Aphasia is a complex disorder, frequent after stroke (with an incidence of 38%), with a detailed pathophysiological characterization. Effective approaches are crucial for devising an efficient rehabilitative strategy, in order to address the everyday life and professional disability. Several rehabilitative procedures are based on psycholinguistic, cognitive, psychosocial or pragmatic approaches, including amongst those with a neurobehavioral approach the Melodic Intonation Therapy (MIT). Van Eeckhout’s adaptation of MIT to French language (Melodic-Rhythmic Therapy: MRT) has implemented the training strategy by adding a (...) rhythmic structure reproducing French prosody. The purpose of this study was to adapt MRT rehabilitation procedures to Italian language and to verify its efficacy in a group of six chronic patients (five males) with severe non-fluent aphasia and without specific aphasic treatments during the previous 9 months. The patients were treated 4 days a week for 16 weeks, with sessions of 30–40 min. They were assessed 6 months after the end of the treatment (follow-up). The patients showed a significant improvement at the Aachener Aphasie Test (AAT) in different fields of spontaneous speech, with superimposable results at the follow-up. Albeit preliminary, these findings support the use of MRT in the rehabilitation after stroke. Specifically, MRT seems to benefit from its stronger structure than the available stimulation-facilitation procedures and allows a better quantification of the rehabilitation efficacy. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss the ethical concerns that may arise from the synthesis of human DNA. To date, only small stretches of DNA have been constructed, but the prospect of generating human genomes is becoming feasible. At the same time, the significance of genes for identity, health and reproduction is coming under increased scrutiny. We examine the implications of DNA synthesis and its impact on debates over the relationship with our DNA and the ownership of our genes, its potential (...) to disrupt common understandings of reproduction and privacy, and the way in which synthetic DNA challenges traditional associations between genes and identity. We explore the degree to which synthetic DNA may further undermine overgeneticised accounts of identity, health, reproduction, parenthood and privacy that are prevalent in the public domain and in some areas of policy-making. While avoiding making normative claims of our own, we conclude that there is a need for reflection on the ethical implications of these developing technologies before they are on us. (shrink)

Primary progressive multiple sclerosis (PPMS) shows a highly variable disease progression with poor prognosis and a characteristic accumulation of disabilities in patients. These hallmarks of PPMS make it difficult to diagnose and currently impossible to efficiently treat. This study aimed to identify plasma metabolite profiles that allow diagnosis of PPMS and its differentiation from the relapsing-remitting subtype (RRMS), primary neurodegenerative disease (Parkinson’s disease, PD), and healthy controls (HCs) and that significantly change during the disease course and could serve as surrogate (...) markers of multiple sclerosis (MS)-associated neurodegeneration over time. We applied untargeted high-resolution metabolomics to plasma samples to identify PPMS-specific signatures, validated our findings in independent sex- and age-matched PPMS and HC cohorts and built discriminatory models by partial least square discriminant analysis (PLS-DA). This signature was compared to sex- and age-matched RRMS patients, to patients with PD and HC. Finally, we investigated these metabolites in a longitudinal cohort of PPMS patients over a 24-month period. PLS-DA yielded predictive models for classification along with a set of 20 PPMS-specific informative metabolite markers. These metabolites suggest disease-specific alterations in glycerophospholipid and linoleic acid pathways. Notably, the glycerophospholipid LysoPC(20:0) significantly decreased during the observation period. These findings show potential for diagnosis and disease course monitoring, and might serve as biomarkers to assess treatment efficacy in future clinical trials for neuroprotective MS therapies. (shrink)

The paper presents and discusses the processes and the results of a Systematic Review of the scientific literature conducted with the aim to become aware of how the antisocial behaviour of adolescents are understood and educationally managed. The results show how the phenomenon is understood mainly through an explanatory and experimental epistemological and methodological approach. Such approach aims at identifying several risks and protection factors that determine/influence AB as well as at defining indications on the practices to be implemented for (...) the design of adequate prevention programmes. Based on these results, the paper proposes some critical reflections on a deterministic conception of AB. (shrink)

