Gertrude Crotty Davenport (1866-1946), née Gertrude Anna Crotty, destacou-se por suas contribuições para a zoologia. Além disso, ela participou ativamente do movimento eugenista dos Estados Unidos juntamente com seu marido, Charles Benedict Davenport (1866-1944). O presente trabalho consiste em uma tradução comentada de um artigo que ela publicou em The Independent, em 1912. Neste artigo, Gertrude apresenta sua própria visão sobre a eugenia e discute sobre a situação em que se encontrava o movimento eugenista no início da década de 1910.

yamato sharply distinguishes itself from other existing upper ontologies in the following respects. Most importantly, yamato is designed with both engineering and philosophical minds. yamato is based on a sophisticated theory of roles, given that the world is full of roles. yamato has a tenable theory of functions which helps to deal with artifacts effectively. Information is a ‘content-bearing’ entity and it differs significantly from the entities that philosophers have traditionally discussed. Taking into account the modern society in which a (...) flood of information occurs, yamato has a sophisticated theory of informational objects. Quality and quantity are carefully organized for the sake of greater interoperability of real-world data. The philosophical contribution of yamato includes a theory of objects, processes, and events. Those features are illustrated with several case studies. These features lead to the intensive application of yamato in some domains such as biomedicine and learning engineering. (shrink)

Antonio Signorini’s contribution to the constitutive theory of non-linear elasticity is reconstructed and analyzed. Some uninformed opinions suggesting he had a minor role, lacking of significant results, are discussed and refuted. It is shown that Signorini should be rightly credited for being among the first scholars aware of the central problem of non-linear elasticity: the determination of the general form of the elastic potential.

In this article we want to rethink the educational significance of the novel from the perspective of a ‘metanovelistic’ reading of Don Quixote, often acclaimed as the ‘first modern novel’. Our point of departure is two-fold: on the one hand, there is the controversial contemporary phenomenon of de-reading, and all the educational discussions it entails; on the other hand, there is the existing tradition of literary education, which has already extensively reflected upon the (moral, epistemological, ontological) relations between novel reading, (...) education, and subjectification, but which perhaps also has exhausted its means for doing so. To problematize this double starting point in a new way, we propose to revisit the ‘origins’ of the (Western) novel and novel reading, at the dawn of modernity. Exploring the differences between the narratives of subjectification represented by the Cartesian cogito and Cervantes’ Don Quixote—which were near-contemporaries—we strongly argue for an educational–philosophical rehabilitation of the latter. In a first movement, and in dialogue with novelists Milan Kundera and Carlos Fuentes, we do so by focusing on the novel as a particular form or configuration of knowledge—one that is by nature experimental and pluralist. In a second movement, we link this to Jean Baudrillard’s famous distinction between ‘simulation’ and ‘illusion’, claiming that novel reading qua educational subjectification always involves a quixotic practice of adventurous, ‘playful’, and public negotiation between reality and its more or less illusory alternatives. (shrink)

People can represent temporal stimuli (e.g., pictures depicting past and future events) as spatially connoted dimensions arranged along the three main axes (horizontal, sagittal, and vertical). For example, past and future events are generally represented, from the perspective of the individuals, as being placed behind and in front of them, respectively. Here, we report that such a 3D representation can also emerge for facial stimuli of different ages. In three experiments, participants classified a central target face, representing an individual at (...) different age stages, as younger or older than the reference face of 40 years. Manual responses were provided with two keys placed along the horizontal axis (Experiment 1), the sagittal axis (Experiment 2), and the vertical axis (Experiment 3). The results indicated that the younger faces were represented on the left/back/top side of the space, whereas the older faces were represented on the right/forward/bottom side of the space. Furthermore, in all experiments, the latencies decreased with the absolute difference between the age of the target face and that of the reference face (i.e., a distance effect). Overall, this work suggests that the spatial representation of time includes social features of the human face. (shrink)

This paper makes the following claims: 1) early playwrights (especially Cratinus and Epicharmus, with a new reading of frr. 23B1-2 DK = 275-276 PCG) were keen on lampooning Eleatism; 2) through literary and linguistic devices that were obvious for Plato's original public, Plato revived this tradition in the Parmenides; 3) the Parmenides portrays the Eleats as catastrophically counterproductive philosophers. In sharp contrast with Socratic logoi, Eleatism, far from promoting philosophy (protreptic), eventually alienates all possible disciples ('apotreptic'), thus undermining the very (...) notion of Platonic philo-sophia. (shrink)

