconstructing this counterhistory, Cavarero proposes a “politics of the voice” wherein the ancient bond between Logos and politics is reconfigured, and wherein what matters is not the communicative content of a given discourse, but rather who is speaking. (shrink)

What does a truly democratic experience of political action look like today? In this provocative new work, Adriana Cavarero weighs in on contemporary debates about the relationship between democracy, happiness, and dissent. Drawing upon Arendt's understanding of politics as a participatory experience, but also discussing texts by Émile Zola, Elias Canetti, Boris Pasternak, and Roland Barthes, along with engaging Judith Butler, Cavarero proposes a new view of democracy, based not on violence, but rather on the spontaneous experience of a (...) plurality of bodies coming together in public. Expanding upon the themes explored in previous works, Cavarero offers a timely intervention into current thinking about the nature of democracy, suggesting that its emergence thrives on the nonviolent creativity of a widespread, participatory, and relational power that is shared horizontally rather than vertically. From digital democracy to selfies to contemporary protest movements, Cavarero argues that we need to rethink our focus on individual happiness and turn toward rediscovering the joyful emotions of birth through plural interaction. Yes, let us be happy, she urges, but let us do so publicly, politically, together. (shrink)

_Relating Narratives_ is a major new work by the philosopher and feminist thinker Adriana Cavarero. First published in Italian to widespread acclaim, _Relating Narratives_ is a fascinating and challenging new account of the relationship between selfhood and narration. Drawing a diverse array of thinkers from both the philosophical and the literary tradition, from Sophocles and Homer to Hannah Arendt, Karen Blixen, Walter Benjamin and Borges, Adriana Cadarero's theory of the `narratable self' shows how narrative models in philosophy and (...) literature can open new ways of thinking about formation of human identities. By showing how each human being has a unique story that can be told about them, Adriana Cavarero inaugurates an important shift in thinking about subjectivity and identity which relies not upon categorical or discursive norms, but rather seeks to account for `who' each one of us uniquely is. (shrink)

This paper presents a series of 4 single subject experiments aimed to investigate whether children with autism show more social engagement when interacting with the Nao robot, compared to a human partner in a motor imitation task. The Nao robot imitates gross arm movements of the child in real-time. Different behavioral criteria (i.e. eye gaze, gaze shifting, free initiations and prompted initiations of arm movements, and smile/laughter) were analyzed based on the video data of the interaction. The results are mixed (...) and suggest a high variability in reactions to the Nao robot. The results are as follows: For Child2 and Child3, the results indicate no effect of the Nao robot in any of the target variables. Child1 and Child4 showed more eye gaze and smile/laughter in the interaction with the Nao robot compared to the human partner and Child1 showed a higher frequency of motor initiations in the interaction with the Nao robot compared to the baselines, but not with respect to the human-interaction. The robot proved to be a better facilitator of shared attention only for Child1. Keywords: human-robot interaction; assistive robotics; autism. (shrink)

Adriana Novoa and Alex Levine offer here a history and interpretation of the reception of Darwinism in Argentina, illuminating the ways culture shapes ...

Words like "terrorism" and "war" no longer encompass the scope of contemporary violence. With this explosive book, Adriana Cavarero, one of the world's most provocative feminist theorists and political philosophers, effectively renders such terms obsolete. She introduces a new word—"horrorism"—to capture the experience of violence. Unlike terror, horrorism is a form of violation grounded in the offense of disfiguration and massacre. Numerous outbursts of violence fall within Cavarero's category of horrorism, especially when the phenomenology of violence is considered from (...) the perspective of the victim rather than that of the warrior. Cavarero locates horrorism in the philosophical, political, literary, and artistic representations of defenseless and vulnerable victims. She considers both terror and horror on the battlefields of the _Iliad_, in the decapitation of Medusa, and in the murder of Medea's children. In the modern arena, she forges a link between horror, extermination, and massacre, especially the Nazi death camps, and revisits the work of Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt's thesis on totalitarianism, and Arendt's debate with Georges Bataille on the estheticization of violence and cruelty. In applying the horroristic paradigm to the current phenomena of suicide bombers, torturers, and hypertechnological warfare, Cavarero integrates Susan Sontag's views on photography and the eroticization of horror, as well as ideas on violence and the state advanced by Thomas Hobbes and Carl Schmitt. Through her searing analysis, Caverero proves that violence against the helpless claims a specific vocabulary, one that has been known for millennia, and not just to the Western tradition. Where common language fails to form a picture of atrocity, horrorism paints a brilliant portrait of its vivid reality. (shrink)

