We invited five Cavell scholars to write on this topic. What follows is a vibrant exchange among Paola Marrati, Andrew Norris, Jörg Volbers, Cary Wolfe and Thomas Dumm addressing the question whether, in the contemporary political context, Cavell’s skepticism and his Emersonian perfectionism amount to a politics at all.

Ante una ciencia mal-tratada desde su interior, un ojo enajenado y confundido en su visión, un ser humano cansado y desconfiado de la misma explicación, un mundo necesitado de comprensión y cuidado, ante unos cuantos insistentes de vivir en unos tiempos y espacios fragmentados, aparece la necesidad de escuchar de nuevo a lo propio, a lo primero y fundante como fuerza de transformación. Así, las siguientes letras reconocen un camino fenomenológico y contemplativo en la Gran Madre, la Hytcha Guaia, la (...) Pachamama, el primer gran útero, matriz sagrada que alimenta y nutre lo humano en toda su manifestación.Para la psicología, saber de psyque, de alma, su tarea también está en mirarse, recuperarse y a través de un logos trascendente, integrativo, volver a la sensible y sentida escucha de lo divino como curación, por ello su afirmación a lo mágico, chamánico, potente y sagrado del conocimiento telúrico (de tierra), a la medicina que en ella habita y su sanación. La propuesta es el gran camino de andar la tierra, de sentir, escuchar y estar en conciencia de raíz, un camino de cuidado que constata en cada ritual y experiencia la fuerza espiritual de nuestro saber ancestral indígena como primera y perenne ciencia. (shrink)

Although remote working can involve positive outcomes both for employees and organizations, in the case of the sudden and forced remote working situation that came into place during the COVID-19 crisis there have also been reports of negative aspects, one of which is technostress. In this context of crisis, leadership is crucial in sustainably managing and supporting employees, especially employees with workaholic tendencies who are more prone to developing negative work and health outcomes. However, while research on the role of (...) the positive aspects of leadership during crises does exist, the negative aspects of leadership during the COVID-19 crisis have not yet been studied. The present study aimed to explore the role of authoritarian leadership in a sample of 339 administrative university employees who worked either completely from home or from home and the workplace. The study examined the moderating effect of a manager on this relationship and the connections between workaholism and technostress through conditional process analysis. Results pointed out that high authoritarian leadership had an enhancing effect, whereas low authoritarian leadership had a protective effect on the relationship between workaholism and technostress, only in the group of complete remote workers. Thus, authoritarian leadership should be avoided and training leaders to be aware of its effect appears to be essential. Limitations, future directions for the study, and practical implications are also discussed. (shrink)

The present study aims at exploring whether the level of well-being vary as a function of fertility status in different phases of the ovulatory cycle. We investigated the multidimensional well-being, including the cognitive component of subjective well-being related to judgments about one’s life satisfaction, the psychological well-being concerning the full growth and self-realization of the individual, and self-esteem, that is the personal judgment of overall self-worth and is recognized as one indicator of well-being. On the basis of the cycle phase (...) estimation at the moment of the experiment, one hundred and sixteen normally cycling women were divided into “fertile” and “non-fertile” groups and were administered the Psychological Well-Being Scale, the Basic Self-Esteem Scale and the Satisfaction with Life Scale. A Multivariate Analysis of Variance has been performed to examine whether there were differences between groups according to their ovulatory phase. All dimensions of psychological well-being, self-esteem and satisfaction with life were found to be stable in the different phases of the menstrual cycle. The implications of these results are discussed. (shrink)

Cross-situational statistical learning of words involves tracking co-occurrences of auditory words and objects across time to infer word-referent mappings. Previous research has demonstrated that learners can infer referents across sets of very phonologically distinct words, but it remains unknown whether learners can encode fine phonological differences during cross-situational statistical learning. This study examined learners’ cross-situational statistical learning of minimal pairs that differed on one consonant segment, minimal pairs that differed on one vowel segment, and non-minimal pairs that differed on two (...) or three segments. Learners performed above chance for all pairs, but performed worse on vowel minimal pairs than on consonant minimal pairs or non-minimal pairs. These findings demonstrate that learners can encode fine phonetic detail while tracking word-referent co-occurrence probabilities, but they suggest that phonological encoding may be weaker for vowels than for consonants. (shrink)

The assumption that origins can be defined as a hermeneutic paradigm in the humanities and in the sciences is explored in relation to specific theoretical ...