Though a chorus of voices has risen to deny the alarm about climate changes during last years, the great majority of the scientific community believe that without further commitment and action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, due to human activities the world will have to face a series of climate changes dangerous both for people and the Earth ecosystems. Climate change is thus an ethical issue from many points of view, mainly because those who are and will be most negatively (...) affected are the least responsible for having caused the problem. (shrink)

En el presente artículo analizamos el problema de la donación en la filosofía neokantiana de Heinrich Rickert y la crítica que Martin Heidegger le dirigió desde el marco de la fenomenología. Gracias a un análisis previo de las estructuras fundamentales de la teoría del conocimiento de Rickert, intentaremos mostrar cómo la interpretación rickertiana de la donación permite captar algunos aspectos esenciales de las diferencias entre Kant y la filosofía transcendental de los valores. Finalmente, mostraremos cómo Heidegger critica la reducción de (...) la donación a una categoría teorética por un lado y extiende su ámbito de aplicación al horizonte preteorético por el otro. (shrink)

In her recent much-debated manifesto for Socratic education, Martha Nussbaum (2010) makes two statements seemingly dissonant with each other: on the one hand, she recognizes in Dewey "a thinker who brought Socrates into virtually every American classroom" (p. 64); on the other hand, she points out that "Dewey, however, never addressed systematically the question of how Socratic critical reasoning might be taught to children of various ages" (p. 73). The latter remark works as a sort of springboard to the introduction (...) of Matthew Lipman's curriculum as a "source of practical guidance" for teachers "who want to teach Socratically" (p. 73).We could rephrase such a double position in the evaluation of Dewey's .. (shrink)

Herbert Simon’s work presents a curious anomaly to the historian and philosopher trying to understand the development of classic Artificial Intelligence (AI). Simon was one of most influential figures in AI since its birth, and yet it is always with some difficulties that his work can be made to fit within the received canon of AI’s development and goals. In fact, he differed from every other figure in early AI on most counts: in terms of the recognized intellectual heritage of (...) AI, of his own background and training, of the goals he set for his own AI work and the assessment criteria he accepted. I will argue that these differences provide important clues toward a reevaluation of the relationship between Artificial Intelligence and Herbert Simon’s work that may change our current understanding of both. On the one hand, classic Artificial Intelligence (or Complex Information Processing, as Simon preferred to call it for a number of years), provided the tool he needed to pursue a much broader research agenda that strove to encompass human beings in their cognitive, emotional, social, and political dimensions. On the other hand, AI’s curious status as the discipline that straggles the boundaries between engineering, science, and philosophy can be recast as the tool that allowed researchers to pursue philosophy’s old goals with an alternative methodology. From this perspective, Simon’s version of Artificial Intelligence becomes a full-fledged form of ”anti-philosophy” as ambitious and broad-ranging as old-fashioned metaphysics and as revolutionary as the latter in the radical refashioning of its methodology. It follows that a philosophical assessment of AI, at in least in its Simonian incarnation, must be more farreaching than it is usually thought. At the methodological level, it must discuss whether AI’s invention of computer simulation as the tool that overcomes the a-priori/a-posteriori distinction by actually producing the behavior it wants to explain is really adequate to the job at hand.. (shrink)

This cutting-edge handbook examines moral psychology and behaviour, uncovering layers of human morality through a comprehensive overview of topics and approaches. Featuring an array of expert international contributors, the book addresses five key themes: moral reasoning, moral judgments, moral emotions, moral behavior, and moral self-views. Each section includes empirical chapters that address these themes at the intrapersonal, interpersonal, intragroup, or intergroup level. Each section starts with a reflective chapter from a leading scholar in this field of study who shares their (...) personal vision on key issues and future developments. Drawing on emerging research and featuring real-world examples, the book offers a deeper understanding of the social psychological factors that shape our moral behavior and how this plays out in our daily lives. (shrink)

