The persisting usage of virtual means for the completion of activities usually or traditionally held in person stimulates the reflection about the possible effect that doing philosophy online could have on the philosophical integrity of the process. The body question seems to be pivotal in this context not only as far as concerning virtuality issues but also philosophy’s care to integrate the body into its routines – when it is practiced physically – especially in the frame of an education still (...) hesitating to embrace embodied experience. The body deficiency, its vanishing, is first of all a question for philosophy and its ways to be practiced today – on that basis, passing through virtuality’s discourses can enlighten the relevant reflection. (shrink)

This paper aims at introducing the idea of Emerging Philosophizing as a way of naming, describing, developing and further understanding the process of having philosophical moments occurring instantly and coming directly from children in the classroom. On this ground, the main characteristics of philosophizing as developed in the frame of EmPhil along with its differences among other forms of philosophizing are briefly discussed. The conceptualization of EmPhil can be grounded in philosophies that explore the process of thinking as emergence, doing (...) and a way of life. EmPhil is an ongoing idea still developing, changing, and shaping both philosophically and practically in classroom as an experience and a process forming a way of philosophizing that allows children’s thinking to unblock and unlock. Children’s thinking and EmPhil as extension to it, are inevitably and fundamentally related to their own activity, incorporated to it, following the stream of this activity, as EmPhil follows the stream of thinking of this very activity and dives in it. EmPhil opens up systematically the space for children to view their own thoughts, as important that need to be questioned, discussed and not left aside. EmPhil celebrates the “instant”, the “fresh”, the “unfinished”, the “ongoing” process of thinking which keeps changing, altering and developing. (shrink)

Bessarion’s major philosophical treatise In Calumniatorem Platonis is a systematic approach to Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy written in response to George of Trebizond’s Comparatio Philosophorum Aristotelis et Platonis, which attacked Plato’s authority and proclaimed Aristotle’s superiority. A striking example of this is Bessarion’s attempt to defend Plato against George of Trebizond’s accusation that Plato did not offer sound arguments in favor of the immortality of the soul. In this article, I focus on Plato’s proof of the immortality of the soul (...) in the Phaedrus, as presented by Bessarion in the eighth chapter of the second book of the In Calumniatorem Platonis. The Phaedrusʼ proof is based on soul’s definition as a self-mover: since the soul always moves itself, it is the source of motion and is, therefore, ungenerated, imperishable and immortal. Bessarion’s interpretation of the Platonic proof gives the impression that Bessarion cites the text where Plato argues that the soul is immortal, and he summarises the text where Plato argues that the soul is ungenerated and imperishable. I argue, however, that Bessarion does not offer an original reading of the Phaedrus’ proof, and I also propose that Bessarion’s interpretation reflects his attempt to harmonize the Platonic and the Aristotelian views. (shrink)

Prior research has suggested that perceptual disfluency activates analytical processing and increases the solution rate of mathematical problems with appealing but incorrect answers (i.e., the Cogn...

The enactive approach to cognition distinctively emphasizes autonomy, adaptivity, agency, meaning, experience, and interaction. Taken together, these principles can provide the new sciences of language with a comprehensive philosophical framework: languaging as adaptive social sense-making. This is a refinement and advancement on Maturana’s idea of languaging as a manner of living. Overcoming limitations in Maturana’s initial formulation of languaging is one of three motivations for this paper. Another is to give a response to skeptics who challenge enactivism to connect “lower-level” (...) sense-making with “higher-order” sophisticated moves like those commonly ascribed to language. Our primary goal is to contribute a positive story developed from the enactive account of social cognition, participatory sense-making. This concept is put into play in two different philosophical models, which respectively chronicle the logical and ontogenetic development of languaging as a particular form of social agency. Languaging emerges from the interplay of coordination and exploration inherent in the primordial tensions of participatory sense-making between individual and interactive norms; it is a practice that transcends the self-other boundary and enables agents to regulate self and other as well as interaction couplings. Linguistic sense-makers are those who negotiate interactive and internalized ways of meta-regulating the moment-to-moment activities of living and cognizing. Sense-makers in enlanguaged environments incorporate sensitivities, roles, and powers into their unique yet intelligible linguistic bodies. We dissolve the problematic dichotomies of high/low, online/offline, and linguistic/nonlinguistic cognition, and we provide new boundary criteria for specifying languaging as a prevalent kind of human social sense-making. (shrink)

In recent years, a change in attitude in particle physics has led to our understanding current quantum field theories as effective field theories. The present paper is concerned with the significance of this EFT approach, especially from the viewpoint of the debate on reductionism in science. In particular, it is a purpose of this paper to clarify how EFTs may provide an interesting case-study in current philosophical discussion on reduction, emergence and inter-level relationships in general.

