A diferença como valor humano: Ensaio sobre as contribuições do pensamento de Boaventura Sousa Santos, Gilles Deleuze e Homi Bhabha para o Paradigma da Inclusão Resumo: A economia e a particularização marcam a sociedade contemporânea como importantes vetores para a ampliação das desigualdades sociais e produção de variados mecanismos de exclusão social. A diferença é parâmetro para categorizar e apartar pessoas à invisibilidade social. O presente ensaio tem como objetivo o diálogo junto aos autores Boaventura Sousa Santos, Gilles Deleuze e (...) Homi Bhabha e seus respectivos pensamentos como contributores para o entendimento da diferença como valor humano no contexto do paradigma da inclusão. Nos caminhos e entre-lugares da descolonização de nosso ser, é preciso desnaturalizar as barbáries produzidas pelo colonizador e aceitar as diferenças como próprias da espécie humana para a invenção de nossa educação e sociedade.Palavras-chave: Inclusão. Diferença. Educação. Descolonização. Apoio: CNPq DIFFERENCE AS HUMAN VALUE: Essay on the contributions of the thoughts of Boaventura Sousa Santos, Gilles Deleuze and Homi Bhabha to the Inclusion Paradigm: Economics and particularization mark contemporary society as important vectors for widening social inequalities and producing various mechanisms of social exclusion. The difference is a parameter to categorize and separate people to social invisibility. This essay aims to dialogue with the authors Boaventura Sousa Santos, Gilles Deleuze and Homi Bhabha and their respective thoughts as contributors to the understanding of difference as a human value in the context of the inclusion paradigm. In the ways and places between the decolonization of our being, we must denaturalize the barbarism produced by the colonizer and accept the differences as proper to the human species for the invention of our education and society.Keywords: Inclusion. Difference. Education. Decolonization. DIFERENCIA COMO VALOR HUMANO: Ensayo sobre las contribuciones de los pensamientos de Boaventura Sousa Santos, Gilles Deleuze y Homi Bhabha al paradigma de la inclusión Resumen: La economía y la particularización marcan a la sociedad contemporánea como vectores importantes para ampliar las desigualdades sociales y producir diversos mecanismos de exclusión social. La diferencia es un parámetro para clasificar y separar a las personas de la invisibilidad social. Este ensayo tiene como objetivo dialogar con los autores Boaventura Sousa Santos, Gilles Deleuze y Homi Bhabha y sus respectivos pensamientos como contribuyentes a la comprensión de la diferencia como un valor humano en el contexto del paradigma de inclusión. En los modos y lugares entre la descolonización de nuestro ser, debemos desnaturalizar la barbarie producida por el colonizador y aceptar las diferencias como propias de la especie humana para la invención de nuestra educación y sociedad.Palabras clave: Inclusión. Diferencia. Educación. Descolonización. Data de registro: 21/09/2019Data de aceite: 22/07/2020. (shrink)

