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)

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)

ISBN 9042002980 (paperback) NLG 45.00 From the contents: Musikwissenschaft in den Niederlanden bis 1960 (Eduard Reeser).- Ueber Helene Nolthenius (Etty Mulder).- Im Banne des Ringes: ideologische Ingredienzen im Werk Wagners (Joost Langeveld).- Adorno und die Musik (Etty Mulder).- Paul Klee zwischen Klang und Farbe: von einem Musiker, der Maler wurde (Hannedea van Nederveen Meerkerk).

La metafora del panottico viene oggi spesso invocata per descrivere gli effetti della sorveglianza contemporanea, effettuata con il supporto di tecnologie digitali. L’ubiquità di sistemi di videosorveglianza, di sensori di ogni tipo incorporati nei dispositivi portatili che ci accompagnano nella quotidianità, la continua esposizione telematica necessaria per espletare funzioni essenziali (lavoro, relazioni con le pubbliche amministrazioni, mantenimento di rapporti interpersonali …) creano una costante possibilità di osservazione simile a quella offerta dalla struttura panottica. Questa nuova situazione sembra riprodurre, negli effetti (...) più che nella struttura architettonica, il sistema disciplinare nel panottico. Stiamo quindi scivolando verso una situazione di “panottismo digitale”, in cui ogni nostro comportamento può essere potenzialmente osservato, senza che ci sia data la possibilità di verificare quando e chi ci osservi? E se questo è il caso, quali sono le possibili implicazioni per valori fondamentali quali l’autonomia, la libertà di espressione, l’eguaglianza, la solidarietà e la partecipazione alla vita politica? -/- SOMMARIO: 1. Sorveglianza, potere e tecnologie digitali. – 2. Breve fenomenologia della sorveglianza digitale. – 2.1. Il “capitalismo della sorveglianza”. – 2.2. Controllo della criminalità e della mobilità. – 2.3. La convergenza di pubblico e privato nella sor-veglianza digitale. – 3. Implicazioni e rischi della sorveglianza digitale e possibili rimedi. (shrink)

This article analyses the ethical aspects of multistakeholder recommendation systems (RSs). Following the most common approach in the literature, we assume a consequentialist framework to introduce the main concepts of multistakeholder recommendation. We then consider three research questions: who are the stakeholders in a RS? How are their interests taken into account when formulating a recommendation? And, what is the scientific paradigm underlying RSs? Our main finding is that multistakeholder RSs (MRSs) are designed and theorised, methodologically, according to neoclassical welfare (...) economics. We consider and reply to some methodological objections to MRSs on this basis, concluding that the multistakeholder approach offers the resources to understand the normative social dimension of RSs. (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)

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)

The first part of this paper will provide a reconstruction of Francis Bacon’s interpretation of Academic scepticism, Pyrrhonism, and Dogmatism, and its sources throughout his large corpus. It shall also analyze Bacon’s approach against the background of his intellectual milieu, looking particularly at Renaissance readings of scepticism as developed by Guillaume Salluste du Bartas, Pierre de la Primaudaye, Fulke Greville, and John Davies. It shall show that although Bacon made more references to Academic than to Pyrrhonian Scepticism, like most of (...) his contemporaries, he often misrepresented and mixed the doctrinal components of both currents. The second part of the paper shall offer a complete chronological survey of Bacon’s assessment of scepticism throughout his writings. Following the lead of previous studies by other scholars, I shall support the view that, while he approved of the state of doubt and the suspension of judgment as a provisional necessary stage in the pursuit of knowledge, he rejected the notion of acatalepsia. To this received reading, I shall add the suggestion that Bacon’s criticism of acatalepsia ultimately depends on his view of the historical conditions that surround human nature. I deal with this last point in the third part of the paper, where I shall argue that Bacon’s evaluation of scepticism relied on his adoption of a Protestant and Augustinian view of human nature that informed his overall interpretation of the history of humanity and nature, including the sceptical schools. (shrink)

Maimonides famously holds that, while it is perfectly possible to know (and say) that God exists, it is impossible to know (and say) what God is like because any positive attri- bution contradicts God’s essential oneness. Consequently, pure equivocity obtains between descriptions of the divine and descriptions of any other being. But this raises a puzzle: Knowledge of God seems vacuous if we lack all comprehension of God’s nature - so how can we have any comprehension of the divine without (...) being able to say what it is that we know? In this essay, I defend the substantiality of the concept of knowledge of God on Maimonides’ apophatic picture. Drawing on the concept of non-propositional knowledge, I argue that knowledge and comprehension can come apart, which lends support to Maimonides’ thesis that knowledge of God, though substantial and objective, cannot be expressed. (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)

euroscience of Rule-Guided Behavior brings together, for the first time, the experiments and theories that have created the new science of rules. Rules are central to human behavior, but until now the field of neuroscience lacked a synthetic approach to understanding them. How are rules learned, retrieved from memory, maintained in consciousness and implemented? How are they used to solve problems and select among actions and activities? How are the various levels of rules represented in the brain, ranging from simple (...) conditional ones if a traffic light turns red, then stop to rules and strategies of such sophistication that they defy description? And how do brain regions interact to produce rule-guided behavior? These are among the most fundamental questions facing neuroscience, but until recently there was relatively little progress in answering them. It was difficult to probe brain mechanisms in humans, and expert opinion held that animals lacked the capacity for such high-level behavior. However, rapid progress in neuroimaging technology has allowed investigators to explore brain mechanisms in humans, while increasingly sophisticated behavioral methods have revealed that animals can and do use high-level rules to control their behavior. The resulting explosion of information has led to a new science of rules, but it has also produced a plethora of overlapping ideas and terminology and a field sorely in need of synthesis. In this book, Silvia Bunge and Jonathan Wallis bring together the worlds leading cognitive and systems neuroscientists to explain the most recent research on rule-guided behavior. Their work covers a wide range of disciplines and methods, including neuropsychology, functional magnetic resonance imaging, neurophysiology, electroencephalography, neuropharmacology, near-infrared spectroscopy, and transcranial magnetic stimulation. This unprecedented synthesis is a must-read for anyone interested in how complex behavior is controlled and organized by the brain. (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)

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)

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.