In this article, Adriana Cavarero and Nidesh Lawtoo resume a dialogue on mimetic inclinations in view of furthering a relational, embodied and affective conception of subjectivity that challenges homo erectus from the immanent perspective of homo mimeticus. If a dominant philosophical tradition tends to restrict mimesis to an illusory representation of reality, Plato was the first to know that mimesis also operates as an affective force, or pathos, that dispossesses the subject. While Plato tended to emphasize the pathological implications (...) of mimesis, Cavarero and Lawtoo agree that both mimesis and inclinations go beyond good and evil and can be put to both pathological and democratic use. Picking up a dialogue started during a walk in New York City, Cavarero and Lawtoo, take their shared interests in Joseph Conrad's relating narratives as an occasion to discuss good and bad mimetic inclinations in contemporary politics and ethics. Joined in conclusion by the Gendered Mimesis team (Willow Verkerk, Isabelle Dahms and Giulia Rignano), topics addressed include new fascism, surging democracy, ethical responsibility for vulnerable others, hypermaternity and public happiness in a precarious world. (shrink)

This paper presents a series of 4 single subject experiments aimed to investigate whether children with autism show more social engagement when interacting with the Nao robot, compared to a human partner in a motor imitation task. The Nao robot imitates gross arm movements of the child in real-time. Different behavioral criteria were analyzed based on the video data of the interaction. The results are mixed and suggest a high variability in reactions to the Nao robot. The results are as (...) follows: For Child2 and Child3, the results indicate no effect of the Nao robot in any of the target variables. Child1 and Child4 showed more eye gaze and smile/laughter in the interaction with the Nao robot compared to the human partner and Child1 showed a higher frequency of motor initiations in the interaction with the Nao robot compared to the baselines, but not with respect to the human-interaction. The robot proved to be a better facilitator of shared attention only for Child1. Keywords: human-robot interaction; assistive robotics; autism. (shrink)

This short contribution is written on the occasion of the book discussion of Sophie Loidolt’s Phenomenology of Plurality: Hannah Arendt on Political Intersubjectivity at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory. It presents an attempt to read the two key notions Loidolt elaborates in her book – spaces of meaning and spaces of the public and private – from a critical perspective offered by Judith Butler’s taking up of Arendt’s work. Offering Butler’s conception of social ontology through several major points (...) of contestation with Arendt, I argue against an all too simple reduction of her understanding of the political and normativity to poststructuralist ones. (shrink)