Desde a Constituição federal de 1988, o Brasil tem avançado, mesmo que vagarosamente, na construção de políticas públicas de inclusão de pessoas que se encontram em condições de desvantagem social. Dentre os movimentos sociais de luta, estão as pessoas com deficiência, seus familiares e profissionais de distintas áreas de atuação. Em agosto de 2021 o Ministro da Educação brasileira proferiu discursos que se engajam em atitudes excludentes. Dentre as falas mais polemizadas, afirmou que nas escolas há crianças com deficiência que (...) atrapalham o aprendizado dos demais alunos. O objetivo deste ensaio é discutir acerca dos discursos do Ministro como impactantes dispositivos de marginalização e exclusão social dos estudantes com deficiência. O teor do ensaio se ampara no acervo documental e legislativo que fundamenta a história, a emanação e a implementação de políticas públicas pró-educação inclusiva, bem como em autores que sustentam as Ciências Humanas e Sociais no entendimento que a diferença e as liberdades de Ser e estar no mundo, com o mundo, com as outras pessoas, sendo diferente, são valores humanos inegociáveis. Palavras-chave: Diferença; Inclusão; Educação; Políticas públicas; Exclusão. "We don't want inclusiveness": an (un)inspired essay by the Minister of Brazilian education Abstract: Since the Federal Constitution of 1988, Brazil has advanced, albeit slowly, in the construction of public policies for the inclusion of people who find themselves in conditions of social disadvantage. Among the social struggle movements are people with disabilities, their families and professionals from different areas of activity. In August 2021 the Brazilian Minister of Education delivered speeches that engage in exclusionary attitudes. Among the most controversial speeches, he stated that in schools there are children with disabilities who hinder the learning of other students. The objective of this essay is to discuss about the Minister's speeches as impacting devices of marginalization and social exclusion of students with disabilities. The content of the essay is supported by the documentary and legislative archive that underlies the history, emanation and implementation of public policies for inclusive education, as well as by authors who support the Human and Social Sciences in the understanding that the difference and the freedoms of Being and being in the world, with the world, with other people, being different, are non-negotiable human values. Keywords: Difference; Inclusion; Education; Public policy; Exclusion. No queremos inclusivismos”: un ensayo (des)inspirado por el Ministro de la Educación brasileña Resumen: Desde la Constitución Federal de 1988, el Brasil ha avanzado, aunque lentamente, en la construcción de políticas públicas para la inclusión de personas que se encuentran en condiciones de desventaja social. Entre los movimientos sociales de lucha se encuentran personas con discapacidad, sus familias y profesionales de diferentes áreas de actividad. En agosto de 2021, el Ministro de la Educación brasileña pronunció discursos que involucran actitudes excluyentes. Entre los discursos más controvertidos, afirmó que en las escuelas hay niños con discapacidad que dificultan el aprendizaje de otros estudiantes. El objetivo de este ensayo es discutir sobre los discursos del Ministro como dispositivos impactantes de marginalización y exclusión social de los estudiantes con discapacidad. El contenido del ensayo se sustenta en el archivo documental y legislativo que sustenta la historia, emanación e implementación de las políticas públicas de educación inclusiva, así como por autores que apoyan a las Ciencias Humanas y Sociales en el entendimiento de que la diferencia y las libertades de Ser y estar en el mundo, con el mundo, con otras personas, siendo diferente, son valores humanos innegociables. Palabras clave: Diferencia; Inclusión; Educación; Políticas públicas; Exclusión. Data de registro: 21/09/2021 Data de aceite: 17/05/2022. (shrink)

We report here an emerging dispute in Italy concerning triage criteria for critically ill covid-19 patients, and how best to support doctors having to make difficult decisions in a context of insufficient life saving resources. The dispute we present is particularly significant as it juxtaposes two opposite views of who should make triage decisions, and how doctors should best be supported. There are both empirical and normative questions at stake here. The empirical questions pertain to the available level of evidence (...) that healthcare professionals would rather not be left alone with their ‘clinical judgments’ to make triage decisions, and to the accounts of distributive justice that doctors and healthcare professionals rely on, when making triage decisions. The normative questions pertain to how this empirical evidence should inform guidelines on how prioritisation decisions are made in a context of emergency, and who gets to have the authority to do so. This debate goes beyond the discussion of the care of critically ill patients with COVID-19 and has broader implications beyond the national context for the discussion of how to relieve moral distress in contexts of imbalances between healthcare resources and clinical needs of a population. (shrink)

Caster Semenya is done with track and field. At 29, her hopes for a continued career as a professional middle-distance runner are dashed. After her case against International Association for Athletics Federation 1 was dismissed by the Court for Arbitration of Sport on 1 May 2019, she has switched to football later in the year.1 Semenya’s case may have come to its legal conclusion, however it has generated an aporia regarding the binary classification in athletics, which has yet to be (...) solved.2 It is time the implications of the fair equality of opportunity principle as a normative basis for the construction of categories in sport are taken seriously to move forward the debate on unfair advantages in sport. Loland conditionally justifies restricting the women’s category to athletes with testosterone levels below a certain threshold, on the basis of the FEO principle, and of a distinction between stable and dynamic inequalities between athletes. …. (shrink)