El presente artículo aborda la estrategia escritural de Daniela Catrileo. Se propone revisar la elaboración del concepto de piñen examinando la relación entre lenguaje y colonialidad, para, de ese modo, subrayar el potencial político y reivindicativo que comporta en la novela del mismo nombre, Piñen (2019). Dicha hipótesis articulará el ejercicio de lectura aquí propuesto, atendiendo principalmente las estrategias narrativas empleadas –servirse de un polilingüismo que rompe estructuras gramaticales– para descentrar el lenguaje de su determinismo colonial. Así, interpretamos dicha (...) estrategia escritural en consonancia con las potencias micropolíticas y descolonizadoras del arte descritas por Suely Rolnik y, en consecuencia, apostando por la posibilidad de diagramar un devenir minoritario que dispute los imaginarios del inconsciente colonial-capital. (shrink)

This is an introduction to the special issue of Filosofia-Philosophy dedicated to the memory of Ivaylo Ditchev (1955 – 2023), professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Sofia, Department of History and Theory of Culture. It combines personal recollections of Ivaylo with a brief overview of his work as a teacher, academic advisor and researcher in the fields of urban anthropology, digital cultures, current forms of political and civic participation. While broad in scope, his research works are united by (...) the exploration of the quest for identity in a situation of dynamic transformations of the cultural frames of reference, and relativisation of values. (shrink)

Leading philosophical models of curiosity represent it as a desiderative attitude whose content is a question, and which is satisfied by knowledge of the answer to that question. I argue that these models do not capture the distinctive character of a form of curiosity that I call 'erotic curiosity'. Erotic curiosity addresses itself not to a question but to an object whose significance for the inquirer is affective as well as epistemic. This form of curiosity is best understood by analogy (...) to erotic love as theorized by Plato in the Symposium. (shrink)

This article focuses on the emergence and development of gerontology in communist Bulgaria, looking at the interplay of various circumstances: scientific and political, national and international. We ask if an apparently ideologically neutral field of knowledge such as gerontology may have had some intrinsic qualities imbued by the regimes of knowledge production under a communist regime. More specifically, we ask to what extent and in which ways the production of such specialized, putatively universal knowledge could be ideologically driven and/or politically (...) controlled. To this end, we unpack the ideological, political, institutional, and epistemic circumstances that may have affected the emergence, the institutionalization, and the paradigm of Bulgarian gerontology. We focus in on the social actors, both individuals and organizations, and the roles they played in the process, as well as on international networking and the uses of international contacts and agendas. (shrink)

In this paper we present a tableau system for deontic logics with the operator of explicit permission. By means of this system the decidability of the considered logics can be proved. We will sketch how these logics are semantically defined by means of relating semantics and how they provide a simple solution to the free choice permission problem. In short, these logics employ relating implication and a certain propositional constant. These two are in turn used to define deontic operators similarly (...) as in Andersonian-Kangerian reduction, which uses different intensional implications and constants. (shrink)

Tanto nos Pensamentos quanto em seus trabalhos matemáticos, Pascal faz referência ao “nada”, assim como a um processo que poderíamos chamar de “aniquilamento”, segundo o qual aquilo que é finito se torna um nada diante do infinito. O “nada” pascaliano, segundo a interpretação aqui defendida, pode ter, em diferentes passagens da obra do autor, uma acepção relativa ou uma acepção absoluta, o que vale também para os termos de “infinito”, “desproporção” e “indivisível” na obra de Pascal. Além do valor de (...) tal análise para os Pensamentos, ela se propõe mostrar certa proximidade estrutural entre as obras matemáticas e apologéticas de Pascal. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Models Analogy Metaphor Metaphorical Models Current Issues.

