C. Antoniade -- P.P. Negulescu -- Petre Andrei -- Mihai Ralea -- Tudor Vianu.

El presente texto pretende reivindicar agencias materiales en las prácticas de la pintura al óleo. El artículo comienza presentando algunos debates sobre la importancia de la materialidad desde una estética posthumana, relacional y ecológica inspirada por las teorías de los nuevos materialismos y sus distintos anclajes (la teoría del actor-red, las epistemologías feministas de la tecno-ciencia, la ontología orientada a los objetos o la cultura material post fenomenológica). A continuación, presentaré algunos ejemplos de mediaciones o hibridaciones socio-técnicas en la pintura (...) al óleo donde agencias humanas y no humanas se involucran para articular y sostener los cuadros; pero también para traicionar, interrumpir y asombrar las intenciones de sus autores, la estabilidad de sus pigmentos y la autenticidad de su apreciación estética. Finalmente, desplegaré un proceso de ontogénesis material de un instrumento pictórico, la paleta, como agenciamiento esperanzador para abandonar los dualismos de la modernidad estética. (shrink)

In developed countries, companies are now substantially reliant on the skills and abilities of their leaders to tackle a variety of complex issues. There is a growing consensus that leadership development training and assessment methods should adopt more holistic methodologies, including those associated with the emotional and neuroendocrine aspects of learning. Recent research into the assessment of leadership competencies has proposed the use of objective methods and measurements based on neuroscience. One of the challenges to be faced in the development (...) of a performance-based methodology to measure leadership skills is how to generate real-life situations with triggers that allow us to study management competencies under controlled laboratory conditions. A way to address this question is to take advantage of virtual environments to recreate real-life situations that might arise in performance-based assessments. We propose virtual reality (VR) as a very promising tool to observe various leadership related behavioral patterns during dynamic, complex and realistic situations. By seamlessly embedding assessment methods into virtual learning environments, VR can provide objective assessment methods with high ecological validity. VR also holds unlimited opportunities for leadership training providing subjects with intelligent tutoring systems that adapts situations in real time according to the observed behaviors. (shrink)

We focus here on the intercalary heterochromatin (IH) of Drosophila melanogaster and, in particular, its molecular properties. In the polytene chromosomes of Drosophila, IH is represented by a reproducible set of dense bands scattered along the euchromatic arms. IH contains mainly unique DNA sequences, and shares certain features with other heterochromatin types such as pericentric, telomeric, and PEV‐induced heterochromatin, the inactive mammalian X‐chromosome and the heterochromatized male chromosome set in coccids. These features are transcriptional silencing, chromatin compactness, late DNA replication, (...) underrreplication or elimination in somatic cells, and formation of the heterochromatin state in early embryogenesis. Post‐translational modification of histones and the specific nonhistone protein complexes are shown to participate in the establishment and maintenance of silencing for all heterochromatin types. Many IH regions contain binding sites for HP1 and/or Pc‐G proteins and all the regions are sites of heterochromatin‐associated SuUR protein. Some IH regions are known to contain homeotic genes. Summarizing these data, we suggest that IH regions comprise stable inactivated genes, whose silencing is developmentally programmed. BioEssays 25:1040–1051, 2003. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

My goal in this paper is to contribute to the literature on Roger Bacon's epistemology by focusing on the issue of perception of quantity. The reading I aim to substantiate is that Bacon's account is best understood in terms of indirect realism. I call it indirect realism because although we have access to quantities as they exist in nature, the account is mediated by the use of a quasi-syllogism. The quasi-syllogism is constructed based on three inputs, the species of the (...) eye, colour, and light. To defend this reading I follow five steps. First, I analyse the importance of quantity in perception, and then, in steps two and three, I look at Bacon's theory of perception from its two sides, extramission and intromission. In the fourth step I look at the quasi-syllogisms that mediate cognition of quantities, and in the fifth and final step, I draw all the threads together and make the case for Bacon's indirect realism of quantity perception. (shrink)