We consider breath as a vast prospect that includes actions and traces of them, that builds images and texts, that involves the human being and the extra-human context; we call this great scenery ‘breathscape’. We then study how breathscape interacts with the human apparatus of the face, both giving rise to signs, but also giving rise to a liminal zone of extremely intriguing interpretative processes on a mereological scale. How and where do the territory of breath and the body interact? (...) Which processes of signification do they give rise to? And which signs are created in their phenomenal and semantic encounter? Art is certainly the most appropriate language for studying this process, as well as for letting opacities emerge and exploring outstanding contrasts. There are various concepts of ‘breathscape’ that, grounded in different cultures, are immediately associated with ancient and contemporary philosophies. As a reverberation from a semiotic interaction and through the discretization and identification of semantic fields relevant to the concerned scenario, and introducing textuality, a phenomenon seen as a crystallization of the transition between outer text (the text of reality) and text (subject/object), we consider those visual texts which are crossed by a common faculty that is both descriptive and inventive: by approaching some inferential and cultural regimes and analysing their specific enunciative practices, we then contribute to their renovation. The texts related to the practices as part of the narratives intrinsic to cultural semiospheres underline the insatiable vastness of epistemological content to be dealt with, and the functional reductionism of the corpus is only a first approach to the field that is intended to shed light on the general panorama and to stimulate subsequent debate and insights. (shrink)

Though not as widely studied as the Research Article, the abstract has attracted increasing interest among researchers over last decades. A number of contrastive or comparative studies of abstracts in English and other languages have already been carried out considering mainly the hard sciences and some soft sciences such as linguistics and history, however no cross-cultural analyses have been conducted so far between RA abstracts in English and RA abstracts in French published in the legal field. This paper seeks to (...) investigate genre variation and changes in frame sequences comparatively in English and French RA abstracts from criminology journals. Using a genre analytical approach to qualitative and quantitative data, the paper reports on two comparable corpora, i.e. English and French, of electronically retrieved abstracts from Criminology Journals published in 2014. The two corpora are composed of three journals per language, namely Criminology, Journal of Criminal Justice, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology for the English corpus, and Champ Pénal, Criminologie, Revue Canadienne de Droit Pénal et Criminologie for the French corpus. The analysis will be carried out following two main steps, i.e. a macro-analysis and a micro-analysis. In the former step, the corpora are compared by the analysis and discussion of the basic IMRD rhetorical move structure for the RA often proposed in the literature and the additional five moves model postulated by Dos Santos with the aim of investigating the linguistic and rhetorical variation in the abstract genre from a cross-cultural perspective. In the latter, we look at frame sequences combining forms of self-mentions and frame markers, i.e. personal patterns, impersonal patterns and locational patterns. Provisional results show that the abstracts under investigation largely follow the international conventions based on the norms established by the English-speaking international academic community. However, variation across the two cultures emerged from the linguistic realizations of framework sequences. Cross-cultural implications are discussed at the close. (shrink)

En tant que tabou de notre société, la pratique de l’inceste parait être une constante humaine indépendante de toute dimension historique. Il est vrai, en effet, comme Fabienne Giuliani le précise en ouverture de son livre, que ce phénomène « demeure un crime aux frontières de notre conscience » (p. 11) : il suscite horreur, silence, dégoût, phobie dans notre imaginaire. De surcroît, depuis la théorie de Lévi-Strauss bien connue, son interdiction représenterait le fondement de toute société....

While a growing number of firms are being evaluated on environment, social and governance criteria by sustainability rating agencies, comparatively little is known about companies’ responses. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with companies operating in Italy, the present paper seeks to narrow this gap in current understanding by examining how firms react to ESG ratings, and the factors influencing their response. Unique to the literature, we show that firms may react very differently to being rated, with our analysis yielding a fourfold (...) typology of corporate responses. The typology captures conformity and resistance to ratings across two dimensions of firm behaviour. We furthermore show that corporate responses depend on managers’ beliefs regarding the material benefits of adjusting to and scoring well on ESG ratings and their alignment with corporate strategy. In doing so, we challenge the idea that organisational ratings homogenise organisations and draw attention to the agency underlying corporate responses. Our findings also contribute to debates about the impact of ESG ratings, calling into question claims about their positive influence on companies’ sustainability performance. We conclude by discussing the wider empirical, theoretical and ethical implications of our paper. (shrink)

Ainda que a autora tenha se debruçado, em várias ocasiões desde 1984, sobre o problema da ideologia na obra postumamente publicada por Lukács, o objetivo geral do presente artigo é trazer comentários adicionais sobre o tema, decorrência de pesquisa mais profunda não só da Ontologia do ser social, mas também do próprio itinerário intelectual do filósofo húngaro. Autores que abordaram o tema são revisitados, configurando-se assim um quadro geral mais complexo da questão em tela.