In the Greek educational mechanism, the teaching of philosophy remains marginalized. On the other hand, a whole range of educational programs seem to be imbued with philosophical elements, even if the contribution of philosophy there is indirect and in fact supplementary and supporting. In the same time, the philosophy of the educational system itself is also imbued with “philosophical” values in the style of the new common European values. A real integration of philosophical practices in Greek school, an integration also (...) of Philosophy for Children, involves necessarily a whole new design of the integration of philosophy itself in the Greek educational system . This design ought to be based on a new systematic conception of philosophy, especially against the new pressures exerted by education. (shrink)

This article elaborates a possible articulation between philosophy, Philosophy for Children and philosophy of education through the concept of teaching. Philosophy for Children permits the discovery not only of the philosophical origins of the methodological tools used commonly in education, but their proper philosophical use. Moreover, Philosophy for Children makes evident the inner relation between philosophy itself and the phenomenon of teaching. On these grounds, and through the understanding of what constitutes philosophical education in real terms, one could adumbrate as (...) well the role that a philosophy of education could undertake. The examples of the critical thinking movement, of the construction of inter-disciplinary thematic curricula, or of creative learning and teaching show to what extent, implicitly and in diverse ways, philosophy is central to the educational mechanism, or is needed for the function of this very mechanism. Nonetheless, at the same time, Greek educational reality marginalizes philosophy, a contradiction that could be worked out by the introduction of Philosophy for Children in the school. This very introduction requires a new kind of understanding and exercise of philosophy, but it also requires a mediator to work from the side of philosophy of education. (shrink)

This essay argues that according to feminist existential phenomenology, feminist pragmatism, and feminist genealogy, our embodied condition is an important starting place for ethical living due to the inevitable role that habits play in our conduct. In bodies, the phenomenon of habit uniquely holds together the ambiguities of freedom and determinism, transcendence and immanence, and stability and plasticity. Seeing habit formation as a matter of self-growth and social justice gives fresh opportunity for thinking of “assuming ambiguity” as a lifelong endeavor (...) made up of many small projects and practices of situated resistance to stagnation. Transcendence, understood as ameliorative transformation, is found in cultivating habits of learning from our bodily living. I articulate this argument via a reading of Simone de Beauvoir's The Coming of Age, John Dewey's Human Nature and Conduct, and Ladelle McWhorter's Bodies and Pleasures. I discuss two domains wherein the ethical significance of habit formation appears: cognitive psychological research on neural plasticity, and certain projects of self-cultivation that risk turning into overdetermining “cult of the self ” practices that close off possibilities for personal and collective transformation. (shrink)

"Now in its third edition, this classic text remains the seminal resource for in-depth information about major concepts and principles of the cultural-historical theory developed by Lev Vygotsky, his students, and colleagues, as well as three generations of neo-Vygotskian scholars in Russia and the West. Featuring two new chapters on brain development and scaffolding in the zone of proximal development, as well as additional content on technology, dual language learners, and students with disabilities, this new edition provides the latest research (...) evidence supporting the basics of the cultural-historical approach alongside Vygotskian-based practical implications. With concrete explanations and strategies on how to scaffold young children's learning and development, this book is essential reading for students of early childhood theory and development"--. (shrink)

The justification of democracy, while widely debated, is hindered by a sub-optimal conceptual framework. For a start, there is confusion about the basic terms in the discussion. Many theorists claim to support either the ‘intrinsic’ or the ‘instrumental’ value of democracy, but it is unclear what this exactly means. Can democracy have other kinds of values? What does it mean to value democracy intrinsically? As a result, at certain points, scholars are talking past one another and their assessments of their (...) respective approaches to democracy are less clear than what they intended. This paper develops a conceptual framework of the values of democracy. I use this framework to classify theories of democracy under three main groups: theories that value democracy intrinsically, instrumentally, or contributorily (necessarily and non-necessarily). Through this analysis, the points of engagement among the different approaches will emerge and flawed arguments about democracy will be revealed. (shrink)

Villeneuve d’Ascq, Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2018, 404 p. Cette collection d’essais commence avec une question provocatrice : d’autres cours d’Europe offrent-elles une place « aussi éminente » aux femmes que la cour de France à l’époque moderne? Les études réunies ici montrent de façon évidente l’importance et la centralité des femmes à la cour de France, des reines et princesses au sommet du pouvoir jusqu’aux demoiselles de musique, nourrices, femmes d’officiels et autres. Cet...