We reconstruct “the classical transformational theory” of Chomsky, and fit it into the structuralist theory of science. We describe both the formal and the empirical features of this classical account, so that one basic hypothesis of this theory – where central notions are used – can be formulated, and in which Chomsky’s “classical” distinction between surface structure and deep structure is clarified. In the empirical claim of this theory are words, sentences and high-structured entities in an inseparable way intertwined. We (...) claim that the formal structure of a natural language is not approximately the same as that of an empirical theory in general. We clarify two special points which affect the structure of the notion of an empirical theory, namely: the delineation of intended applications and the fit between data and models. We hold that the concept of the empirical claim for a linguistic theory should be generalized in comparison with the “standard” structuralist approach. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“A Child Has Been Born unto Us”Arendt on BirthAdriana CavareroTranslated by Silvia Guslandi and Cosette BruhnsIn The Human Condition, at the end of the dense chapter on action, Hannah Arendt reiterates that action, that is, the political faculty for excellence, “is ontologically rooted” in the fact of natality, “like an ever-present reminder that men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to (...) begin” (Arendt 1998, 246).1 To reinforce this argument, Arendt compares action to miracles, and makes an interesting and, as we will see, somewhat perplexing reference to the Bible:[The miracle] is, in other words, the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope, those two essential characteristics of human existence which Greek antiquity ignored altogether.…It is this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their “glad tidings”: “A child has been born unto us.”(HC, 247)The citation is suggestive, but incorrect. In the Gospels, which do announce with true joy the birth of the child, the phrase as it is quoted here does not exist. It appears instead in Isaiah (9:6), translated into English both as “For to us a child is borne,” and, in the version of the King James Bible from which Arendt is plausibly drawing, as “For unto us a child is born.” The error, if indeed it is an error, is thus twofold (see Young-Ah Gottlieb 2003, 136ff.), since [End Page 12] both the passage referenced and the words cited are incorrect. That Arendt frequently cites from memory, and that the citations tend to be bibliographically incorrect, is known to her interpreters, but in this case the error ends up being quite significant. As is well known, the prophetic text carries a strong Messianic burden, and such a burden would trouble significantly the thesis that Arendt is here illustrating; the Gospels’ message creates instead fewer obstacles to her strategy of framing the meaning of birth within the mundane horizon that in her vocabulary takes the names of “world” or “worldliness.” Since “‘to live’ and to ‘be among men’” mean the same thing (HC, 7), the child, every newborn, that is, every human being that makes its entrance in the world, is not, according to the Arendtian vision, born to us, coming from elsewhere, but appears among us here. The scenario of birth, like that of action, whatever be the holy text that mentions or exemplarily validates them, is, for Arendt, a radically mundane scenario that does not call into question any transcendence or religious instance of salvation.Jewish, secular, and classically trained in Greek and Latin, Arendt, who had little familiarity with the Jewish language and tradition, met Christian thought primarily through Saint Augustine, to whom she dedicated her doctoral thesis (Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin, published in Berlin in 1929 and then in English in 1996 as Love and Saint Augustine), and who remained a constant point of reference throughout her work. A phrase from Augustine—initium ut esset homo creatus est—present in the thesis, appears, in fact, in Arendt’s later texts, including The Human Condition, indeed with obsessive repetitiveness in reference to the category of birth.2 In her monumental work The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, a full seven years prior to The Human Condition, Arendt already writes: “Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identical with man’s freedom. Initium ut esset homo creatus est, ‘that a beginning be made, man was created’, said Augustine. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man” (Arendt 1973, 479). On the philosophically anomalous theme of birth, the contributions of the Christian tradition that Arendt does appreciate are predominantly two: the “glad tidings” that herald the coming of the child, and Augustine’s comments on the narrative of Creation.Natality, Birth, and the Human Condition of... (shrink)

A corpus of 60 articles published in Spanish, English, and Portuguese was analyzed to account for the integrative literature review on the concept of vulnerability from bioethics, identifying the following thematic trends: risk, susceptibility, autonomy, and culture in people and communities. The methodological approach has been mainly qualitative. We found that the disciplines that most addressed the concept belong to the human and social sciences. The authors recommend conducting studies of the concept from people’s perspectives and that ethics committees review (...) the informed consent and information guides according to these results. The categories give way to the concept of vulnerability, which must be analyzed beyond principlism in bioethics. (shrink)

Throughout the history of Christianity, innumerable men and women have consecrated their lives to God in an exclusive and radical way, reproducing in their own lives the very life of Christ. With this, we are going to identify the presence, the fundament and the characteristics of the state of virginal life consecration within the early Church. We will also analyze its contribution and importance within the ecclesial and social spheres of that time. The witness of this form of life calls (...) the attention of the Church and the world to the dignity of human person and of love. It reminds us of its superiority in relation to other creatures and invites us to look towards future realities, where we find our final goal as Christian and human existence. (shrink)

La infamia constituye el modelo ideal de castigo actual, ya que marca el cuerpo real y simbólico de ciertos sujetos, sin ninguna mediación institucional: los individuos y los grupos sociales se arrogan el derecho a imputar, juzgar y castigar. De manera que existen instituciones formales y, además, ciertos colectivos informales que neutralizan, excluyen, matan y encierran real y simbólicamente, ejerciendo un poder para-judicial y para-penal. En palabras más precisas, hay una penalidad que no pasa necesariamente por el poder judicial ni (...) el proceso legal, sino por el tribunal social y psicológico efectuado por algunos agentes de control social informal. La realidad evidencia la absorción progresiva del proceso judicial en el juicio colectivo, sin ninguna garantía ni código distinto a la mirada, el murmullo social y el juicio instantáneo. La sociedad se transforma así en un tribunal permanente que odia, etiqueta y castiga, y cuya inmediatez, espontaneidad y anonimato reaviva la infamia de los viejos sistemas de la penalidad medieval, así como la devastadora marcación totalitaria. (shrink)