The relationship between power, law and consent is a key feature of the Western debate on criminal law. On the one side, defining the legitimate ways of exercising the punitive power has been a critical question since the Enlightenment thought onwards and especially as to the rule of law doctrine. On the other side, the role played by public punishment in shaping consent and its communicative potential have been crucial questions for critical, as well as non-critical approaches to criminal law (...) in contemporary thought. These questions gain in strength and radicalism when it comes to international criminal law (ICL). In this case the filter of the state is not present anymore to mediate between power, law and consent, and the power to punish individuals is directly exercised by international institutions. This means, on the one hand, that traditional justifications of the power to punish and which are elaborated on in the domestic sphere are not useful anymore in legitimating international punishment. International criminal norms are not framed by an international democratically elected parliament, and their exercise is not controlled by the complex system of checks and balances typical of the rule of law. On the other hand, having not being created by a sovereign, international criminal law cannot be conceived as an instrument to build or consolidate consent around the sovereign. A double-sided dilemma therefore arises: traditional explanations are no longer apt to answer the question whether ICL is legitimate, while ICL itself can no longer be considered an instrument to build consent around the traditional power exercising it, namely the state. Although I consider both sides of the dilemma equally interesting and stimulating, I will focus here only on one side of the coin: the ability to build consent of the ICL institutions, and in particular the International Criminal Court (ICC). In other words, instead of asking whether the consent around the ICC is broad enough for the Court to be considered legitimate, I shall ask whether the ICC is able to build consent around the world order it embodies. (shrink)

Questo libro presenta quattro saggi scritti da Sartre nell’arco di un decennio, dal 1951 agli anni Sessanta, per la prima volta riuniti sotto lo stesso titolo. Sono frammenti sparsi cui manca l’organicità strutturata dell’opera compiuta, ma che costituiscono un insieme coerente raccontando, al tempo stesso, di un uomo e della sua ossessione, di una città e del suo volto che è lo stesso del figlio che teme e di una pittura brutta, senza Dio. Sono prese in esame alcune opere del (...) Tintoretto, sel... (shrink)

Metaphorical analogies have been popular in different forms of reasoning, theatre and drama analogy among them. From the semiotic perspective, theatre is arepresentation of reality. Characteristic to theatrical representation is the fact that for creating representations of reality it uses, to a great extent, the materiality andcultural codes that also constitute our everyday life; sometimes the means of representation are even iconically identical to the latter. This likeness has inspirednumerous writers, philosophers and, later, social scientists to look for particular similarities (...) between social life, drama and theatre. In this paper I chose twoparticular approaches from the social sciences that make use of the metaphorical analogy of theatre in quite different, yet, to certain extent, also overlapping ways — Victor Turner’s concept of “social dramas” from anthropology and Erving Goffman’s “dramaturgy” of social interactions from sociology. The former bases hisanalogy more on the structure of the dramatic text and on a key resemblance in the (dramatic) conflict, whereas the latter builds his analogy on the principles ofperforming used in theatre, and regards characters and roles as major resemblances between action on stage and in social space. This paper examines these key resemblances and sheds light on what kind of interpretations of culture and society emerge when theatre analogies are put into action. In the concluding section some general problems, related to extended metaphors and analogical explanations the researcher needs to face with, are discussed. (shrink)

This article presents the first, systematic analysis of the ethical challenges posed by recommender systems through a literature review. The article identifies six areas of concern, and maps them onto a proposed taxonomy of different kinds of ethical impact. The analysis uncovers a gap in the literature: currently user-centred approaches do not consider the interests of a variety of other stakeholders—as opposed to just the receivers of a recommendation—in assessing the ethical impacts of a recommender system.