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.

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)

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)

Legal interpreting and translation are some of the oldest and most frequently practised bilingual activities in Hong Kong. The principles and operation of the bilingual legal system actually impinge on the legal interpreting services and the practices of legal interpreting services also in ways impact on the system itself. This study adopts a historical approach to analyse the jurisprudence and administration of legal interpreting in Hong Kong courts from 1966 to 2016, across the 1997 dividing line between British colonial rule (...) and the return of Hong Kong to the government of mainland China. It focuses on the opinions of judges and other participants in courtroom proceedings as recorded in Hong Kong case reports. It is discovered that the jurisprudence of having an interpreter to interpret for participants who do not speak the language of the court is clearly indicated and well versed in the precedents. However, there is a gap between the jurisprudence and the actual interpreting services, mainly caused by the malpractices of the concerned administration department and some of the law enforcement agents working in the frontline. (shrink)

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)

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)

It is well-established that algorithms can be instruments of injustice. It is less frequently discussed, however, how current modes of AI deployment often make the very discovery of injustice difficult, if not impossible. In this article, we focus on the effects of algorithmic profiling on epistemic agency. We show how algorithmic profiling can give rise to epistemic injustice through the depletion of epistemic resources that are needed to interpret and evaluate certain experiences. By doing so, we not only demonstrate how (...) the philosophical conceptual framework of epistemic injustice can help pinpoint potential, systematic harms from algorithmic profiling, but we also identify a novel source of hermeneutical injustice that to date has received little attention in the relevant literature: epistemic fragmentation. Epistemic fragmentation is a structural characteristic of algorithmically-mediated environments that isolate individuals, making it more difficult to develop, uptake and apply new epistemic resources. This, in turn, can impede the identification and conceptualisation of emerging harms in these environments. We trace the occurrence of hermeneutical injustice back to the fragmentation of the epistemic experiences of individuals, who are left more vulnerable by the inability to share, compare, and learn from shared experiences. (shrink)

Teaching mathematics and improving mathematics competence are pending subjects within our educational system. The PEIM (Programa Evolutivo Instruccional para Matemáticas), a constructivist intervention program for the improvement of mathematical performance, affects the different agents involved in math learning, guaranteeing a significant improvement in students’ performance. The program is based on the following pillars: (a) students become the main agents of their learning by constructing their own knowledge; (b) the teacher must be the guide to facilitate and guarantee such a construction (...) by being a great connoisseur of the fundamental aspects of the development of the child’s mathematical thinking; (c) the mathematical contents must be sequenced in terms of the complexity and significance for the student as well as contextualized at all times; and (d) the classroom must have a constructivist climate highlighting cooperative work among students. The implementation of PEIM along with the empirical evaluation conducted in several centers in Madrid and Zaragoza (Spain) confirm how students improve their mathematical competence. Both first- and second-grade students in elementary education were far more effective in solving problems, highlighting the use of more advanced strategies in their resolution and a lower incidence of conceptual errors. Moreover, it was possible to verify how the students proving greater difficulty, experienced an evolution in learning similarly to those who did not present it. The program provides customized education to allow the teacher to know at all times how he should be more influential on the students’ learning through mathematical profiles. Both teaching practice and teachers were observed, being that of the experimental group more prone to analyzing processes and allowing the construction of knowledge by students, due to their psycho-developmental training. As a result, we found several improvements through the implementation of the program that may serve, for upcoming years, as a basis for the necessary changes in the teaching of mathematics. (shrink)

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)

The recent boom of direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic tests, aimed at measuring children’s athletic potential, is the latest wave in the ‘pre-professionalization’ of children that has characterized, especially but not exclusively, the USA in the last 15 years or so. In this paper, I analyse the use of DTC genetic tests, sometimes coupled with more traditional methods of ‘talent scouting’, to assess a child’s predisposition to athletic performance. I first discuss the scientific evidence at the basis of these tests, and the (...) parental decision in terms of education, and of investing in the children’s future, taken on the basis of the results of the tests. I then discuss how these parental practices impact on the children’s right to an open future, and on their developing sense of autonomy. I also consider the meaning and role of sports in childhood, and conclude that the use of DTC genetic tests to measure children’s athletic potential should be seen as a ‘wake up’ call for other problematic parental attitudes aimed at scouting and developing children’s talent. (shrink)

The Feeling Brain — The Thinking Soul Recent advances in neuroscience have dramatically improved our understanding of human emotional states. With the help of new technologies and models, scholars are beginning to unravel the "mystery" of emotional life. Confusions in contemporary emotion studies are due to the traditional model of a person as a rational conscious agent. The paper highlights two problematic aspects of this prevailing model: the relation between emotion and reason and the relation between emotion and consciousness. Firstly, (...) it is claimed that the difference between emotions and thoughts does not transcend their mutual interconnectivity. Secondly, conscious content and emotional responses are both products of specialized emotion systems that operate unconsciously. Both claims are supported by experimental findings and clinical practice. (shrink)

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.