This essay frames systemic patterns of mental abuse against women of color and Indigenous women on Turtle Island (North America) in terms of larger design-of-distribution strategies in settler colonial societies, as these societies use various forms of social power to distribute, reproduce, and automate social inequalities (including public health precarities and mortality disadvantages) that skew socio-economic gain continuously toward white settler populations and their descendants. It departs from traditional studies in gender-based violence research that frame mental abuses such as gaslighting--commonly (...) understood as mental manipulation through lying or deceit--stochastically, as chance-driven interpersonal phenomena. Building on structural analyses of knowledge in political epistemology (Dotson 2012, Berenstain 2016), political theory (Davis and Ernst 2017), and Indigenous social theory (Tuck and Yang 2012), I develop the notion of cultural gaslighting to refer to the social and historical infrastructural support mechanisms that disproportionately produce abusive mental ambients in settler colonial cultures in order to further the ends of cultural genocide and dispossession. I conclude by proposing a social epidemiological account of gaslighting that a) highlights the public health harms of abusive ambients for minority populations, b) illuminates the hidden rules of social structure in settler colonial societies, and c) amplifies the corresponding need for structural reparations. (shrink)

Coordination is a widely employed term across recent quantitative and qualitative approaches to intersubjectivity, particularly approaches that give embodiment and enaction central explanatory roles. With a focus on linguistic and bodily coordination in conversational contexts, I review the operational meaning of coordination in recent empirical research and related theorizing of embodied intersubjectivity. This discussion articulates what must be involved in treating linguistic meaning as dynamic processes of coordination. The coordination approach presents languaging as a set of dynamic self-organizing processes and (...) actions on multiple timescales and across multiple modalities that come about and work in certain domains (those jointly constructed in social, interactive, high-order sense-making). These processes go beyond meaning at the level that is available to first-person experience. I take one crucial consequence of this to be the ubiquitously moral nature of languaging with others. Languaging coordinates experience, among other levels of behavior and event. Ethical effort is called for by the automatic autonomy-influencing forces of languaging as coordination. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore the consequences of accepting the immortality of the soul with regard to moral behavior. Philosophers from different periods and fields offer a variety of arguments which prove the immortal nature of the soul based on ethical theories, such as happiness is the end of mankind, man’s incapability of fulfilling his final purpose, the posthumous award of divine justice and so on. Through a critical appraisal of different but representative philosophical approaches to immortality (...) presented by Plato, Kant and Petros Brailas-Armenis, this paper aims to show that there is a strong interaction between ethics and psychology; the idea of eternal life has a deep moral meaning as an incentive for being virtuous. Therefore, both knowledge about and belief in the immortality of the soul can serve as a springboard for an ethical life. (shrink)

Bessarion, bishop of Nicaea and later cardinal of the Roman Church, was one of the most significant figures of the fifteenth century. He devoted himself to preserving the Greek heritage, to uniting the Orthodox and Latin Churches, and to promoting a crusade against the Ottomans. The aim of this paper is to interpret Bessarion’s views concerning the salvation of Byzantium by giving an overview of his key works, orations and letters, focusing on the rise of the Ottomans: his Oratio dogmatica (...) pro Unione delivered to the Byzantine delegation at the Council of Florence on 13 and 14 April 1439; his Epistola encyclica addressed to the Greeks on 27 May 1463, when he was appointed Latin Patriarch of Constantinople; his third and last letter sent to Constantine Palaeologus, Despot of Mystra, in the middle of 1444; his letter addressed to the Doge of Venice, Francesco Foscari, written on 13 July 1453, shortly after receiving the news of the fall of Constantinople; and his Epistolae et Orationes contra Turcos composed on the occasion of the capture of the Venetian colony of Negroponte by the Ottomans (12 July 1470). (shrink)