In the last decades the concept of objectivity has been criticized by the "new epistemologies". These criticisms favour the consolidation of relativist and subjective positions, which condition the objectivity of scientific knowledge to such an extent that it seems to be a goal impossible to achieve.

Can art, religion, or philosophy afford ineffable insights? If so, what are they? The idea of ineffability has puzzled philosophers from Laozi to Wittgenstein. In Ineffability and its Metaphysics: The Unspeakable in Art, Religion and Philosophy, Silvia Jonas examines different ways of thinking about what ineffable insights might involve metaphysically, and shows which of these are in fact incoherent. Jonas discusses the concepts of ineffable properties and objects, ineffable propositions, ineffable content, and ineffable knowledge, examining the metaphysical pitfalls involved (...) in these concepts. Ultimately, she defends the idea that ineffable insights as found in aesthetic, religious, and philosophical contexts are best understood in terms of self-acquaintance, a particular kind of non-propositional knowledge. Ineffability as a philosophical topic is as old as the history of philosophy itself, but contributions to the exploration of ineffability have been sparse. The theory developed by Jonas makes the concept tangible and usable in many different philosophical contexts. (shrink)

The existence of fundamental moral disagreements is a central problem for moral realism and has often been contrasted with an alleged absence of disagreement in mathematics. However, mathematicians do in fact disagree on fundamental questions, for example on which set-theoretic axioms are true, and some philosophers have argued that this increases the plausibility of moral vis-à-vis mathematical realism. I argue that the analogy between mathematical and moral disagreement is not as straightforward as those arguments present it. In particular, I argue (...) that pluralist accounts of mathematics render fundamental mathematical disagreements compatible with mathematical realism in a way in which moral disagreements and moral realism are not. 11. (shrink)

This paper reports a European Forum for Good Clinical Practice workshop held in 2011 to consider a research ethics committee training syllabus, subsequent training needs and resources. The syllabus that was developed was divided into four competencies: committee working; scientific method; ethical analysis and the regulatory framework. Appropriate training needs for each, with possible resources, were discussed. Lack of funding for training was reported as a major problem but affordable alternatives were debated. Strengths and weaknesses of this approach were discussed (...) and the resultant proposal will be disseminated through the European Forum for Good Clinical Practice and the research ethics committees of member states. (shrink)

En el artículo se abordan las prácticas educativas inclusivas en la aulas de la escuelas de nivel. Los denominados proyectos pedagógicos de inclusión generan en ocasiones, prácticas segregadas, fragmentadas entre la tarea del docente del aula y el docente de apoyo. Las propuestas sostenidas en la coenseñanza, la corresponsabilidad y la confianza se consideran elementos centrales en la transformación de las prácticas. Se plantean el análisis de tres aspectos considerados claves para el desarrollo de la coenseñanza, la construcción de: 1.vínculos (...) de corresponsabilidad entre docentes, 2. de espacios favorecedores del trabajo colectivo en el aula sin dejar de reconocer las singularidades y 3. la construcción de una gestión democrática de distribución de los saberes en el aula. Se considera como objetivo primordial de la tarea educativa el desarrollo un educando con capacidad de iniciativa, con participación y autonomía. Este debe constituir el desafío central del trabajo en un aula inclusiva. (shrink)

Recent controversies about the level of replicability of behavioral research analyzed using statistical inference have cast interest in developing more efficient techniques for analyzing the results of psychological experiments. Here we claim that complementing the analytical workflow of psychological experiments with Machine Learning-based analysis will both maximize accuracy and minimize replicability issues. As compared to statistical inference, ML analysis of experimental data is model agnostic and primarily focused on prediction rather than inference. We also highlight some potential pitfalls resulting from (...) adoption of Machine Learning based experiment analysis. If not properly used it can lead to over-optimistic accuracy estimates similarly observed using statistical inference. Remedies to such pitfalls are also presented such and building model based on cross validation and the use of ensemble models. ML models are typically regarded as black boxes and we will discuss strategies aimed at rendering more transparent the predictions. (shrink)