Source: Author: Liliya Ponomaryova, Elena Osadcha The problems of forming phonetic skills of the German language which is studied on the basis of the English language have been considered. The aim of this research is to make the comparative analysis of the phonetic aspects of the foreign languages that are taught one after another. There has been the attempt to analyze, generalize and systematize the material on the given topic which is presented in works in German, English, Ukrainian and (...) Russian on the main theoretical questions connected with the process of teaching the second foreign language. It was shown that while forming phonetic skills in German, it is necessary to give the characteristics to the phonetic, rhythmic and intonation peculiarities of both German and English; to point out the difficulties of mastering the pronunciation system of German, to develop the introductory course and the material for phonetic warming-up and to work out the algorithm of introducing a new sound. ]]>. (shrink)

This book is an excellent and accessible overview of the position that children learn the meanings of words by applying a variety of nonlinguistic cognitive tools to the problem. We take issue with Bloom's emphasis on Theory of Mind as an explanatory mechanism for language learning; and with his claim that only unitary objects are nameable.

This paper deals with the problem of continuity and discreteness of human consciousness. The author starts with the analysis of the “linguistic turn” in the philosophy of the 20th century when language was for the first time regarded as an autonomous essence. While stressing the illegitimacy of overestimating of linguistic discreteness, the author identifies three types of concepts, which help to understand differently the connection between continuum and discreteness. These are “the level concepts”, where the semantic and sensitive dimensions of (...) the language are highlighted; “the concepts of complementarity”, which show that the discreteness is always accompanied by continuum (“non-verbal moments of communication”, etc.), and “the concepts of reference”, where the nonverbal and hidden cultural codes of language are explicated (viz. theories of symbols, linguo pragmatics, etc.). (shrink)

Ist ein Philosophieren durch Bilder möglich? Elena Filippi betritt ein kaum erforschtes Gebiet, indem sie die Philosophie Albrecht Dürers nicht etwa in seinen Schriften, sondern in einer Reihe von bildnerischen Meisterwerken untersucht, in welchen die docta manus des Malers und Zeichners grundlegende Beiträge zu den überlieferten Fragen der Philosophie – wie sie sich insbesondere in der platonischen Tradition stellten, aber auch in der Rezeption des Nicolaus Cusanus in Nürnberg fanden – geleistet hat. Um 1500, als seine künstlerische und menschliche (...) Bildung eine erste Vollendung erreicht, beginnt Dürer, sich intensiv mit philosophischen Themen zu beschäftigen.0Der permanente Widerstreit zwischen ‚MaǑ und ‚Maßlosigkeit‘ prägt als entscheidendes ethisches Motiv Dürers Denken und wird wegweisend für seine Kunst. Darin artikuliert sich die Schlüsselfrage nach dem Wesen der Gerechtigkeit, die Dürers gesamtes Schaffen durchzieht und in der Suche nach einem möglichen einheitlichen „ grvndt“, einen Kristallisationspunkt seines philosophischen Denkens bildet.0Der Künstler Albrecht Dürer als „ philosophus“: Filippi erschließt dieses historisch und systematisch reizvolle Motiv erstmals interdisziplinär, indem sie zentrale Interpretationsansätze aus Kunstgeschichte und Philosophie miteinander verbindet. (shrink)

Cette étude se propose de vérifier l’efficacité des collocations en tant qu’indice pour distinguer les genres textuels. De plus, elle a le double objectif d’aborder l’exploration de la variabilité de l’italien en utilisant des méthodologies computationnelles, et de vérifier l’efficacité d’une nouvelle mesure d’association dans l’étude des collocations.Quatre typologies de collocations ont été analysées (verbe-nom, nom-adjectif, nom-nom et nom-préposition-nom) dans six genres textuels différents, dont trois sont écrits (textes littéraires, textes académiques et compositions scolaires) et trois sont oraux (conversations, discours (...) et dialogues filmiques).La fréquence des collocations dans les différents genres montre que chaque typologie de texte a des préférences spécifiques pour des typologies de collocations spécifiques; la seule fréquence et la seule distinction entre textes écrits et oraux, toutefois, ne réussit pas à interpréter cette différente distribution selon un modèle cohérent. A cet effet, la mesure statistique de la gravité lexicale semble posséder une efficacité majeure, comme nous essayerons de démontrer. (shrink)

We define proof nets for cyclic multiplicative linear logic as edge bi-coloured graphs. Our characterization is purely graph theoretical and works without further complication for proof nets with cuts, which are usually harder to handle in the non-commutative case. This also provides a new characterization of the proof nets for the Lambek calculus (with the empty sequence) which simply are a restriction on the formulas to be considered (which are asked to be intuitionistic).