Bessarion’s major philosophical treatise In Calumniatorem Platonis is a systematic approach to Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy written in response to George of Trebizond’s Comparatio Philosophorum Aristotelis et Platonis, which attacked Plato’s authority and proclaimed Aristotle’s superiority. A striking example of this is Bessarion’s attempt to defend Plato against George of Trebizond’s accusation that Plato did not offer sound arguments in favor of the immortality of the soul. In this article, I focus on Plato’s proof of the immortality of the soul (...) in the Phaedrus (245c5-246a2), as presented by Bessarion in the eighth chapter of the second book of the In Calumniatorem Platonis. The Phaedrusʼ proof is based on soul’s definition as a self-mover: since the soul always moves itself, it is the source of motion and is, therefore, ungenerated, imperishable and immortal. Bessarion’s interpretation of the Platonic proof gives the impression that Bessarion cites the text where Plato argues that the soul is immortal (245c5-9), and he summarises the text where Plato argues that the soul is ungenerated and imperishable (245d1-246a2). I argue, however, that Bessarion does not offer an original reading of the Phaedrus’ proof, and I also propose that Bessarion’s interpretation reflects his attempt to harmonize the Platonic and the Aristotelian views. (shrink)

Nine years before the fall of Constantinople, in 1444, cardinal Bessarion in his third and last letter addressed to Constantine Palaeologus, Despot of Mystra, expressed his deep concern about the economic, political, cultural, social and moral crisis, maintaining that the multidimensional crisis would inevitably lead to Byzantium’s decline. Bessarion stresses that the aristocracy’s biased policy, the burdensome taxation, the low level of business activity, the complete lack of technological advancements and the deficient education system not only shaped the Peloponnesian state (...) but also transformed the once brave, conscientious and studious Greeks into a cowardly, indolent and ignorant people. Realizing that the constitution of Greek society and the behavior of its citizens are impediments to modernization and to cultural progress, Bessarion proposes a series of reforms based on a revival of Ancient Greek culture and on technological advances of West that would lead to a well-governed, self-sufficient and independent Greek state. On 23 April 2010, 566 years after Bessarion’s letter, the Greek government requested financial assistance from the European Support Mechanism in order to avert the probability of default in Greece. The fiscal deficit, the swelling sovereign debt and the global financial recession shape Greece in crisis. The aim of this paper is to give an interpretative presentation of Bessarion’s letter with reference to modern Greece; to analyze the causes of the Byzantine Empire’s decline and the recommended reforms in comparison to the causes of the financial crisis in Greece and the implementation of austerity measures. I will prove that nowadays modern Greeks face the same problems with the Greeks of Peloponnese such as political corruption, administrative incompetence, excessive taxation, economic impoverishment, class inequality, unemployment, reduced business activity and inability to exploit natural resources. In this sense, I will show that the identity crisis of modern Hellenism was first cultivated and formed gradually from the Renaissance to modern Greece. (shrink)

Demetrius Chrysoloras was a Byzantine anti-Unionist and anti-Thomist theologian. He was in the service of John VII Palaeologus and a member of the court of the Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus. He wrote theological, philosophical, astronomical, and rhetorical works.

Manuel Chrysoloras was a Byzantine scholar and diplomat. He is best known as the first notable professor of Greek language in Italy. He occupied the chair of Greek at the Florentine Studium, and he also taught Greek occasionally in Pavia, Milan, and Rome. Among his students were some of the prominent early Italian humanists including Leonardo Bruni, Uberto Decembrio, Guarino of Verona, Pier Paolo Vergerio, Palla Strozzi, Roberto Rossi, Jacopo Angeli da Scarperia, Cencio de’ Rustici, and others. His method of (...) teaching Greek language and literature was innovative and was continued by some of his students. He had a significant impact on the revival of Greek studies in the West through his Erotemata, as this work became the central textbook of Greek grammar until the sixteenth century. He was a pioneer of the so-called transferre ad sententiam method for translating Greek texts into Latin, and he was the first who translated Plato’s Republic (in collaboration with his student Uberto Decembrio). His other writings are mainly rhetorical epistles; he engaged in extensive correspondence with many of his contemporaries, eminent humanists and ecclesiastical and political figures, such as the Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus and Coluccio Salutati. He was appointed to a number of important diplomatic missions on behalf of Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus, and he was in the service of Pisan Pope John XXIII. He spent most of his life visiting the European courts in an attempt to secure help for Byzantium and to negotiate the Union of the Churches. He was an ardent unionist, he participated in the Council of Constance, and he may have converted to Catholicism. (shrink)