A pesar de los innumerables beneficios, hay varias críticas y preocupaciones en relación con el uso de la Inteligencia Artificial (IA), especialmente en Brasil, donde no hay ninguna legislación federal en vigor hasta el momento. Las legislaciones estatales existentes y los proyectos de ley que se están votando en el Congreso, como el PL 21/20, son defectuosos e incompletos, especialmente en lo que respecta a algunas aplicaciones de la IA que implican altos riesgos para los derechos y libertades fundamentales, además (...) de traer a menudo un sesgo potencial, duplicando o potenciando el racismo institucionalizado existente en la sociedad u otras formas de discriminación. Existe una inequidad codificada que propicia infraestructuras injustas, sinembargo, donde hay poder hay resistencia, y en este sentido es necesario señalar la importancia de las contra codificaciones basadas en la solidaridad y que repiensan la justicia, es decir, un enfoque emancipador de la tecnología. Este es el cambio paradigmático necesario, y siendo necesario, tiene que ser posible y debe buscarse con el máximo esfuerzo. Se trata de verdaderas formas de resistencia, como instrumentos abolicionistas para el “Nuevo Código Jim”, nuevas formas de discriminación de raza, género y clase existentes a través del uso de las nuevas tecnologías, en el sentido de prácticas de diseño orientadas a la justicia. (shrink)

This text was first published in Theory, Culture & Society, May 13, 2015. For a special issue of Body & Society on ‘Rhythm, Movement, Embodiment', Paola Crespi presents two previously untranslated texts, Rudolf Bode's ‘Rhythm and its Importance for Education' and Rudolf Laban's ‘Eurhythmy and Kakorhythmy'. In the following interview she uncovers further unpublished and untranslated sources and she discusses some of the main themes of these texts in relation to the more widely known text - Danse, théâtre et (...) spectacle vivant – GALERIE – Nouvel article. (shrink)

This book takes the reader on a philosophical quest to understand the dark side of emotions. The chapters are devoted to the analysis of negative emotions and are organized in a historical manner, spanning the period from ancient Greece to the present time. Each chapter addresses analytical questions about specific emotions generally considered to be unfavorable and classified as negative. The general aim of the volume is to describe the polymorphous and context-sensitive nature of negative emotions as well as changes (...) in the ways people have interpreted these emotions across different epochs. The editors speak of ‘the dark side of the emotions’ because their goal is to capture the ambivalent – unstable and shadowy – aspects of emotions. A number of studies have taken the categorial distinction between positive and negative emotions for granted, suggesting that negative emotions are especially significant for our psychological experience because they signal difficult situations. For this reason, the editors stress the importance of raising analytical questions about the valence of particular emotions and focussing on the features that make these emotions ambivalent: how – despite their negativity – such emotions may turn out to be positive. This opens up a perspective in which each emotion can be understood as a complex interlacing of negative and positive properties. The collection presents a thoughtful dialogue between philosophy and contemporary scientific research. It offers the reader insight by illuminating the dark side of the emotions. (shrink)

Accelerating environmental uncertainty and the need to cope with increasingly complex market and social demands, combine to create high value for the intuitive approach to decision-making at the strategic level. Research on intuition suffers from marked fragmentation, due to the existence of disciplinary silos based on diverse, apparently irreconcilable, ontological and epistemological assumptions. Not surprisingly, there is no integrated interdisciplinary framework suitable for a rich account of intuition, contemplating how affect and cognition intertwine in the intuitive process, and how intuition (...) scales up from the individual to collective decision-making. This study contributes to the construction of a broad conceptual framework, suitable for a multi-level account of intuition and for a fruitful dialogue with distant research areas. It critically discusses two mainstream conceptualizations of intuition which claim to be grounded in a cross-disciplinary consensus. Drawing on the complexity paradigm, it then proposes a conceptualization of intuition as emergence. Finally, it explores the theoretical and practical implications. (shrink)

We animals have evolved a variety of mechanisms to avoid conspecifics who might be infected. It is currently unclear whether and why this “behavioral immune system” targets unfamiliar individuals more than familiar ones. Here I answer this question in humans, using publicly available data of a recent study on 1969 participants from India and 1615 from the USA. The apparent health of a male stranger, as estimated from his face, and the comfort with contact with him were a direct function (...) of his similarity to the men in the local community. This held true regardless of whether the face carried overt signs of infection. I conclude that our behavioral immune system is finely tuned to degrees of outgroupness — and that cues of outgroupness are partly processed as cues of infectiousness. These findings, which were consistent across the two cultures, support the notion that the pathogens of strangers are perceived as more dangerous. (shrink)

