La política de relaciones internacionales de los países del bloque occidental puso en marcha a mediados del siglo XX las políticas de cooperación al desarrollo. En España, a partir de los años 50 surgieron ONGD que iniciaron su camino en la cooperación al desarrollo, entre ellas Manos Unidas. La evolución del propio concepto de desarrollo y de cooperación al desarrollo fue recogida en los diferentes boletines informativos que se publicaban en Manos Unidas y reflejan los avances realizados en las diferentes (...) etapas. Este artículo analiza las acciones de desarrollo y de cooperación internacional a través de las publicaciones realizadas por la ONGD Manos Unidas. (shrink)

El presente artículo expone una redescripción de la primera persona gramatical en términos de su funcionamiento lógico-pragmático: qué ─acción─ cuenta como práctica lingüística de enunciación de “yo” como operación anafórica. Para conseguir este propósito, se utiliza la noción de anáfora como vínculo inferencial con estructuras suboracionales substituibles, y estas a su vez con estructuras proposicionales articuladas inferencialmente. Además, se cuenta con la noción de juegos de lenguaje y formas de vida ─Lebensformen─ en tanto adiestramiento para la práctica de dicho jugador. (...) En este sentido, se sigue plenamente la estructura que Robert Brandom desarrolla en hacerlo explícito. En definitiva, el enunciante de “yo” debe articular los contenidos conceptuales que se adscribe de manera anafórica para que se establezca un entramado coherente de compromisos deónticos. (shrink)

A la secció 25 de la dissertació tercera de La genealogia de la moral, en el context de la recerca de «l’antagonista natural de l’ideal ascètic», es descriu l’antagonisme «Plató contra Homer» com «l’antagonisme autèntic i total». Aquest article emmarca aquest antagonisme en el conjunt de l’obra nietzscheana i, després d’analitzar com es planteja en la República de Plató, fa algunes remarques sobre el paper que interpreta en el pensament de l’últim Nietzsche. El seu propòsit és argumentar que la presa (...) en consideració de la interpretació i l’ús que Nietzsche fa de l’antagonisme «Plató contra Homer» permet obtenir una perspectiva hermenèutica des de la qual es poden contemplar aspectes habitualment desatesos de l’antagonisme decisiu, i no menys total, que té com a camp de batalla les últimes obres nietzscheanes: el «combat contra Plató» del mateix Nietzsche, que coincideix amb el seu combat per l’abandonament de la metafísica i l’autosupressió de la moral. (shrink)

Despite the emphasis placed by most curricula in the development of social and emotional competencies in education, there seems to be a general lack of knowledge of methods that integrate strategies for assessing these competencies into existing educational practices. Previous research has shown that the development of social and emotional competencies in children has multiple benefits, as they seem to contribute to better physical and mental health, an increase in academic motivation, and the well-being and healthy social progress of children. (...) This study aims at assessing the possible changes in children’s self-esteem, socio-emotional competencies, and school-related variables after participating in the Learning to Be project (L2B) project.Methods:This quasi-experimental study included an intervention group (L2B) and a control group. The participants were 221 students in primary education (55.2% girls) between the ages of eight and 11 (M= 9.31; SD = 0.89). The L2B intervention program took place over a period of 5 months. The assessment was carried out twice, before and after the intervention through three main evaluation instruments: the Rosenberg’s Self-Esteem questionnaire, the Socio-Emotional competence questionnaire (SEQ), and self-report scales for measuring school difficulties, school engagement, opinions about school, and school absence. Ten schools from different Spanish provinces participated.Results:The results indicate that those participants in the experimental group show higher self-esteem, better responsible decisions, and higher self-awareness than those in the control group. There were no other statistical differences between groups.Conclusions:The results of this work suggest that the implementation of the L2B program did not improve social and emotional competencies in primary school students. Further research related to how include formative assessment in SEL programs is needed. (shrink)