Nikolaos Kavasilas was a notable lay theologian of the Greek Orthodox Church. He is regarded as one of the most profound Byzantine theologians of the fourteenth century and one of the foremost Marian theologians in the Greek patristic tradition. He was an original exponent of anthropocentric Mariology and Christocentric theology. A prolific author renowned for his liturgical and sacramental writings, but also concerned with social and political issues. He lived in a period of political strife and theological controversy. He was (...) a younger contemporary of Gregorios Palamas, a close friend of Demetrius Cydones and an advisor to the Emperor John VI Cantacuzenus. (shrink)

This paper offers an interpretative presentation of Duns Scotus’ notion of intellect, as it is delineated in his treatise entitled De Spiritualitate et Immortalitate Animae Humanae. Duns Scotus’ theory is gradually formed through his critical examination of the Aristotelian views which are presented in De Anima and Metaphysics.Duns Scotus accepts the Aristotelian definition of the soul, according to which the soul knows and thinks through its intellective power, and he claims that the intellective soul is the proper form of man. (...) However, he is opposed to Aristotle’s theory concerning the imperishability of the intellect, holding that since the intellect is the form of the perishable composite, it cannot exist apart from the composite. Furthermore, adopting the Aristotelian view that only human beings have two cognitive powers, the senses and the intellect, Duns Scotus shows the supremacy of the intellect compared to the senses. He distinguishes intellectual knowledge from sense knowledge by designating their functions and objects. Intellectual knowledge is an immaterial and non organic act in contradistinction to sense knowledge, which is a material and organic act; the intellect perceives abstract objects whereas the senses grasp particular objects. Although Duns Scotus proves that intellectual knowledge is superior to sense knowledge, he recognizes the contribution of the senses in acquiring knowledge inasmuch as he holds that the intellect understands only when it is rotated to the outside world: the intellect knows the universal by perceiving the intellectual images through the medium of imagination (phantasia), which modifies sense images to intellectual images (phantasms). Therefore, for Duns Scotus, knowledge would be impossible without cooperation between the intellect and the senses. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss a proposal for reform in the teaching of Euclidean geometry that reveals the symbiotic relationship between axiomatics and pedagogy. We examine the role of intuition in this kind of reform, as expressed by Mario Pieri, a prominent member of the Schools of Peano and Segre at the University of Turin. We are well aware of the centuries of attention paid to the notion of intuition by mathematicians, mathematics educators, philosophers, psychologists, historians, and others. To set (...) a context for Pieri’s proposal, we only seek to open a small window on views of the pedagogical role of intuition, from primary education to university study that may have informed early 20th century efforts to improve the teaching of geometry at the secondary school level. Pieri addressed the topic of intuition in many of his axiomatizations, including those in projective geometry which was his main area of concentration in foundations. We focus here primarily on his axiom systems for elementary geometry, which embraced the transformational approach of Felix Klein’s vision for the subject. Our goal is to convey Pieri’s thoughts on how to integrate two types of intuition, denoted as sensible and rational, in his endeavors to improve the teaching of the geometry of Euclid. We show how Pieri’s views on geometric intuition and pedagogical reform were either ignored or misrepresented in several notable publications at the turn of the 20th century. In particular, we give Pieri a voice in response to specific comments made in the early 1900s by Federigo Enriques, Ugo Amaldi, and Florian Cajori in widely circulated publications inspired by Klein. (shrink)

The question whether AI systems have agency is gaining increasing importance in discussions of responsibility for AI behavior. This paper argues that an approach to artificial agency needs to be teleological, and consider the role of human goals in particular if it is to adequately address the issue of responsibility. I will defend the view that while AI systems can be viewed as autonomous in the sense of identifying or pursuing goals, they rely on human goals and other values incorporated (...) into their design, and are, as such, dependent on human agents. As a consequence, AI systems cannot be held morally responsible, and responsibility attributions should take into account normative and social aspects involved in the design and deployment of the said AI. My argument falls in line with approaches critical of attributing moral agency to artificial agents, but draws from the philosophy of action, highlighting further philosophical underpinnings of current debates on artificial agency. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 45, Issue 11, November 2021.

Confucian meritocratic rule has been recently advocated on the basis of the economic performance of Western democracies and the political ignorance of their average voters. These arguments are grou...

