Os usos do passado e da tradição em uma sociedade pós-tradicional, na perspectiva de Zygmunt Bauman, é resultado dos desdobramentos da modernidade em sua produção da ambivalência. O objetivo do presente artigo é rastrear esse pensamento na obra de Bauman a partir da suturação do conceito de tradição com a obra mais ampla do filósofo. Buscaremos, então, pontos de contato com outros autores que também trabalharam esta temática – notadamente, Hannah Arendt – a partir da ótica de que a modernidade (...) é marcada pela dependência de um passado ressignificado. (shrink)

Post-truth is a complex phenomenon which could be analysed from a variety of perspectives. In this paper, attention will be paid to the theoretical and practical aspects concerning the role of law in contrasting the fake-news. These are the most important and evident results of the impact of post-truth in the legal and political world. A following focus is dedicated to the new forms of activism aiming at developing a critical conscience. The Author concludes that it is time to promote (...) practices of active citizenship, developed by new technologies, social network and digital platforms, as well as to organize dialogues and discussions in the educational environments and, more broadly, in the neighbourhoods of the city. (shrink)

Here we study polysemy as a potential learning bias in vocabulary learning in children. Words of low polysemy could be preferred as they reduce the disambiguation effort for the listener. However, such preference could be a side-effect of another bias: the preference of children for nouns in combination with the lower polysemy of nouns with respect to other part-of-speech categories. Our results show that mean polysemy in children increases over time in two phases, i.e. a fast growth till the 31st (...) month followed by a slower tendency towards adult speech. In contrast, this evolution is not found in adults interacting with children. This suggests that children have a preference for non-polysemous words in their early stages of vocabulary acquisition. Interestingly, the evolutionary pattern described above weakens when controlling for syntactic category (noun, verb, adjective or adverb) but it does not disappear completely, suggesting that it could result from a combination of a standalone bias for low polysemy and a preference for nouns. (shrink)

This essay focuses on the national and international policies aiming at dealing with the extremely complex and various issue of security. «Taking security seriously» means to analyse in depth the many shades of this concern: from the immigration processes, until the reconsideration of the urban spaces, looking at the Mediterranean and the European specificities. This kind of reflections can be useful in a perspective of preventing security, engaging institutions.__.

Cet ouvrage s'inscrit dans le fil du travail collectif entrepris en 1995, l'Histoire de la pensée médicale en Occident (trois volumes sous la direction de Mirko D Grmek, Seuil, 1995, 1997, 1999). Il rend compte du déploiement des recherches pluridisciplinaires et transdisciplinaires de la pensée médicale et aborde les discussions et controverses actuelles sur les politiques de santé. Du fait du développement des connaissances théoriques et des innovations techniques, la notion même de soin, sous ses aspects sociaux, économiques, mais aussi (...) épistémiques, se trouve questionnée. La pensée médicale ne saurait se limiter aux données biologiques, et ses composantes spécifiquement humaines et sociales sont explorées et interrogées ici dans une perspective historique qui tient compte des découvertes du dernier siècle. (shrink)

Chemical embryology was born in 1931 with the publication of Chemical Embryology by Joseph Needham. In the following two decades it became an innovative research project aiming at the description of the construction of the embryological structure and differentiation in biochemical terms. This research programme produced a vast amount of experimental evidence and theories on the chemical dynamics of the embryo: particularly chemical characterization of the zygote and the developing embryo, the chemical exchanges between the nucleus and the cytoplasm, the (...) significance of subcellular structures, and the role and distribution of nucleic acids within the cell. From the 1950s on, a large part of these results came to be integrated into the empirical basis of molecular biology. However, the shift from chemical embryology to molecular embryology was not just a semantic shift but a deep theoretical change, produced by the introduction of a new model of scientific explanation, based on the transmission and expression of genetic information and opposed to the biochemical definition of life. (shrink)