Durante la última década se ha producido un importante desarrollo de prácticas que formulan propuestas alternativas a los modos de producción, consumo e intercambio dominantes. Este artículo analiza el tejido de prácticas económicas alternativas en la ciudad de Valladolid, una ciudad media alejada de los contextos urbanos sobre los que se ha construido el cuerpo teórico que indaga en el potencial transformador de redes de consumo, mercados de trueque, bancos de tiempo, monedas sociales o huertos comunitarios. El trabajo, consciente del (...) valor del contexto y de la escala, propone para ciudades como la estudiada una relectura que sitúa dicho potencial no en el ámbito económico, sino en el de la práctica y la experiencia social y en el de la cultura política.The last decade has witnessed an important development of practices that involve alternative proposals to the dominant production, consumption and exchange patterns. In the present article, we present an analysis of the interwoven patterns of alternative economic practices in Valladolid, a mid-sized city in Spain. This urban profile differs from the cities that have typically been used to design the body of research on the transformation power that consumer networks, bartering, time banking, social coin and community orchards have. Taking into account the value of both the context and the scale under investigation, this study proposes a reanalysis for these types of cities: under this view, the potential is not placed in the economic sphere but rather in the social practice and experience as well as in the political culture. (shrink)

A total of 378 mathematics undergraduates (selected for being strong at “systemizing”) and 414 students in other (control) disciplines at Cambridge University were surveyed with two questions: (1) Do you have a diagnosed autism spectrum condition? (2) How many relatives in your immediate family have a diagnosed autism spectrum condition? Results showed seven cases of autism in the math group (or 1.85%) vs one case of autism in the control group (or 0.24%), a ninefold difference that is significant. Controlling for (...) sex and general population sampling, this represents a three- to sevenfold increase for autism spectrum conditions among the mathematicians. There were 7 of 1,405 (or 0.5%) cases of autism in the immediate families of the math group vs 2 of 1,669 (or 0.1%) cases in the immediate families of the control group, which again is a significant difference. These results confirm a link between autism and systemizing, and they suggest this link is genetic given the association between autism and first-degree relatives of mathematicians. (shrink)

Prisoners sometimes die in prison, either due to natural illness, violence, suicide, or a result of imprisonment. The purpose of this study is to understand deaths in custody using qualitative methodology and to argue for a comprehensive definition of death in custody that acknowledges deaths related to the prison environment. Interviews were conducted with 33 experts, who primarily work as lawyers or forensic doctors with national and/or international organisations. Responses were coded and analysed qualitatively. Defining deaths in custody according to (...) the place of death was deemed problematic. Experts favoured a dynamic approach emphasising the link between the detention environment and occurrence of death rather than the actual place of death. Causes of deaths and different patterns of deaths were discussed, indicating that many of these deaths are preventable. Lack of an internationally recognised standard definition of death in custody is a major concern. Key aspects such as place, time, and causes of death as well as relation to the prison environment should be debated and incorporated into the definition. Systematic identification of violence within prison institutions is critical and efforts are needed to prevent unnecessary deaths in prison and to protect vulnerable prisoners. (shrink)

El presente artículo expone una redescripción de la primera persona gramatical en términos de su funcionamiento lógico-pragmático: qué -acción- cuenta como práctica lingüística de enunciación de “yo” como operación anafórica. Para conseguir este propósito, se utiliza la noción de anáfora como vínculo inferencial con estructuras suboracionales substituibles, y estas a su vez con estructuras proposicionales articuladas inferencialmente. Además, se cuenta con la noción de juegos de lenguaje y formas de vida -Lebensformen- en tanto adiestramiento para la práctica de dicho jugador. (...) En este sentido, se sigue plenamente la estructura que Robert Brandom desarrolla en Hacerlo explícito. En definitiva, el enunciante de “yo” debe articular los contenidos conceptuales que se adscribe de manera anafórica para que se establezca un entramado coherente de compromisos deónticos. (shrink)