A guest edited volume of the Journal of Applied Philosophy devoted to topics regarding the ethics of nudges, particularly those that have received little or no treatment up to now. Since the publication of Nudge in 2008, nudges have become widely used tools in policymakers' toolbox. Concurrently, ethicists have discussed which conditions, if any, ensure the fair and ethically legitimate implementation of such untraditional policy techniques. The debates have focused primarily on the alleged intrusiveness of nudges and their lack of (...) factual transparency. The special issue is intended to enrich the debate in the conviction that the clarity of the terms adopted within the debate could be improved and that some relevant ethical perspectives have been left out in assessing the morality of nudges. Specifically, the aims of this special issue are twofold, normative and conceptual. On the one side, we delve into the concepts on which the evaluation of nudging hinges, such as "preferences", "resistibility", and "libertarianism". Since the meanings assigned to such concepts drive our evaluation of nudging, their comprehension is critical. On the other side, the acceptability of nudges has been extensively assessed in the light of ethical theories developed within Western philosophy, and not with alternative but promising ethical frameworks from the Global South. Relatedly, some values implicated in nudging, such as the ethics of nudging vulnerable populations, have been overshadowed by scholars' attention to decisional autonomy. The special issue gives these themes the attention they deserve. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hunters, Cooks, and Nooks:Two Interpretations of the Tangled Relationship Between Philosophy and ScienceStefano Franchi (bio)Knowledge is the measure of all things.—Plato, Prot. 361b1Preliminaries: Double QuestioningWhen philosophers ask questions about science, they usually do so in the context of one specific discipline whose latest results or whose historical development seem to pose genuinely philosophical problems: for instance, the nature of space/time, the nature of intelligence, the nature/nurture debate. It is (...) rarer to hear a philosopher asking questions about the general relationship between philosophy and science, even when, as in the cases above, the answer to this question provides the necessary ground for any specific investigation of the allegedly genuine philosophical problems arising in physics, biology, or cognitive science.The main difficulty lies in the intrinsic ambiguity of the term "science." On the one hand, "science" can be considered as a descriptive term: it is the genus of the empirically given, scientific disciplines (the "sciences," in the plural). On the other hand, "science" (episteme, scientia, Wissenschaft) (always in the singular) is a theoretical term that denotes a form of knowledge. More precisely, it refers, as philosophers say, to a "conceptually unified body of objective knowledge." Traditionally, the latter meaning includes philosophy itself within its denotation. Thus, when both meanings of the term "science" are considered, to interrogate the relationship between philosophy and science is always, and preliminarily, to question the nature of philosophy itself, even when the question as such is not explicitly raised. In all these cases, a characterization of the nature of philosophy is presupposed by a philosophical analysis of scientific results.However, unless the specificity of concrete scientific investigations is denied from the outset, the questioning, even when conducted from a circumscribed philosophical standpoint, cannot be reduced to a single gesture that interrogates the scientificity of philosophy. On the contrary, it must also concurrently question the possibility of a specific relation between a determinate philosophical endeavor and specific scientific pursuits. Any questioning of the relationship between philosophy and science will always imply a double gesture: on the one hand, a question about what makes or does not make philosophy a science; on the other, what brings philosophy closer, or moves [End Page 98] it farther apart, from the sciences. Most often, philosophers focus their attention on just one aspect of this double question. In this paper, I would like to address both sides of the issue. In particular, I would like to examine the two very different answers to this general problem given by Plato and by Michel Foucault. Although their answers address fundamentally the same issue, they are so diametrically opposed, as I will show, that they may be considered as the external boundaries of a very broad range of possible responses.2SignpostsLet me begin with Plato. In a well-known passage from the Euthydemus, the main characters are discussing which kind of knowledge is required by wisdom. In this context, to the delighted although belated surprise of Crito, the young Cleinias introduces a crucial distinction between hunters and cooks: the former know how to find the prey, but only the latter know how to use it:No art of actual hunting, [Cleinias] said, extends any further than pursuing and capturing; whenever the hunters catch what they are pursuing they are incapable of using it, but they and the fishermen hand over their prey to the cooks. And again, geometers and astronomers and calculators (who are hunters too, in a way, for none of these make their diagrams; they simply discover those which already exist), since they themselves have no idea of how to use their prey but only how to hunt it, hand over the task of using their discoveries to the dialecticians—at least, those of them who are not completely useless [anoetoi].[290b–c]1Cleinias's account acknowledges the reality and value of the knowledge gained by the sciences, but denies that scientists have full awareness of what they are doing and of the implications of their own work. Scientific knowledge lacks both self-reflexivity and transparency: it does not have the ability to bring to full evidence the principles it rests upon... (shrink)