No século XVII, vemos a emergência de uma nova abordagem geométrica às seções cônicas. Desenvolvida inicialmente por Girard Desargues e por Blaise Pascal, tal geometria é herdeira do método de representação pela perspectiva linear a aponta na direção da geometria projetiva do século XIX. Estudos recentes de J. Echeverría e de V. Debuiche iniciaram a discussão da recepção de tais trabalhos por Leibniz, assim como a relação deles com os trabalhos do próprio Leibniz em perspectiva e com a Geometria situs. (...) Este artigo percorre algumas questões associadas a estes domínios, assim como a importância do paradigma da perspectiva para a filosofia de Leibniz. (shrink)

This paper examines the relationship between Simondon's theory of individuation and Deleuze's transcendental empiricism. Deleuze credits Simondon with inventing a new conception of the transcendental – a claim that might have taken Simondon by surprise, as this term does not play any significant role in his oeuvre. The aim of this paper is to show both that Simondon's philosophy contributed to the construction of Deleuze's transcendental philosophy in an essential way and that the nature of his own project is radically (...) different from Deleuze's. The most important divergence between the two thinkers lies arguably in their respective methods. What this difference brings to the fore is Deleuze's adherence to the philosophical traditions of idealism and structuralism at this stage of his thought. (shrink)

In this paper I will examine what Blaise Pascal means by “infinite distance”, both in his works on projective geometry and in the apologetics of the Pensées’s. I suggest that there is a difference of meaning in these two uses of “infinite distance”, and that the Pensées’s use of it also bears relations to the mathematical concept of heterogeneity. I also consider the relation between the finite and the infinite and the acceptance of paradoxical relations by Pascal.

"Theory of mind� describes the ability to impute mental states, such as beliefs, desires and intentions, to oneself and to other people. Usually we want to know why people did what they did and we wonder what they are going to do next. That is, everyday we try to predict and explain human behaviour. In order to do this we refer to a person"s beliefs, desires, emotions, intentions etc. Behaviour is the product of belief and desire: People do things because (...) they desire something and believe some act will achieve it. For adults it is clear that our assumptions about reality do not necessarily match the real world; but we know, regardless of whether our beliefs are true or not, our beliefs direct our actions. In contrast, it is not until the age of 4 years that children understand that one can be mistaken about the world and that actions can be based on this false belief. (shrink)

El artículo se propone recuperar la potencialidad analítica de la perspectiva fenomenológica de Alfred Schutz, para reflexionar acerca de temas vinculados a “lo político, las identidades y la transformación del orden social. Para ello, desarrollaremos, en primer lugar, algunos lineamientos propuestos por Ernesto Laclau y Jacques Rancière en torno a esas nociones. Nos interesa particularmente plantear el momento del surgimiento del campo “lo político” en relación con el orden social y el rol que cumplen las identidades en ese surgimiento. En (...) segundo lugar, se intentará establecer un diálogo entre estas perspectivas y la fenomenología schutziana a fin de arrojar la luz sobre esos ejes analíticos implícitos en la obra del autor. (shrink)

Mamardashvili always engaged in a dialogue with thinkers of the past, particularly with those philosophers whom he considered to have founded the phenomenological analysis of consciousness. He had a particular fascination for Kant. Not only did Mamardashvili devote to him a series of lectures, but he referenced Kantian themes throughout the entirety of his work. This article focuses on two of those themes. The first is transcendental consciousness, considered as that which makes experience possible without being itself reducible to experience. (...) Consciousness is at the basis of all the different “forms” that make possible our experience of the world. Thinking is possible only in the context of cultural tradition, which is embedded in language. The second is individual moral responsibility. Everyone everywhere takes a stance at all times, here and now, thereby assuming the whole responsibility for their action. Mamardashvili’s dialogue with Kant leads us to consider some of the ethical problems of human civilization. (shrink)

It is widely believed that we ought not to criticize others for wrongs that we ourselves have committed. The author draws out and challenges some of the background assumptions about the practice of criticism that underlie our attraction to this claim, such as the tendency to think of criticism either as a social sanction or as a didactic intervention. The author goes on to offer a taxonomy of cases in which the moral legitimacy of criticism is challenged on the grounds (...) that the critic him- or herself engages in the behavior that he or she criticizes in others. The author argues that, in each type of case, the would-be critics should not constrain their participation in moral discourse on the grounds that they are not themselves innocent of the wrongdoing they criticize in others. (shrink)