The essay focuses on the Italian evolutionist Tito Vignoli, whose work is the result of a fruitful contamination between philosophy, history of religion, linguistics, ethnography, anthropology, psychology, zoology and physiology. His most regarded book, Mito e scienza (1879), and some of his minor writings deal with the theory of myth, art and aesthetics in the new framework of Darwin's ideas.

This essay argues that according to feminist existential phenomenology, feminist pragmatism, and feminist genealogy, our embodied condition is an important starting place for ethical living due to the inevitable role that habits play in our conduct. In bodies, the phenomenon of habit uniquely holds together the ambiguities of freedom and determinism, transcendence and immanence, and stability and plasticity. Seeing habit formation as a matter of self-growth and social justice gives fresh opportunity for thinking of “assuming ambiguity” as a lifelong endeavor (...) made up of many small projects and practices of situated resistance to stagnation. Transcendence, understood as ameliorative transformation, is found in cultivating habits of learning from our bodily living. I articulate this argument via a reading of Simone de Beauvoir's The Coming of Age, John Dewey's Human Nature and Conduct, and Ladelle McWhorter's Bodies and Pleasures. I discuss two domains wherein the ethical significance of habit formation appears: cognitive psychological research on neural plasticity, and certain projects of self-cultivation that risk turning into overdetermining “cult of the self ” practices that close off possibilities for personal and collective transformation. (shrink)

This essay frames systemic patterns of mental abuse against women of color and Indigenous women on Turtle Island (North America) in terms of larger design-of-distribution strategies in settler colonial societies, as these societies use various forms of social power to distribute, reproduce, and automate social inequalities (including public health precarities and mortality disadvantages) that skew socio-economic gain continuously toward white settler populations and their descendants. It departs from traditional studies in gender-based violence research that frame mental abuses such as gaslighting--commonly (...) understood as mental manipulation through lying or deceit--stochastically, as chance-driven interpersonal phenomena. Building on structural analyses of knowledge in political epistemology (Dotson 2012, Berenstain 2016), political theory (Davis and Ernst 2017), and Indigenous social theory (Tuck and Yang 2012), I develop the notion of cultural gaslighting to refer to the social and historical infrastructural support mechanisms that disproportionately produce abusive mental ambients in settler colonial cultures in order to further the ends of cultural genocide and dispossession. I conclude by proposing a social epidemiological account of gaslighting that a) highlights the public health harms of abusive ambients for minority populations, b) illuminates the hidden rules of social structure in settler colonial societies, and c) amplifies the corresponding need for structural reparations. (shrink)

The first to use Judith Butlers work as a reading of how the legal subject is formed, this book traces how Butler comes to the themes of ethics, law and ...

Coordination is a widely employed term across recent quantitative and qualitative approaches to intersubjectivity, particularly approaches that give embodiment and enaction central explanatory roles. With a focus on linguistic and bodily coordination in conversational contexts, I review the operational meaning of coordination in recent empirical research and related theorizing of embodied intersubjectivity. This discussion articulates what must be involved in treating linguistic meaning as dynamic processes of coordination. The coordination approach presents languaging as a set of dynamic self-organizing processes and (...) actions on multiple timescales and across multiple modalities that come about and work in certain domains (those jointly constructed in social, interactive, high-order sense-making). These processes go beyond meaning at the level that is available to first-person experience. I take one crucial consequence of this to be the ubiquitously moral nature of languaging with others. Languaging coordinates experience, among other levels of behavior and event. Ethical effort is called for by the automatic autonomy-influencing forces of languaging as coordination. (shrink)

This is the review paper for the section III ("Symmetry breaking") of the volume "Symmetries in physics: philosophical reflections", Cambridge University Press, 2003, edited by Katherine A. Brading and Elena Castellani. The paper's sections are: 1. Preliminaries (I); 2. Symmetry breaking and Curie's analysis; 3. Preliminaries (II); 4. Symmetry breaking of physical laws (4.1. Explicit symmetry breaking; 4.2. Spontaneous symmetry breaking); 5. Symmetry breaking and philosophical questions.