Believing that the enterprise of constructing "artificial intelligence" transcends the bounds of any one discipline, the editors of Mechanical Bodies, Computational Minds have brought together researchers in AI and scholars in the humanities to reexamine the fundamental assumptions of both areas. The AI community, for example, could benefit from explorations of human intelligence and creativity by philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, literary critics, and others, while analysis of AI's theoretical struggles and technical advances could yield insights into such traditional humanist concerns as (...) the nature of rationality and the mind-body dichotomy.The contributions include a continuation of the famous Hubert Dreyfus-Daniel Dennett debate over Kasparov's defeat by IBM's Deep Blue; Philip Agre's tracing of difficulties in AI research to the inherited tensions of Cartesian dualism; Evelyn Fox Keller's examination of the development of computer technology in relation to biology; Douglas Hofstadter's argument that thinking is more than the theorem-solving activities of AI; and Alison Adam's discussion of the implicitly male universal subject used in AI. (shrink)

We trained chickens to react to an average human female face but not to an average male face (or vice versa). In a subsequent test, the animals showed preferences for faces consistent with human sexual preferences (obtained from university students). This suggests that human preferences arise from general properties of nervous systems, rather than from face-specific adaptations. We discuss this result in the light of current debate on the meaning of sexual signals and suggest further tests of existing hypotheses about (...) the origin of sexual preferences. (shrink)

La "riforma" della dialettica hegeliana e la "circolazione" del pensiero europeo scandirono il progetto culturale del filosofo e politico Bertrando Spaventa. Ma la sua biografia intellettuale - dalla giovinezza alle ultime riflessioni sul realismo e sulla metafisica - mostra una ricchezza per tanti versi inesplorata: la lettura dei grandi autori del Rinascimento, a cominciare da Giordano Bruno, il confronto con i filosofi italiani contemporanei, il contributo alla vita civile, costituiscono momenti essenziali per lo sviluppo del suo pensiero. In occasione del (...) bicentenario della nascita (Bomba, 26 giugno 1817), alcuni dei suoi maggiori interpreti propongono con questo libro una ricostruzione dell'intero itinerario filosofico e civile di Spaventa. (shrink)

Starting from a suggestion of Stephen Toulmin and through an interpretation of the criticism to which Neurath, one of the founders of the Vienna Circle, submits Descartes’ views on science, the paper attempts to outline a pattern of modernity opposed to the Cartesian one, that has been obtaining over the last four centuries. In particular, it is argued that a new alliance has to be established between science and education, overcoming Descartes’ banishment against education. In a Neurathian perspective education is (...) a key-moment of the scientific enterprise without which science itself is in danger of going astray and no scientific outlook is promoted in the society at large. Such an anti-Cartesian attitude is a leitmotiv of the whole Neurath’s production and characterizes his fundamental approach to the sense of modernity. For this reasons, despite all its shortcomings, Neurath’s proposal represents a very promising option for a new agenda of the modernity away from Descartes’ spell. By elaborating on Neurath’s (and Dewey’s) insights, the paper puts forward the idea that philosophy of science (such as it was originated by neopositivism in its Reichenbachian version) should give way to an educational philosophy of science which could allow us “to bring the genuine modern into existence”. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to develop some considerations about the ways of reading Marx in the twentieth first century. The author claims that what is actually necessary is a completely new approach to the Marxian texts. Today Marx has to be red as a great classic of political and philosophical thought, and this means that it is necessary to discuss and to criticize the Marxian arguments with the same accuracy which is needed to read a page of Aristotle (...) or of Kant. This means further that it is very important also to discover the main aporias in the Marxian thought ; and the author tries to show which kind of problems we meet if we confront seriously with some fundamental Marxian themes as the theory of history, the theory of the revolution, the labour theory of value. Marxian thinking is not a perfect and coherent construction. But the contribution of Marx to critical thought is in any case important because only Marx has a so clear view of the fundamental antinomy of modernity : the paradox of a form of domination which is at the same time based on the fundamental assumption of the equality of all men. (shrink)