Prompted by our commentators, we take this response as an opportunity to clarify the premises, attitudes, and methods of our enactive approach to human languaging. We high-light the need to recognize that any investigation, particularly one into language, is always a concretely situated and self-grounding activity; our attitude as researchers is one of knowing as engagement with our subject matter. Our task, formulating the missing categories that can bridge embodied cognitive science with language research, requires avoiding premature abstractions and clarifying (...) the multiple circularities at play. Our chosen method is dialectical, which has prompted several interesting observations that we respond to, particularly with respect to what this method means for enactive epistemology and ontology. We also clarify the important question of how best to conceive of the variety of social skills we progressively identify with our method and are at play in human languaging. Are these skills socially constituted or just socially learned? The difference, again, leads to a clarification that acts, skills, actors, and interactions are to be conceived as co-emerging categories. We illustrate some of these points with a discussion of an example of aspects of the model at play in a study of gift giving in China.Keywords: Enactive epistemology, Enactive ontology, Dialectics, languaging, Shared know-how. (shrink)

In our contemporary age, where a combination of individualism and mutual distrust is unhappily common among people and society is “liquid” and disoriented, so-called intermediate units are a precious resource that promotes positive coexistence within organizations and in local communities, too. The present contribution describes an example of such an intermediate unit, the Talent Club, located in a peripheral neighborhood of a metropolitan area in northern Italy. This case study shows the development of positive living and working together in organizations (...) and their transformation in the tool for community development and good coexistence. Qualitative and quantitative data show that the relational aspect is crucial because it promotes authentic exchange among people, supporting participation and social cohesion against self-referential habits and isolation. Although at present the Talent Club is mostly functioning in a affiliating coexistence among members, seeds of a more generativ... (shrink)

The first to use Judith Butlers work as a reading of how the legal subject is formed, this book traces how Butler comes to the themes of ethics, law and ...

This essay offers an overview of the diversity of women’s prose writing that emerged on the Czech cultural scene in the post-communist era. To that end it briefly characterizes the work of eight Czech women authors who were born within the first two decades after World War II and began to create during the post-1968 era of ‘normalization’. In this broad sense they belong to a single generation. With rare exception their work was not officially published in their homeland until (...) the 1990s. The writers included are: Lenka Procházková, Tereza Boučková, Alexandra Berková, Zuzana Brabcová, Daniela Hodrová, Sylvie Richterová, Iva Pekárková, and Eva Hauserová. The overview is followed by a concise comparative analysis of texts by three very different writers (Procházková, Pekárková, and Hodrová), using a feminist critical approach. There is also an appendix of works by these writers available in English translation. (shrink)

Following a usage-based approach to language acquisition, lexically specific patterns are considered to be important building blocks for language productivity and feature heavily both in child-directed speech and in the early speech of children (Arnon, Inbal & Morten H. Christiansen. 2017. The role of multiword building blocks in explaining L1-L2 differences. Topics in Cognitive Science 9(3). 621–636; Tomasello, Michael. 2003. Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press). In order to account for patterns, the traceback (...) method has been widely applied in research on first language acquisition to test the hypothesis that children’s utterances can be accounted for on the basis of a limited inventory of chunks and partially schematic units (Lieven, Elena, Dorothé Salomo & Michael Tomasello. 2009. Two-year-old children’s production of multiword utterances: A usage-based analysis. Cognitive Linguistics 20(3). 481–508). In the current study, we applied the method to code-mixed utterances (n = 1,506) of three German-English bilingual children between 2 and 4 years of age to investigate individual differences in each child’s own inventory of patterns in relation to their input settings. It was shown that units such as I see X as in I see a Kelle ‘I see a trowel’ could be traced back to the child’s own previous productions. More importantly, we see that each child’s inventory of constructions draws heavily on multiword chunks that are strongly dependent on the children’s language input situations. (shrink)