This paper addresses the phenomenological experience of precarity and vulnerability in racialized gender-based violence from a structural perspective. Informed by Indigenous social theory and anti-colonial approaches to intergenerational trauma that link settler colonial violence to the modalities of stress-inducing social, institutional, and cultural violences in marginalized women’s lives, I argue that philosophical failures to understand trauma as a functional, organizational tool of settler colonial violence amplify the impact of traumatic experience on specific populations. It is trauma by design. I explore (...) this through the history of the concept of trauma and its connection to tragedy. I give a brief overview of prominent theories of trauma and contrast these with the work of Indigenous feminist scholar Dian Million (2013), who highlights functional complicity of settler colonial institutions in shaping accounts of trauma in the west. I begin the piece with an important illustration of the kinds of lives and experiences that call for a politicized understanding of trauma in anti-colonial feminist theory. I end by offering an expansive notion of structural trauma that is a methodological pivot for conducting trauma-based gender-based violence research in a decolonial context, which calls for an end to narratives of trauma that are severed from the settler colonial project of Native land dispossession and genocide. [Volume 23, no.1]. (shrink)

The question whether AI systems have agency is gaining increasing importance in discussions of responsibility for AI behavior. This paper argues that an approach to artificial agency needs to be teleological, and consider the role of human goals in particular if it is to adequately address the issue of responsibility. I will defend the view that while AI systems can be viewed as autonomous in the sense of identifying or pursuing goals, they rely on human goals and other values incorporated (...) into their design, and are, as such, dependent on human agents. As a consequence, AI systems cannot be held morally responsible, and responsibility attributions should take into account normative and social aspects involved in the design and deployment of the said AI. My argument falls in line with approaches critical of attributing moral agency to artificial agents, but draws from the philosophy of action, highlighting further philosophical underpinnings of current debates on artificial agency. (shrink)

This essay addresses structural violence against Latinas by looking at the existential toll different forms of cultural violence take on us. In particular, it looks at linguistic violence and the role lesser-known violences play in the intergenerational continuation of colonial violence, such as hermeneutic violence. Defined as violence done to systems of meaning and interpretation, hermeneutic violence is discussed at length in relation to the experience of harm and injury. The essay further explores some resistant epistemic practices Latina feminists have (...) generated to address systemic violence. The work of Gloria Anzaldúa is elaborated as an example of resistant epistemic practices. (shrink)

Whoever paid the bill at the restaurant last night, will clearly remember doing it. Independently from the type of action, it is a common experience that being the agent provides a special strength to our memories. Even if it is generally agreed that personal memories (episodic memory) rely on separate neural substrates with respect to general knowledge (semantic memory), little is known on the nature of the link between memory and the sense of agency. In the present paper, we review (...) results from two experiments investigating the effects of agency on both explicit and implicit memory traces. Performance of normal subjects is compared to that of schizophrenic patients in order to explore the role of awareness of action on memory. It is proposed that reliable first-person information is necessary to create a stable and coherent motor memory trace. (shrink)

The justification of democracy, while widely debated, is hindered by a sub-optimal conceptual framework. For a start, there is confusion about the basic terms in the discussion. Many theorists claim to support either the ‘intrinsic’ or the ‘instrumental’ value of democracy, but it is unclear what this exactly means. Can democracy have other kinds of values? What does it mean to value democracy intrinsically? As a result, at certain points, scholars are talking past one another and their assessments of their (...) respective approaches to democracy are less clear than what they intended. This paper develops a conceptual framework of the values of democracy. I use this framework to classify theories of democracy under three main groups: theories that value democracy intrinsically, instrumentally, or contributorily (necessarily and non-necessarily). Through this analysis, the points of engagement among the different approaches will emerge and flawed arguments about democracy will be revealed. (shrink)

AfterTranscritique: On Kant and Marx, Karatani Kōjin’s new bookThe Structure of World Historypresents another engagement with Marxian theory from a ‘heterodox’ standpoint. In this book, rather than viewingThe Structure of World Historyfrom the aspect of mode of production in the conventional ‘Marxist’ sense, Karatani shifts perspective to the modes of exchange. To this end, Karatani appropriates what he sees as Marx’s emphasis on ‘exchange’. In the present essay, by looking at the textual evidence, I critically evaluate whether this appropriation of (...) Marx’s theory is justified. I furthermore contend that Karatani’s reading of the concepts of value, money, capital, and surplus-value from the standpoint of ‘exchange’ arises from a grave misconstrual of Marx’s critical intent. Accordingly, Karatani neglects the critique of exploitation and the systematic production of poverty that informs the basic assumptions of Marx’s analysis of the capitalist mode of production. (shrink)