La memoria es el principio de la justicia que permite destruir el vínculo entre el poder y la violencia que funda y mantiene el orden del derecho. La justicia de la memoria es, en efecto, una fuerza revolucionaria que anuncia el sufrimiento de los oprimidos, de los vencidos, de los sojuzgados de la historia; es una especie de antihistoria que se rebela ante el poder que somete la vida natural a un estado de excepción permanente; es una justa apelación a (...) la justicia más allá del derecho que permite instaurar un nuevo orden fundado en la vida como potencia y como vida justa. (shrink)

The paper focuses on the ethical teachings of Classical Antiquity philosophers in the poetry of Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, especially on the parallels between the author’s work and the Cynics and the Stoics. The syncretic nature of Gregory’s work, reflected in the assimilation of the teachings of ancient philosophical schools and the then expanding Christianity creates conditions for the explanation and highlighting of basic human virtues. Gregory of Nazianzus’ legacy also draws on the teachings of such philosophers as Plato and (...) Aristotle, but he always approaches them from the perspective of a strictly Christian worldview. He understands philosophy as a moral underlying basis from which one can draw inspiration for a virtuous and happy life. Gregory thinks that philosophy cannot harm Christians in the pursuit of a virtuous life. Nevertheless, Christian teachings and God are the highest authority. They stand above all philosophical schools or ideas advanced by specific philosophers. Gregory’s moral poetry thus directs his readers, if they are to deserve eternal life, to follow the commandments, which is possible only if one lives a practical and virtuous life. (shrink)

By taking into account those operations of modernity initiated by Stendhal and Cézanne, Manet and Proust, which were continued by Merleau-Ponty and Lévi-Strauss, this paper considers Claude Imbert's writings from the perspective of the formative role that literature and painting had and still have in mapping a new rationality. The aim is to show how the philosopher reintegrates such priceless experiences, captured by peculiar literary forms, syntagms, and juxtaposition of genres or pictorial manners, into a conceptual and stylistic invention affecting (...) the very core of philosophical activity. (shrink)

The article approaches the attempts at theoretical reduction of the mental and the social and mantains that the reductionist projects are based on ontological and epistemological presuppositions that relate to an atomist vision of the world that grounds untenable humean conceptions of causality a..

This pathbreaking work pursues two interwoven themes. Firstly, it engages in a deconstruction of Ancient philosopher's texts--mainly from Plato, but also from Homer and Parmenides--in order to free four Greek female figures from the patriarchal discourse which for centuries had imprisoned them in a particular role. Secondly, it attempts to construct a symbolic female order, reinterpreting these figures from a new perspective. Building on the theory of sexual difference, Cavarero shows that death is the central category on which the whole (...) edifice of traditional philosophy is based. By contrast, the category of birth provides the thread with which new concepts of feminist criticism can be woven together to establish a fresh way of thinking. Cavarero develops a philosophical narrative which, by re-interpreting each of the four figures of ancient thought, uncovers several images of the female desire for self-representation. Plato himself had not forseen that one day female subjectivity would assert its autonomy, plundering and throwing into confusion the patriarchal text in order to tell another story. (shrink)

At the very beginning of the history of philosophy, with Plato, we are told the strange story of some men dwelling in a cave and looking at shadows. Immobilized by chains since childhood for all their lives, they are forced to sit on the cave's floor and are impeded from standing up. Hence, whoever they are and whatever they do, the label Homo erectus as a general category denoting the vertical posture of the human animal is decidedly unfit for their (...) position. The strange story, however, goes on and recounts how one of them, by managing to get rid of the chains, for the first time rises to his feet. The familiar feature of Homo erectus, intended not as an extinct hominid species but as the postural human standard .. (shrink)

In his unpublished 1979 Lectures on the Philosophy of Mind, Saul Kripke offers a knowledge argument against materialism focusing on deaf people who lack knowledge of auditory experience. Kripke's argument is a precursor of Frank Jackson's better‐known knowledge argument against materialism (1982). The paper sets out Kripke's argument, brings out its interest and philosophical importance, and explores some similarities and differences between Kripke's knowledge argument and Jackson's.