The accuracy of proxies when they interpret advance directives or apply substituted decision-making criteria has been called into question. It therefore became important to know if the Andalusian Advance Directive Form (AADF) can help to increase the accuracy of proxies' predictions. The aim of this research was to compare the effect of the AADF on the accuracy of proxies' predictions about patients' preferences with that gained from informative and deliberative sessions about end-of-life decision making. A total of 171 pairs of (...) patients and their proxies were randomized to three groups. The control group's answers to the Life Sustaining Preferences Questionnaire (LSPQ) were compared with their proxies' answers to the same questionnaire. In one intervention group, the patients had already completed the AADF and given it to their proxies, who used it to guide their own answers to the LSPQ. In the second intervention (discussion) group, both patients and proxies attended two educative sessions guided by trained nurses and later filled in the LSPQ. Comparisons of accuracy and other variables showed a strong association with the discussion group. The findings show that promoting communication between patients and their proxies improves the accuracy of proxies' predictions much more than isolated use of the AADF form. (shrink)

Firm managers play an important role in the implementation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) actions. Education is emerging as the key factor in developing a sense of moral responsibility amongst the business students who will eventually become company managers and decision makers. The aim of this research is, thus, twofold. First, to analyze the existence of a direct positive correlation between university students’ perception of CSR and its impact on business performance; and second, to examine the extent to which two (...) factors (advantages brought by CSR and responsibilities toward stakeholders) act as mediation variables in the aforementioned correlation. The analysis was performed with a sample of 390 business‐related university students. Amongst the potential contributions made by this study we can highlight the possibility of knowing future managers’ way of thinking and of knowing the aspects where educational centers might improve their CSR teaching. (shrink)

Objective: To measure the stability of life-sustaining treatment preferences amongst older people and analyse the factors that influence stability. Design: Longitudinal cohort study. Setting: Primary care centres, Granada (Spain). Eighty-five persons age 65 years or older. Participants filled out a questionnaire with six contexts of illness (LSPQ-e). They had to decide whether or not to receive treatment. Participants completed the questionnaire at baseline and 18 months later. Results: 86 percent of the patients did not change preferences. Sex, age, marital status, (...) hospitalisation, and self-perception of health and pain did not affect preferences. Morbidity and the death of a relative did. Conclusion: Stability of preferences of older persons in relation to end-of-life decisions seems to be more probable than instability. Some factors, such as the death of a relative or the increase in morbidity, can change preferences. These findings have implications for advance directives (ADs) and advance care planning. (shrink)

: This article presents a definition of action that links empirical facts with normative reasons to form an explanation of rational agency with predictive capabilities. This idea is developed along the lines of pragmatism which holds that a set of beliefs is a matter of linguistic evaluation from a particular community. This notion is related to the idea of facts as empirical information that is cognitively apprehended. Such information is regarded as an input which is later contrasted to expected behavioral (...) responses from the agent. The deviation of such observed behavior with respect to the expected one represents an evaluative output that is understood as the definition of reasonably expected behavior. Action is, thus, understood as the outcome of such an evaluative process. (shrink)

The paper consists of a reflexive exercise in which Herbert Simon's views concerning science are applied to his own research. It argues that what connected his ventures into so many different disciplinary domains was a search for complex, hierarchical systems. In the process, the paper establishes a close connection between Simon's insights and his focus on simulation. Instead of simulating Simon on a computer, though, it simulates Simon on paper. This exercise is then contrasted with Simon's own attempts to simulate (...) science. This comparison leads to a reflexive evaluation of Simon's simulations. (shrink)

: This paper discusses how Herbert Simon's initial interest in decision making became transformed into a focus on understanding human problem solving in response to the concrete conditions of the Cold War and the practical goals of the military. In particular, it suggests a connection between the seachange in Simon's interest and his shift in patronage. As a result, Simon is portrayed as a component of the scientific-military World War II cyborg that further evolved during the Cold War. Moving from (...) decision making to problem solving, Simon's cyborg science not only required large sums of money, but also managed to acquire these. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this article we analyze the attempt that young Simone Weil made for thinking time and change, and for deciphering the participation that the world and the mind may have in its configuration. To achieve this, we set out to elucidate two concepts that we believe synthesize her approach: the first one is astonishment, understood both in its quality of incessant intuition that reveals the human impotence to understand the present, and in its quality as a mediating instance between (...) ignorance and approximate human science of the phenomenal field. The second concept we analyze is that of directed time, significant of the first Weilian philosophy in that it reveals the subjugation of man to the present, the only tangible time. This determination allows us to understand the meaning of the past as an abolished existence, and the future as a virtual nucleus of possibilities towards which the human being prepares his action and work thanks to his faculty to devise projects. Finally, we try to show the problematic tension that young Weil discerned between the law of the immediacy of the world, and the law of time that imposes intermediate steps to the realization of all human activity. (shrink)