Intersectionality is a term that arose within the black feminist intellectual tradition for the purposes of identifying interlocking systems of oppression. As a descriptive term, it refers to the ways human identity is shaped by multiple social vectors and overlapping identity categories (such as sex, race, class) that may not be readily visible in single-axis formulations of identity, but which are taken to be integral to robustly capture the multifaceted nature of human experience. As a diagnostic term, it captures the (...) confluence of power and domination on the social construction of identity in order to remedy concrete harms that result from this convergence. It is not a prescriptive methodology or closed system of analysis, but rather an open-ended hermeneutic lens through which interconnected systems of oppression can come into focus in the fight for social justice. (shrink)

In recent years postcolonial and decolonial feminisms have become increasingly salient in philosophy, yet they are often deployed as conceptual stand-ins for generalized feminist critiques of eurocentrism (without reference to the material contexts anti-colonial feminisms emanate from), or as a platform to re-center internal debates between dominant European theories/ists under the guise of being conceptually ‘decolonized’. By contrast, this article focuses on the specific contexts, issues and lifeworld concerns that ground anti-colonial feminisms and provides a brief survey of the literature. (...) Because the terms implicated in the analysis (Third World, transnational, women of color, postcolonial, decolonial and indigenous feminisms) are highly contested on their own, I only provide provisional and non-foundational histories and definitions for the purposes of resisting philosophical appropriations of anti-colonial feminist theory. (shrink)

: By introducing us into core concepts of Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social systems, Elena Esposito shows their relevance for contemporary social sciences and the study of unsettled times….

This chapter proceeds in two ways. First, I argue that Fanon’s structural witnessing of racism yields important insights about the nature of violence that challenges the settler colonial concept of violence as the extra-legal use of force. Second, I argue that his analysis of violence is insufficient for combating colonial racism and violence because, using the terms of his own analysis, it leaves intact logics and mechanisms that allow racism to structurally renew itself in perpetuity: violence against women. Without a (...) critical feminism that tracks the alterities of structural violence against women, and women of color in particular, Fanonianism is just another lifeline of colonialism. I thus caution against uncritical uses of Fanon’s structural account of violence for any emancipatory social theory that fails to acknowledge the attendant alterities, asymmetries, and axes of coordinated subordination involved in racialized violence against women. (shrink)

"Now in its third edition, this classic text remains the seminal resource for in-depth information about major concepts and principles of the cultural-historical theory developed by Lev Vygotsky, his students, and colleagues, as well as three generations of neo-Vygotskian scholars in Russia and the West. Featuring two new chapters on brain development and scaffolding in the zone of proximal development, as well as additional content on technology, dual language learners, and students with disabilities, this new edition provides the latest research (...) evidence supporting the basics of the cultural-historical approach alongside Vygotskian-based practical implications. With concrete explanations and strategies on how to scaffold young children's learning and development, this book is essential reading for students of early childhood theory and development"--. (shrink)

The enactive approach to cognition distinctively emphasizes autonomy, adaptivity, agency, meaning, experience, and interaction. Taken together, these principles can provide the new sciences of language with a comprehensive philosophical framework: languaging as adaptive social sense-making. This is a refinement and advancement on Maturana’s idea of languaging as a manner of living. Overcoming limitations in Maturana’s initial formulation of languaging is one of three motivations for this paper. Another is to give a response to skeptics who challenge enactivism to connect “lower-level” (...) sense-making with “higher-order” sophisticated moves like those commonly ascribed to language. Our primary goal is to contribute a positive story developed from the enactive account of social cognition, participatory sense-making. This concept is put into play in two different philosophical models, which respectively chronicle the logical and ontogenetic development of languaging as a particular form of social agency. Languaging emerges from the interplay of coordination and exploration inherent in the primordial tensions of participatory sense-making between individual and interactive norms; it is a practice that transcends the self-other boundary and enables agents to regulate self and other as well as interaction couplings. Linguistic sense-makers are those who negotiate interactive and internalized ways of meta-regulating the moment-to-moment activities of living and cognizing. Sense-makers in enlanguaged environments incorporate sensitivities, roles, and powers into their unique yet intelligible linguistic bodies. We dissolve the problematic dichotomies of high/low, online/offline, and linguistic/nonlinguistic cognition, and we provide new boundary criteria for specifying languaging as a prevalent kind of human social sense-making. (shrink)

The rise of East Asian Confucian heritage societies (China, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam and Singapore) has inspired an enormous amount of new empirical research. At the political level, one...