Prized Attic honey is an often-neglected topic in studies of Athenian productions, despite the considerable spread of production, as attested by archaeological finds of terracotta beehives throughout the territory. Literary sources also frequently mention honey produced in Attica, especially the most famous and prized variety from Mount Hymettus. In this paper, after a mention of the peculiarity of the traditions about honey in the classical world, the importance and fame of the Attic product is emphasised. The sources that praise the (...) product are here classified in three groups, namely the authors who focus on its sweetness and fragrance, the ones who describe Attic honey generically in relation to its prestige and the sources which compares it to honey from other regions. Afterwards, my further goal is to assess the possible connection between honey and the funerary sphere in Attica. This relation is explored also through the reanalysis of some interpretations proposed for a fictile group of geometric Attic models. (shrink)

Il presente articolo si propone di spiegare il contesto storico-artistico e il significato politico di due esposizioni dell’immediato dopoguerra svolte a Palazzo Venezia, il quartier generale di Mussolini. Esse sono la Mostra dei capolavori della pittura europea (XV-XVII secoli), che ha luogo dall’agosto 1944 al febbraio 1945, e la Mostra d’arte italiana a Palazzo Venezia, inaugurata a maggio e conclusa nell’ottobre 1945. La prima è organizzata e promossa dal Governo Militare Alleato, la seconda dall’Associazione Nazionale per il Restauro dei Monumenti (...) Danneggiati dalla Guerra, fondata e diretta dal filantropo Umberto Zanotti Bianco. Numerose vicende si intrecciano nell’organizzazione di queste esposizioni, tra cui il lavoro dei Monuments Men, le operazioni di salvataggio del patrimonio mobile da parte di alcuni ex funzionari del Ministero dell’Educazione Nazionale, la nascita del Governo Militare Alleato e delle nuove istituzioni italiane antifasciste, la necessità di restaurare il patrimonio artistico distrutto e la fondazione dell’associazione di Zanotti Bianco. Chiunque voglia affrontare lo studio della situazione storico-artistica del dopoguerra romano e nazionale deve necessariamente fare i conti con le due mostre di Palazzo Venezia. (shrink)

Pluralist mathematical realism, the view that there exists more than one mathematical universe, has become an influential position in the philosophy of mathematics. I argue that, if mathematical pluralism is true (and we have good reason to believe that it is), then mathematical realism cannot (easily) be justified by arguments from the indispensability of mathematics to science. This is because any justificatory chain of inferences from mathematical applications in science to the total body of mathematical theorems can cover at most (...) one mathematical universe. Indispensability arguments may thus lose their central role in the debate about mathematical ontology. (shrink)

Since the enactment of the first Hong Kong bilingual ordinance in 1989, tremendous effort and resources have been put to translating English legal documents into Chinese. Long before the implementation of bilingual legislation, the provision of interpreting services has remained an entrenched practice in the courtrooms of Hong Kong. This study has adopted a corpora approach to re-examine what seems to be reasonable and routine practices of the bilingual, legal system, the impacts of bilingual legislation, translation, and interpretation on trial (...) proceedings. Results generated from the corpus show the problems of anglicized Chinese translation of the Sexual Offences Ordinance under the British Common Law system; and interpreters’ performance which is intricately bound by the discourse practices of the legal professionals as well as the ideology of the bilingual legal system in Hong Kong. (shrink)

This essay argues that despite of the feminist critique of Merleau-Ponty his phenomenology can be positively appropriated to the theory of sexual difference. It focuses on three issues: the first one is closely linked to the Phenomenology of Perception and introduces a concept of "difference as differentiation". The second one is concerned with the intersubjective dimension of sexuality and will be called a "sexual syncretism". Finally, I’m referring to Merleau-Ponty's notion of "chiasm" in his late work The Visible and the (...) Invisible in order to apply it to the theory of sexual difference. At this point, the difference between sexual beings will be conceptualized as "chiasmatic intertwining". In doing so, I hope to show that Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology is a helpful resource for philosophical research that is mainly concerned with the questions of sexuality and sexual difference. (shrink)