Resumen La cuestión del tiempo es uno de los principales objetos de estudio que ocuparon a Simone Weil. En efecto, está intensamente presente en su obra desde sus primeros textos hasta sus últimos escritos. La razón es de peso: para esta autora es a través del tiempo que accedemos a la realidad y a toda posibilidad de sentido en sta. Ahora bien, nuestra intención es mostrar que si bien es cierto que la concepción del tiempo de S. Weil, en sus (...) años de madurez, se erige desde una perspectiva espiritualista, mística y religiosa, en su primera época la filósofa se instala en una ontológica fuertemente influenciada por Kant, que la lleva a restringir lo temporal al marco de la experiencia posible, en el sentido que le da el pensador alemán.The question of time is one of the most important subjects in Simone Weil’s philosophy. Indeed, time’s issue is intensively present in her works from her earlier texts until her last writings. This can be explained by the fact that, for this author, it is through time that we can access to reality and find any sense into the latter. That being said, our goal is to show that, if certainly it can be affirmed that S. Weil’s conception of time in her maturity years is constructed from a spiritual, mystic and religious perspective, at the opposite, in her first period, the philosopher settles her views through an ontology strong influenced by Kant, which conducts her to limited temporal matters into the frame of possible experience, according to the definition of this expression given by the German thinker. (shrink)

Resumen: En este trabajo estudiamos la génesis de la concepción de la percepción de Simone Weil. Apoyándonos en algunos textos clave de juventud de la autora, hacemos el seguimiento al manejo que le da la filósofa a la figura mitológica de Proteo y a las nociones de tiempo y espacio. Así, nuestra intención es evidenciar la aparición de los principales fundamentos teóricos que estructurarán la fenomenología weiliana de los años de madurez.2 En este sentido, intentamos demostrar en particular que si (...) bien el proceso perceptivo weiliano de los años de juventud está determinantemente influenciado por la fenomenología kantiana, aparece ya un aporte original en lo que atañe a la relación de la conciencia del sujeto y los datos espaciotemporales que se le revelan al aprehender el objeto.: In this work we study the genesis of Simone Weil's conception of perception. We discuss her use of the notions of time, space, and the mythological figure of Proteus, analyzing some of the author's key early texts. Our goal is to then make clear the appearance of the main important theoretical bases that organize Weil's phenomenology in her mature years. In this way, we try to demonstrate that although the perceptive process as conceived by the young Weil is strongly influenced by Kantian phenomenology, it already appears as an original contribution with regard to the relation between the consciousness of the subject and the spatiotemporal data revealed in the apprehension of the object. (shrink)

En este artículo analizamos la cuestión de la presencia del mundo en los escritos de juventud de Simone Weil, con el objetivo de aprehender su concepción del tiempo. En ese sentido, intentaremos elucidar las relaciones ontológica y epistemológica que ella establece entre el hombre y el mundo. Esta perspectiva nos permite explorar la primera filosofía de la percepción weiliana y trazar las implicaciones existenciales que se desprenden de la experiencia del presente. Igualmente, examinamos la dificultad de pensar la inmovilidad en (...) la realidad humana a partir de la tensión problemática que plantea S.Weil entre las nociones de continuidad y eternidad. Palabras clave: Simone Weil, presencia, mundo, continuidad, eternidad, tiempo. (shrink)