The ubiquitous human practice of spontaneously gesturing while speaking demonstrates the embodiment, embeddedness, and sociality of cognition. The present essay takes gestural practice to be a paradigmatic example of a more general claim: human cognition is social insofar as our embedded, intelligent, and interacting bodies select and construct meaning in a way that is intersubjectively constrained and defeasible. Spontaneous co-speech gesture is markedly interesting because it at once confirms embodied aspects of linguistic meaning-making that formalist and linguistic turn-type philosophical approaches (...) fail to appreciate, and it also forefronts intersubjectivity as an inherent and inherently normative dimension of communicative action. Co-speech hand gestures, as linguistically meaningful speech acts, demonstrate both sedimentation and spontaneity (in the sense of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s dialectic of linguistic expression ( 2002 )), or features of convention and nonconvention in a Gricean sense ( 1989 ). Yet neither pragmatic nor classic phenomenological approaches to communication can accommodate the practice of co-speech hand gesturing without some rehabilitation and reorientation. Pragmatic criteria of intersubjectivity, normativity, and rationality need to confront the non-propositional and nonverbal meaning-making of embodied encounters. Phenomenological treatments of expression and intersubjectivity must consider the normative nature of high-order social practices like language use. Reciprocally critical exchanges between these traditions and gesture studies yield an improved philosophy that treats language as a multi-modal medium for collaborative meaning achievement. The proper paradigm for these discussions is found in enactive approaches to social cognition. Co-speech hand gestures are first and foremost emergent elements of social interaction, not the external whirring of an isolated internal consciousness. In contrast to current literature that frequently presents gestures as uncontrollable bodily upsurge or infallible imagistic phenomenon that drives and dances with verbal or “linguistic” convention (McNeill 1992 , 2005 ), I suggest that we study gestures as dynamic, embodied, and shared tools for collaborative sense-making. (shrink)

A common approach for measuring the effectiveness of an education system or a school is the estimation of the impact that school interventions have on students’ academic performance. However, the latest trends aim to extend the focus beyond students’ acquisition of knowledge and skills, and to consider aspects such as well-being in the academic context. For this reason, the 2015 edition of the international assessment system PISA incorporated a new tool aimed at evaluating the socio-affective variables related to the well-being (...) of students. It is based on a definition focused on the five dimensions proposed in PISA theoretical framework: cognitive, psychological, social, physical and material. The main purpose of this study is to identify the well-being components that significantly affect student academic performance and to estimate the magnitude of school effects on the well-being of students in OECD countries, the school effect being understood as the ability of schools to increase subjective student well-being. To achieve this goal, we analyzed the responses of 234,000 students from thirty-five OECD countries to PISA 2015 questionnaires. Specifically, we considered non-cognitive variables in the questionnaires and student performance in science. The results indicated that the cognitive well-being dimension, composed of enjoyment of science, self-efficacy and instrumental motivation, as well as the test anxiety all had a consistent relationship with student performance across countries. In addition, the school effect, estimated through a two-level hierarchical linear model, in terms of student well-being was systematically low. While the school effect accounted for approximately 25% of the variance in the results for the cognitive dimension, only 5-9% of variance in well-being indicators was attributable to it. This suggests that the influence of school on student welfare is weak, and the effect is similar across countries. The present study contributes to the general discussion currently underway about the definition of well-being and the connection between well-being and achievement. The results highlighted two complementary concerns: there is a clear need to promote socio-emotional education in schools, and it is important to develop a rigorous framework for well-being assessment. The implications of the results and proposals for future studies are discussed. (shrink)

In recent years postcolonial and decolonial feminisms have become increasingly salient in philosophy, yet they are often deployed as conceptual stand-ins for generalized feminist critiques of eurocentrism (without reference to the material contexts anti-colonial feminisms emanate from), or as a platform to re-center internal debates between dominant European theories/ists under the guise of being conceptually ‘decolonized’. By contrast, this article focuses on the specific contexts, issues and lifeworld concerns that ground anti-colonial feminisms and provides a brief survey of the literature. (...) Because the terms implicated in the analysis (Third World, transnational, women of color, postcolonial, decolonial and indigenous feminisms) are highly contested on their own, I only provide provisional and non-foundational histories and definitions for the purposes of resisting philosophical appropriations of anti-colonial feminist theory. (shrink)

Review of Marta Dyczok, Oxana Gaman-Golutvina (eds.), Media, Democracy and Freedom. The Post-Communist Experience, (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009).

The first volume of Renzo De Felice's biography of Mussolini appeared in 1965. Now, after 30 years, the eighth and last volume finally appears, unfinished because of the author's death. The narrative stops in mid-1944, but the first four chapters, which had been completed with an appendix by De Felice himself and have been published by his friends and colaborators, Emilio Gentile, Giorgio Goglia and Mario Missori, constitute the first non-partisan history of the beginning of the resistence movement and the (...) Social Republic, as well as the the first comprehensive study of the populations' attitude in a country devided between…. (shrink)