La paz y la seguridad internacionales no sólo son el resultado de la ausencia de guerras, es decir, no son únicamente el fundamento de la preservación del orden o ausencia de violencia, sino que incluyen también, para ser alcanzadas, aspectos diversos, tales como la seguridad alimentaria. Dentro del abanico de los nuevos riesgos y amenazas a la paz y seguridad internacionales, cada vez más se está teniendo en consideración las repercusiones negativas que tienen las crisis alimentarias y el hambre que (...) sufren en torno a 800 millones de personas en todo el mundo. La preocupación y abordaje de estos temas hizo que por primera vez, el 30 de marzo de 2016, la FAO se dirigiese al Consejo de Seguridad con el objetivo de reafirmar la necesidad de mejorar la seguridad alimentaria como aspecto fundamental para la consolidación de una paz y seguridad internacional sostenibles. (shrink)

The main purpose of this paper is to make a reflection on the war from the work both by Karl von Clausewitz and Raymond Aron. The hypothesis proposed herein is that a misunderstanding of the theories proposed by the Prussian General may have led to an erroneous recognition about him as father of some tactics employed by some totalitarian regimes of the 20th Century in order to crush their opponents. In an effort to corroborate this idea, the analysis will be (...) based on two seminal sources, the Vom Kriege and Thinking about the war, Clausewitz, which will be supplemented by secondary literature comprising books and articles. It is to avoid that local and international conflicts that are unleashed on the world stage be approaching the limits of absolute war is to practice moderation (an essential political understanding) when making decisions related to the military leadership of the confrontation. (shrink)

O espelho da arte clássica se multiplicou em fragmentos e influenciou a arquitetura grega e seus desdobramentos, verificados no decorrer do que rotulamos chamar de história da arte. A arquitetura e o urbanismo praticados pelos gregos, e mais tarde pelos romanos, foi elemento de inspiração para personalidades de liderança e artistas nos grandes períodos históricos da humanidade, onde a cidade era tida como elemento principal da vida política e social dos povos. Do clássico ao neoclássico, o desdobramento inspirado na estética (...) da antiguidade chega ao Brasil através da corte portuguesa e se fortalece com a missão artística francesa, tornando-se uma característica estilística no Brasil do século XIX. Unir, portanto, esses fragmentos estilísticos em busca do verdadeiro reflexo clássico é o objetivo deste artigo. (shrink)

Neste artigo, partindo de uma análise dos conceitos de corpo e potência presentes nas filosofias de Nietzsche e Espinosa, objetivamos mostrar que ambos os filósofos, além de fazerem uma crítica aos valores transcendentes, afirmam a necessidade de criação de novos valores e mostram que para que uma ética afirmativa da vida seja possível há, antes de tudo, a necessidade do aumento de potência da totalidade corpo/ mente, obtido através de uma terapêutica fundada na dinâmica afetiva. Considerando que tanto Nietzsche quanto (...) Espinosa recorrem ao mesmo afeto, o da alegria, para a cura da impotência e apresentam uma terapêutica de caráter estritamente pessoal, recusando a criação de uma ética normativa, concluímos que uma terapêutica que objetiva realmente promover saúde deve ser um processo essencialmente afetivo, pautado em escolhas e ações salutares próprias, e não uma moralização dos atos da vida cotidiana, operada pelos manuais de psicologia do comportamento e de higiene coletiva. (shrink)

In a little over two years of the Jair Bolsonaro administration, questions related to the Amazon, to the environment, and to indigenous peoples have come to the fore among the themes that have mobilized the opposition to the government, both in national and international civil society campaigns as well as in struggles taking place in Congress and in lawsuits in the Supreme Court. In this article, I point out some of these moments, highlighting the history of the president's positions on (...) some of these questions. I demonstrate how his visions contrasts starkly with the premises of most international treaties, with the foundations of Brazil's constitution, with scientific consensus, and with the policies implemented in the country in the past thirty years. The analysis of his anti-environmental policies for the Amazon makes it inevitable to treat the role of the Armed Forces in his government, even though many of the aspects involved still remain to be addressed. (shrink)