As a 52-year-old academic and mother of three, this research explores the ethics of the question ‘do I have time to go skateboarding?’ Using the themes of time, injury, ageing and learning, it explores the question in relation to Simone de Beauvoir’s ethics of ambiguity. The approach employs autoethnographic and sensory methods to document the authors own experience of learning to skateboard in her late forties and uses learning to skateboard as a vehicle from which to consider time and productivity. (...) Embracing Beauvoir’s ethics of transcendence in navigating the psychological burden of ageing and informing the ongoing methodological approach required for making time to play, the author subverts ideas of progression and knowledge acquisition from childhood to adulthood and explores instead the converse transition from adult to child. The article draws conclusions about the value of lifelong learning and what expanded ideas about productivity mean for our ethical positioning in the world. How being in the skatepark together requires an ethical contract between skateboarders, an unambiguous ethics of being together where adhering to a system of unwritten rules means that everyone has enough space to stay safe. Risk and the time implications of injury are explored throughout in terms of the choices we make at different stages of our lives as we navigate a balance between personal desire and social good. (shrink)

A noção de pessoa, para Simone Weil, passa por uma certa desconstrução e releitura que a filósofa realiza a partir da categoria do impessoal. Abordaremos inicialmente os conceitos de direito e obrigação, refletindo sobre as necessidades da alma pensadas por Weil, em que a obrigação abre o ser humano para o impessoal da pessoa, que por sua vez é conexo com o sentido do eterno e do sagrado. Neste escrito pretende-se resgatar alguns traços desta reflexão e destacar a relação entre (...) o impessoal com o eterno e o sagrado, enquanto constitutivos do ser humano, estudando como a partir do impessoal emerge uma nova percepção da relação ética. (shrink)

A partir de nuestra interpretación de la obra de Simone Weil proponemos dos líneas de lectura para entender su concepción de la identidad individual: primero, mostramos que para la filósofa el hombre construye, a través de su trabajo, la imagen de sí mismo que él busca ser. Mostraremos que esta búsqueda está habitada por un problema fundamental: la repetición de un mecanismo ligado al deseo de expansión del yo, en el que apenas se alcanza el instante de contacto con la (...) imagen proyectada, esta se ve remodelada y vuelta a lanzar al horizonte inalcanzable del deseo. Así, veremos en segundo lugar que en oposición a ese camino de construcción de la identidad que emana de la labor, aparece en la última época weiliana una búsqueda de destrucción del impulso de identificación, que implica una disciplina consciente de control de la expansión del yo y del deseo de poder que le es inherente. From our interpretation of Simone Weil's works, we propose two lecture lines to understand her conception of individual identity: first, we show that, according to Weil, man builds, through his work, the image of himself that he attempts to be. We will show that, behind this search, there is a structural problem: the repetition of an mechanism related to the self's desire of expansion, where, as soon as the instant of contact with the projected image is reached, this image is remodeled and launched forward until the unreachable horizon of desire. And secondly, we will see that in opposition to this path of identity's construction which arises from work, in the last weilian period it appears a search of destruction of the identification momentum, that implies a conscious discipline of control of the self's expansion and the desire of power which is related. (shrink)