In this study, Paola Marrati approaches—in an extremely insightful, rigorous, and well-argued way—the question of the philosophical sources of Derrida's thought through a consideration of his reading of both Husserl and Heidegger. A central focus of the book is the analysis of the concepts of genesis and trace as they define Derrida's thinking of historicity, time, and subjectivity. Notions such as the contamination of the empirical and the transcendental, dissemination and writing, are explained as key categories establishing a guiding (...) thread that runs through Derrida's early and later works. Whereas in his discussion of Husserl Derrida problematizes the relationship between the ideality of meaning and the singularity of its historical production, in his interpretation of Heidegger he challenges the very idea of the originary finitude of temporality. This book is essential reading not only for those interested in the philosophical roots of deconstruction, but for all those interested in the central questions of history and temporality, subjectivity and language, that pervade contemporary debates in cultural, literary, and visual theory alike. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe paper focuses on the gradual separation between materialism and mechanism in early modern German philosophy. In Germany the distinction between the two concepts, originally introduced by Leibniz, was definitively stated by Wolff who was the first to provide a definition of the new philosophical term Materialismus, and of the related philosophical sect. In the first part I describe the initial identification of mechanism and materialism in German philosophy between the last decades of the seventeenth century and 1720. Mechanism is (...) here mostly conceived within a monistic metaphysics of body, which refers mainly to Hobbes and to some interpretations of Spinoza’s pantheism. This tight connection between a mechanical explanation of nature and the Deus sive natura issue leads to a negative judgement on mechanism and its materialistic implications, both charged with a form of more or less explicit atheism. In the second part I describe the gradual emancipation in Germany of mechanism fro... (shrink)

In this article we firstly present a Kripke semantics for the description logic ALC which is directly inspired by the semantics for Intuitionistic logic. Moreover, we discuss why a direct translation of this kind of semantics is not adequate in the description logic context and propose a constructive semantics that differs from the previous one by the fact that we impose a condition on the partial order. We also present a tableau calculus which is sound and complete with respect to (...) our semantics. As an application of the calculus we prove that this semantics meets the disjunction property, a key criterion used in assessing whether a logic is constructive. (shrink)

Abstract. The notion of similarity has been studied in many areas of Computer Science; in a general sense, this concept is defined to provide a measure of the semantic equivalence between two pieces of knowledge, expressing how “close” their meaning can be regarded. In this work, we study similarity as a tool useful to improve the representation of arguments, the interpretation of the relations between arguments, and the semantic evaluation associated with the arguments in the argumentative process. In this direction, (...) we present a novel mechanism to determine the similarity between two arguments based on descriptors representing particular aspects associated with these arguments. This mechanism involves a comparison process influenced by the context in which the process develops, where this context provides the relevant aspects that need to be analyzed in the application domain. Then, we use this similarity measure as a quantity to compute the result of attacks and supports in the argumentation process. These valuations, applied to a Bipolar Argumentation Frameworks, allowed us to refine the argument relations, providing the tools to establish a family of new argumentation semantics that considers the similarity between arguments as a crucial part for the argumentation process. (shrink)

Thirty years after the death of Michel Foucault, notwithstanding the fact that his thought has profoundly shaped the contemporary reflection and contributed to move beyond structuralism, the Urban Political Ecology in general and the Urban Political Ecology of water in particular are still dominated by Marxist-inspired theoretical frameworks. This paper aims to provide a theoretical rationale for the development and implementation of a Foucauldian ap-proach to the UPE of water. We show how a Foucauldian approach could shed light on the (...) hydro-social cycle and could be the basis of a specific form of scholarly political engagement. (shrink)

Utopian thought feeds on a speculative magnitude that has attracted sustained critiques and generated radical revisions. In the contemporary age, the advocates of utopia have been prompted to corroborate the effective agency of a predominantly abstract frame of mind. A response, which also serves as a rebuttal, entails illuminating how utopian projects have intervened in history and shaped societies by probing the most unyielding, unchangeable features of humankind. Understanding how utopias unfold proposals for the present involves recognizing that utopian writers (...) share a penchant for extrapolation: While perusing the present, they anticipate the future; in focusing their investigation on very specific historical... (shrink)