Public engagement is one of the fundamental pillars of the European programme for research and innovation _Horizon 2020_. The programme encourages engagement that not only fosters science education and dissemination, but also promotes two-way dialogues between scientists and the public at various stages of research. Establishing such dialogues between different groups of societal actors is seen as crucial in order to attain epistemic as well as social desiderata at the intersection between science and society. However, whether these dialogues can actually (...) help attaining these desiderata is far from obvious. This paper discusses some of the costs, risks, and benefits of dialogical public engagement practices, and proposes a strategy to analyse these argumentative practices based on a three-tiered model of epistemic exchange. As a case study, we discuss the phenomenon of vaccine hesitancy, arguably a result of suboptimal public engagement, and show how the proposed model can shed new light on the problem. (shrink)

I argue that recent attempts to deflect Access Problems for realism about a priori domains such as mathematics, logic, morality, and modality using arguments from evolution result in two kinds of explanatory overkill: the Access Problem is eliminated for contentious domains, and realist belief becomes viciously immune to arguments from dispensability, and to non-rebutting counter-arguments more generally.

What are the relevant values to the appraisal of research programs? This question remains hotly debated, as philosophers have recently proposed many lists of values potentially relevant to scientific appraisal. Surprisingly, despite being mentioned in many lists, little attention has been paid to fruitfulness. It is unclear how fruitfulness should be explicated, and whether it has any substantial role in scientific appraisal. In this paper, I argue we should explicate fruitfulness as the capacity to develop of research programs. Moreover, I (...) provide a novel strategy to assess and compare the fruitfulness of programs focused on their research questions and heuristics. To illustrate how this strategy would work, I will discuss a case study, namely the adaptationist program in evolutionary psychology. (shrink)

La diffusione del libro nel Medioevo potrebbe essere riletta alla luce di una metafora attuale sebbene non scevra di aspetti dialettici: quella della “rete”. All’ubicazione spazio-temporale del libro nei monasteri medievali, contraddistinta da fisicità e permanenza, si sotituisce oggi un formato digitale e virtuale, che porta ad una sorta di decontestualizzazione e alla continuità del flusso di informazioni, contribuendo alla diffusione capillare del sapere. L’ottica di universalità e globalità accomuna tuttavia entrambe le epoche. Alcuni concetti-chiave dell’informatica potrebbero infatti declinarsi in (...) ambito medievale: Server-Client per la raccolta, la conservazione e la trasmissione delle conoscenze da parte dei monasteri, quali centri del sapere in Europa, agli uomini di cultura; Firewall , per alludere alla necessità di tutelare i manoscritti, mediante la copiatura e la diffusione dei codici; Community , ad indicare non solo la comunità religiosa o monastica in senso stretto, bensì l’apertura ad una costruzione del sapere mediante un’azione partecipativa . I problemi dell’autenticità delle fonti, dell’acriticità delle informazioni e la pratica delle citazioni trovano un precedente significativo nelle Sententiae di Pietro Lombardo: una sorta di “biblioteca virtuale” grazie alla collezione di passi dalla Sacra Scrittura e da fonti latine e greche, paragonabile a un moderno modello enciclopedico di sapere. The diffusion of the book in the Middle Ages could be critically read through a modern metaphor: the “net”. The space-temporal coordinates of the book shift from being physical and permanent in the Medieval monasteries, to being de-contextualized and continue in the flow of information of digital and virtual format. However the universal and global perspective is common to the contemporary and the Medieval periods. In fact some key-words of computer science could be applied to the Medieval context: Server-Client , for the collection, the preservation and the transmission of knowledge from monasteries, as cultural centers in Medieval Europe, to men of culture; Firewall , for the necessary protection of manuscripts, through copying and diffusing codes; Community , referred not only to the monastic and religious groups, but also to an open sharing of the building of knowledge. Problems like the authenticity of the sources, the lack of criticality in the reception of data, and the practice of quotations are well represented in Peter Lombard’s Sententiae : this work can be compared to a modern encyclopedia thanks to the collection of passages from the Holy Scripture and from Latin and Greek sources, as well as a “virtual library”. (shrink)

: O objetivo principal do presente artigo é indicar as principais características da obra tardia de G. Lukács, em especial, Para uma Ontologia do Ser Social. Pretende-se ainda tecer alguns comentários sobre sua trajetória intelectual.