Dance is regarded as visual art form by common arts and science perspectives. Definitions of dance as means of communication agree that its message is conveyed by the dancer/choreographer via the human body for the observer, leaving no doubt that dance is performed to be watched. Brain activation elicited by the visual perception of dance has also become a topic of interest in cognitive neuroscience, with regards to action observation in the context of learning, expertise and aesthetics. The view that (...) the aesthetic experience of dance is primarily a visual one is still shared by many artists and cultural institutions, yet there is growing interest in making dance performances accessible for individuals with visual impairment / blindness. Means of supporting the non-visual experience of dance include verbal (audio description), auditive (choreographed body sounds, movement sonification), and haptic (touch tour) techniques, applied for different purposes by artists and researchers, with three main objectives: to strengthen the cultural participation of a non-sighted audience in the cultural and aesthetic experience of dance; to expand the scope of dance as an artistic research laboratory toward novel ways of perceiving what dance can convey; and to inspire new lines of (neuro-cognitive) research beyond watching dance. Reviewing literature from different disciplines and drawing on the personal experience of an inclusive performance of Simon Mayer's “Sons of Sissy,” we argue that a non-exclusively visual approach can be enriching and promising for all three perspectives and conclude by proposing hypotheses for multidisciplinary lines of research. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Toward a Political Economy of the Libro De AlexandreSimone Pinet (bio)The carefully composed and craftily pronounced stanzas of the thirteenth-century Libro de Alexandre, if mostly a (free) translation of Gautier de Châtillon’s Alexandreis, provide readers with glimpses of northern Iberia in descriptions and comparisons, but especially through curious formulations and eloquent rewritings.1 These incite the reader to reflect upon the emergence of the vernacular regime of literary composition by (...) clerics that developed in the thirteenth century, a corpus known to us as the mester de clerecía. In this corpus, the use of the vernacular, in particular, brings with it an unproblematized sense of transparency of the context in which the works of mester de clerecía were produced, a genre of which the Libro de Alexandre is a key poetic point of origin. Next to an emphasis on a Latinate syntax and recitation techniques that underline the corpus’s clerical production, the irruption of quotidian phrases, vocabulary, figures of medievalization, and especially of Iberization, make these texts a privileged site to study the articulation of the varied phenomena that from economics to the grammatical, from Aristotle to technology, come to revolutionize medieval culture from the twelfth century onward. Of the many peculiar uses of the vernacular in the Libro de Alexandre, references that connote a sense of worthlessness through the repeated structure “not worth an X, ” especially those that express the comparison with minted coinage of little value: dinero, meaja, pepión, or sueldo, as in “not worth a penny,”2 will serve here as a point of entry. These hyperbolic [End Page 44] expressions, common to Romance languages, underline not only the moral and economic ambivalence of terms such as preçio, valor, honor, pagar(se), dar crédito, and so forth, but also the incorporation of a monetary economy within this ambivalence. These types of expressions, moreover, produce a linguistic marker for such ambiguity, as Louis F. Sas noted when he underlined the “affect” which marks, at the level of speech, the reference to abstract terms such as infinity, nothing, and zero in these types of constructions [469, 471].3Sas notes that the vast majority of the occurrences of these phrases in the Libro de Alexandre happen “in combination with the word valer, with its synonyms, or with dar por, that is, in contexts of exchange” [475]. Many years before Sas exhaustively documented these expressions, Alois Richard Nykl had interpreted their presence as related to barter and a supposed clerical contact with local markets, which to some extent could explain their frequent use in the poem, and he especially mentioned the use of fruits and vegetables in these expressions. Nykl also suggested these were “rustic” similes, favored by men of the clergy such as Berceo, Juan Ruiz, and the authors of the Alexandre and the Fernán González, showing, in his opinion, these men’s contact with a certain world in which fruits and vegetables could serve as payment for the church or diezmo, bringing in through this curious interpretation not only a historical economic context but also its [End Page 45] qualification as something “rustic” or at least foreign to the cleric [311].4In 1929, a couple of years after Nykl’s article appeared, George Irving Dale would correct his affirmations, noting that the expressions called “rustic” by Nykl belonged to a well-studied figure called figurative negation. Dale remarked that figurative negation appeared already in the Poema de mio Cid, and he directed the reader to the bibliography offered by Menéndez Pidal in his edition of the Poema under the title of “Refuerzo de la Negación” [Cantar de Mio Cid 1: 376 and glossary]. In his article, Dale wrote in passing that the type of adjectives used with these expressions “increases the insignificance or lack of value” [324]. Later, agreeing with Dale, Sas wrote that the emphasis added to these phrases through the use of adjectives such as vile or rotten did not point to any medieval particular practice beyond that of a peculiar affect, which has been interpreted in terms of “simplicity.” In the next pages I want to suggest some lines of... (shrink)