A common approach for measuring the effectiveness of an education system or a school is the estimation of the impact that school interventions have on students’ academic performance. However, the latest trends aim to extend the focus beyond students’ acquisition of knowledge and skills, and to consider aspects such as well-being in the academic context. For this reason, the 2015 edition of the international assessment system PISA incorporated a new tool aimed at evaluating the socio-affective variables related to the well-being (...) of students. It is based on a definition focused on the five dimensions proposed in PISA theoretical framework: cognitive, psychological, social, physical and material. The main purpose of this study is to identify the well-being components that significantly affect student academic performance and to estimate the magnitude of school effects on the well-being of students in OECD countries, the school effect being understood as the ability of schools to increase subjective student well-being. To achieve this goal, we analyzed the responses of 234,000 students from thirty-five OECD countries to PISA 2015 questionnaires. Specifically, we considered non-cognitive variables in the questionnaires and student performance in science. The results indicated that the cognitive well-being dimension, composed of enjoyment of science, self-efficacy and instrumental motivation, as well as the test anxiety all had a consistent relationship with student performance across countries. In addition, the school effect, estimated through a two-level hierarchical linear model, in terms of student well-being was systematically low. While the school effect accounted for approximately 25% of the variance in the results for the cognitive dimension, only 5-9% of variance in well-being indicators was attributable to it. This suggests that the influence of school on student welfare is weak, and the effect is similar across countries. The present study contributes to the general discussion currently underway about the definition of well-being and the connection between well-being and achievement. The results highlighted two complementary concerns: there is a clear need to promote socio-emotional education in schools, and it is important to develop a rigorous framework for well-being assessment. The implications of the results and proposals for future studies are discussed. (shrink)

Is there more that one "Curie's principle"? How far are different formulations legitimate? What are the aspects that make it so scientifically fruitful, independently of how it is formulated? The paper is devoted to exploring these questions. We start with illustrating Curie's original 1894 article and his focus. Then, we consider the way that the discussion of the principle took shape from early commentators to its modern form. We say why we think that the modern focus on the inter-state version (...) of the principle loses sight of some of the most interesting significant applications of the principle. Finally, we address criticism of the principle put forward by Norton and purported counterexamples due to Roberts. (shrink)

The red pill or the blue pill? Obviously the red. But are we sure it will work the way it is supposed to? Are we sure it will take us out of the Matrix? We are proud to announce that we have found a document that will throw some new light (and a renewed cloud of suspicion) on this matter: the product packaging of RedPill®, complete with all directions for use and warnings against side-effects.

With a foreword by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and a chapter by Irigaray responding to her commentators, this book is an essential text for those in social ...

East Asia’s economy is leading the world into the new Asian century. While meritocratic practices in the educational and private sectors are often considered pivotal conditions for East Asia’s economic success, experts have pointed out that the path ahead requires new approaches to ensure social cohesion and stability, which depend on the quality of relations across social divides. These considerations raise multiple questions for philosophers: What forms of social meritocracy are necessary to sustain social cohesion? Moreover, how can the detrimental (...) effects of meritocratic practices be contained? Is it possible to utilise some of the intellectual resources indigenous to East Asia to generate innovative solutions? This paper argues that the answers to these questions lie in the indigenous Confucian conceptual resources. Confucian ideas can inspire a more desirable societal ideal for the future of East Asia. In particular, the Confucian emphasis on cultivating reciprocal harmonious human relationships and others’ morality can guide new approaches to fostering social cohesion. As Confucian personal cultivation through harmonious relations is a process of social cohesion, these ideas inspire a) a multiple approach to policymaking that is not only grounded in economic redistribution, b) a richer understanding of societal progress, and c) a democratic approach to fostering social cohesion. Unlike Confucian meritocrats and scholars who defend the Confucian roots of East Asian forms of political and social meritocracy, this paper proves that Confucian conceptual resources can help formulate a societal vision that strengthens cohesion and mitigates the adverse effects of meritocratic practices. (shrink)