De re aedificatoria by Leon Battista Alberti, Trattato di Architettura by Filarete, Trattati di architettura, ingegneria e arte militare by Francesco di Giorgio Martini, and Leonardo da Vinci’s works of engineering and inventions exemplify the ways in which fifteenth-century Italian thinkers could blend speculative and rational approaches. Libellus vere aureus was published in Leuven in 1516. Mambrino Roseo praised the simple, earnest people of Garamanti in Institutione del prencipe christiano, dating to 1543. The first version of More’s Latin text in (...) vernacular Italian was published in Venice in 1548, and the first translation into English by Ralph Robinson was printed in London in... (shrink)

My aim in this note is to shed light on ways of interpreting Kant’s Formula of Universal Law (FUL), by looking at relevant similarities and differences between Pauline Kleingeld and Mark Timmons. I identify both their readings as a formal interpretation of Kant’s FUL, in contrast to the substantive interpretations that favor a robust conception of rational agency as a necessary requirement for moral deliberation. I highlight the benefits that arise from Kleingled’s interpretation in showing the immediacy involved in the (...) volitional self-contradiction when universalizing a maxim. Alongside Timmons, I address a question as to whether Kleingeld’s interpretation is completely free from at least a minimal set of assumptions about practical deliberation more broadly, that seem to play a role in generating the volitational self-contradiction she is defending. I close by raising some skeptical worries about the capacity of this kind of contradiction to translate into a moral judgment triggering action. (shrink)

The ArgumentAlexandre Koyré is one of the most important historians of philosophic and scientific though since the thirties. Research on the Scientific Revolution, on Galileo, Descartes, Newton, as well as on Paracelsus and Boehme has deeply changed under his influential method: it has been a model for Kuhn's methodology of paradigms and revolutions in the histroy of science. Whereas Koyré used to be considered opposed in his ideology and method to sociological approaches, he has recently been characterized by Yehuda Elkana (...) as a sociologist of knowledge. In fact, until now one of the main sources of his method had not been identified: it is only by acknowledging the influence of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl on Koyré that it is possible to explain how the latter wrote his thesis on Boehme's mystical thought just before his Etudes galiléennes. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl was teaching history of philosophy at the Sorbonne, and Koyré was strongly influenced by his idea of “prelogical thinking” as a universel phenomenon and in a general way by the sociological school of Durkheim. Conceptual analysis deriving from Husserl, collective representations and attitude mentale, came together in Alexandre Koyrè's method. (shrink)

How much do animals matter--morally? Can we keep considering them as second class beings, to be used merely for our benefit? Or, should we offer them some form of moral egalitarianism? Inserting itself into the passionate debate over animal rights, this fascinating, provocative work by renowned scholar Paola Cavalieri advances a radical proposal: that we extend basic human rights to the nonhuman animals we currently treat as "things." Cavalieri first goes back in time, tracing the roots of the debate (...) from the 1970s, then explores not only the ethical but also the scientific viewpoints, examining the debate's precedents in mainstream Western philosophy. She considers the main proposals of reform that recently have been advanced within the framework of today's prevailing ethical perspectives. Are these proposals satisfying? Cavalieri says no, claiming that it is necessary to go beyond the traditional opposition between utilitarianism and Kantianism and focus on the question of fundamental moral protection. In the case of human beings, such protection is granted within the widely shared moral doctrine of universal human rights' theory. Cavalieri argues that if we examine closely this theory, we will discover that its very logic extends to nonhuman animals as beings who are owed basic moral and legal rights and that, as a result, human rights are not human after all. (shrink)

Μελέτη συλλογῆς δακτυλιολίθων, πού συγκροτήθηκε στήν Αἴγυπτο καί στεγάζεται στό Μουσεῖο 'Αλεξανδρείας. Περιέχει μερικά ἑλληνιστικά δείγματα, πολλά ρωμαϊκά αὐτοκρατορικῶν χρόνων, ὕστερών χρόνων ἀκόμη καί σύγχρονα. 'Ορισμένα εἶναι ἐξαιρετικῆς τέχνης : μιά προτομή πτολεμαϊκῶν χρόνων τῆς Ἴσιδας, ἤ ἕνα πορτραῖτο τοῦ Σεπτιμίου Σεβήρου καί τῆς οἰκογενείας του. Πολλά συνδέονται ἀπό τό θέμα τους (ἰσιακή τριάδα, κανωπικά ἀγγεῖα, σύνθετα ἑλληνοαιγυπτιακά σχήματα, μαγικές σφραγίδες) ἤ τήν τεχνοτροπία μέ τήν ἑλληνορωμαϊκή Αἴγυπτο.