En este trabajo se indaga en la recepción del republicanismo clásico en España e Hispanoamérica, recepción que en ambos escenarios fue superficial y parcial. En España, es posible hallar huellas de esta tradición filosófico-política especialmente en el movimiento comunero cuyos integrantes esgrimían una ideología que recogía parte de la doctrina republicana y llegaron a poner en práctica, incluso, algunos de sus aspectos más destacables, si bien no surgió ninguna obra doctrinal importante. En Hispanoamérica, por su parte, todas las naciones, tras (...) su independencia, se enfrentaron al reto de organizar sus sociedades y sus Estados, lo que les llevó a bucear en las fuentes clásicas y renacentistas de la tradición republicana tanto como en las modernas de la tradición liberal. En cualquier caso, las tesis clásicas apenas llegaron a tener influencia real a pesar de que fueran esgrimidas, ni más ni menos que por el propio Simón Bolívar, entre otros. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Toward a Political Economy of the Libro De AlexandreSimone Pinet (bio)The carefully composed and craftily pronounced stanzas of the thirteenth-century Libro de Alexandre, if mostly a (free) translation of Gautier de Châtillon’s Alexandreis, provide readers with glimpses of northern Iberia in descriptions and comparisons, but especially through curious formulations and eloquent rewritings.1 These incite the reader to reflect upon the emergence of the vernacular regime of literary composition by (...) clerics that developed in the thirteenth century, a corpus known to us as the mester de clerecía. In this corpus, the use of the vernacular, in particular, brings with it an unproblematized sense of transparency of the context in which the works of mester de clerecía were produced, a genre of which the Libro de Alexandre is a key poetic point of origin. Next to an emphasis on a Latinate syntax and recitation techniques that underline the corpus’s clerical production, the irruption of quotidian phrases, vocabulary, figures of medievalization, and especially of Iberization, make these texts a privileged site to study the articulation of the varied phenomena that from economics to the grammatical, from Aristotle to technology, come to revolutionize medieval culture from the twelfth century onward. Of the many peculiar uses of the vernacular in the Libro de Alexandre, references that connote a sense of worthlessness through the repeated structure “not worth an X, ” especially those that express the comparison with minted coinage of little value: dinero, meaja, pepión, or sueldo, as in “not worth a penny,”2 will serve here as a point of entry. These hyperbolic [End Page 44] expressions, common to Romance languages, underline not only the moral and economic ambivalence of terms such as preçio, valor, honor, pagar(se), dar crédito, and so forth, but also the incorporation of a monetary economy within this ambivalence. These types of expressions, moreover, produce a linguistic marker for such ambiguity, as Louis F. Sas noted when he underlined the “affect” which marks, at the level of speech, the reference to abstract terms such as infinity, nothing, and zero in these types of constructions [469, 471].3Sas notes that the vast majority of the occurrences of these phrases in the Libro de Alexandre happen “in combination with the word valer, with its synonyms, or with dar por, that is, in contexts of exchange” [475]. Many years before Sas exhaustively documented these expressions, Alois Richard Nykl had interpreted their presence as related to barter and a supposed clerical contact with local markets, which to some extent could explain their frequent use in the poem, and he especially mentioned the use of fruits and vegetables in these expressions. Nykl also suggested these were “rustic” similes, favored by men of the clergy such as Berceo, Juan Ruiz, and the authors of the Alexandre and the Fernán González, showing, in his opinion, these men’s contact with a certain world in which fruits and vegetables could serve as payment for the church or diezmo, bringing in through this curious interpretation not only a historical economic context but also its [End Page 45] qualification as something “rustic” or at least foreign to the cleric [311].4In 1929, a couple of years after Nykl’s article appeared, George Irving Dale would correct his affirmations, noting that the expressions called “rustic” by Nykl belonged to a well-studied figure called figurative negation. Dale remarked that figurative negation appeared already in the Poema de mio Cid, and he directed the reader to the bibliography offered by Menéndez Pidal in his edition of the Poema under the title of “Refuerzo de la Negación” [Cantar de Mio Cid 1: 376 and glossary]. In his article, Dale wrote in passing that the type of adjectives used with these expressions “increases the insignificance or lack of value” [324]. Later, agreeing with Dale, Sas wrote that the emphasis added to these phrases through the use of adjectives such as vile or rotten did not point to any medieval particular practice beyond that of a peculiar affect, which has been interpreted in terms of “simplicity.” In the next pages I want to suggest some lines of... (shrink)