This essay answers two questions that continue to drive debate in moral and legal philosophy; namely, ‘Is a risk of harm a wrong?’ and ‘Is a risk of harm a harm?’. The essay’s central claim is that to risk harm can be both to wrong and to harm. This stands in contrast to the respective positions of Heidi Hurd and Stephen Perry, whose views represent prominent extremes in this debate about risks. The essay shows that there is at least one (...) category of risks – intentional impositions of risk on unconsenting agents – which can be both wrongful and harmful. The wrongfulness of these risks can be established when, on the balance of reasons, one ought not to impose them. The harmfulness of these risks can be established when the risks are shown to set back legitimate interests. In those cases where risks constitute a denial of the moral status of agents, risks set back agents’ interest in dignity. In these ways, the essay shows that there are instances when a risk can constitute both a wrong and a harm. (shrink)

Regular musical activity as a complex multimodal lifestyle activity is proposed to be protective against age-related cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s disease. This cross-sectional study investigated the association and interplay between musical instrument playing during life, multi-domain cognitive abilities and brain morphology in older adults from the DZNE-Longitudinal Cognitive Impairment and Dementia Study study. Participants reporting having played a musical instrument across three life periods were compared to controls without a history of musical instrument playing, well-matched for reserve proxies of education, (...) intelligence, socioeconomic status and physical activity. Participants with musical activity outperformed controls in global cognition, working memory, executive functions, language, and visuospatial abilities, with no effects seen for learning and memory. The musically active group had greater gray matter volume in the somatosensory area, but did not differ from controls in higher-order frontal, temporal, or hippocampal volumes. However, the association between gray matter volume in distributed frontal-to-temporal regions and cognitive abilities was enhanced in participants with musical activity compared to controls. We show that playing a musical instrument during life relates to better late-life cognitive abilities and greater brain capacities in OA. Musical activity may serve as a multimodal enrichment strategy that could help preserve cognitive and brain health in late life. Longitudinal and interventional studies are needed to support this notion. (shrink)

International large-scale assessments, such as PISA, provide structured and static data. However, due to its extensive databases, several researchers place it as a reference in Big Data in Education. With the goal of exploring which factors at country, school and student level have a higher relevance in predicting student performance, this paper proposes an Educational Data Mining approach to detect and analyze factors linked to academic performance. To this end, we conducted a secondary data analysis and built decision trees (C4.5 (...) algorithm) to obtain a predictive model of school performance. Specifically, we selected as predictor variables a set of socioeconomic, process and outcome variables from PISA 2018 and other sources (World Bank, 2020). Since the unit of analysis were schools from all the countries included in PISA 2018 (n= 21,903), student and teacher predictor variables were imputed to the school database. Based on the available student performance scores in Reading, Math, and Science, we applied k-means clustering to obtain a categorized (three categories) target variable of global school performance. Results show the existence of two main branches in the decision tree, split according to the schools’ mean socioeconomic status (SES). While performance in high-SES schools is influenced by educational factors such as metacognitive strategies or achievement motivation, performance in low-SES schools is affected in greater measure by country-level socioeconomic indicators such as GDP, and individual educational indicators are relegated to a secondary level. Since these evidences are in line and delve into previous research, this work concludes by analyzing its potential contribution to support the decision making processes regarding educational policies. (shrink)

Among various recent approaches to truth one should distinguish a large family of minimalist accounts, which emphasize that the notion of truth is less substantial than it was traditionally taken for granted. Some philosophers (including, among others, Crispin Wright and Michael P. Lynch) propose to combine this minimalism about the notion of truth with pluralism of some kind, namely the idea that "what property serves as truth may vary from discourse to discourse". Briefly, there is one minimal notion of truth (...) but many properties satisfying it. I consider and contrast two ways of elaborating this interesting and promising view, defended respectively by Wright and Lynch. For Wright the common minimal notion of truth does not express any single property; the notion is simply multiple realized by various properties in different discourses. Lynch amends this view by claiming that the common notion of truth expresses a single property after all: it is a supervenient role property. I argue that more minimalistic Wright's alethic pluralism has certain advantages over functional-supervenient alethic pluralism advocated by Lynch. (shrink)