This article is articulated in three voices of scholars who have worked on questions of war, visual culture, and contemporary political aesthetics that also relates to art and film practices. Media theorist Jussi Parikka, literary scholar Anders Engberg-Pedersen, and visual culture researcher Daniela Agostinho address the relations between images, aesthetics and operations through the lens of two books published concomitantly, Parikka’s Operational Images: From the Visual to the Invisual and Engberg-Pedersen’s Martial Aesthetics: How War Became an Art Form. Both (...) books expand the scope of what Czechoslovakian-born filmmaker Harun Farocki termed “operational images” in his experimental documentaries and theoretical writings from the early 2000s. Through his analyses of the politics of imagery in the military-industrial context, Farocki notably defined “operational images” as images that do not depict or represent but rather perform tasks such as tracking, surveilling, detecting, and targeting. For both Parikka and Engberg-Pedersen, Farocki’s central concept of operational images forms a point of departure for writing media archaeologies of the present. In a three-voiced dialogue, the authors unfold operations as a “machine of articulation,” a conceptual and analytical device that reveals surprising linkages and frictions across different themes, techniques, scales, and historical periods. (shrink)

I-Language introduces the uninitiated to linguistics as cognitive science. In an engaging, down-to-earth style Daniela Isac and Charles Reiss give a crystal-clear demonstration of the application of the scientific method in linguistic theory. Their presentation of the research programme inspired and led by Noam Chomsky shows how the focus of theory and research in linguistics shifted from treating language as a disembodied, human-external entity to cognitive biolinguistics - the study of language as a human cognitive system embedded within the (...) mind/brain of each individual. The recurring theme of equivalence classes in linguistic computation ties together the presentation of material from phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. The same theme is used to help students understand the place of linguistics in the broader context of the cognitive sciences, by drawing on examples from vision, audition, and even animal cognition.This textbook is unique in its integration of empirical issues of linguistic analysis, engagement with philosophical questions that arise in the study of language, and treatment of the history of the field. Topics ranging from allophony to reduplication, ergativity, and negative polarity are invoked to show the implications of findings in cognitive biolinguistics for philosophical issues like reference, the mind-body problem, and nature-nurture debates.This textbook contains numerous exercises and guides for further reading as well as ideas for student projects. A companion website with guidance for instructors and answers to the exercises features a series of pdf slide presentations to accompany the teaching of each topic. (shrink)

The present article is devoted to a logical treatment of some fundamental concepts involved in responsibility attribution. We specify a theoretical framework based on a language of temporal deontic logic with agent-relative operators for deliberate causal contribution. The framework is endowed with a procedure to solve normative conflicts which arise from the assessment of different normative sources. We provide a characterization result for a basic system within this framework and illustrate how the concepts formalized can be put at work in (...) the analysis of examples of legal reasoning. (shrink)

Climate change and fourth industrial revolution (4IR) technologies are massively shifting the material and social conditions of existence on Earth and contribute to a state of indeterminacy and increased political experimentation. While various models for what might become the ‘next iteration of governance’ are currently emerging, this essay turns to specific contemporary political experiments which claim to democratize power, distribute and/or share sovereignty, function as peer-to-peer or actor-to-actor, and move beyond criticism—be it to the moon or to soil. More precisely, (...) I look at extropist experiments in competitive crypto-governance and at (post)critical laboratories closer to the conceptual frame of international law, which both, in different ways, rely on a specific practice of determination characterized by binary relations and existential negation. In favor of an alternative approach, I argue for an ethics of legal thought capable of attending to indeterminacy and the relationalities it enables differently. (shrink)

In a number of recent philosophical works, the concept of ontography has been raised to involve a revaluation of figurative and visual thinking against logico-conceptual thinking— i. e. a revaluation of a philosophical practice that supplements or departs from the traditional site of philosophy, language. This paper investigates the ontographic dimensions of Charles S. Peirce’s diagrammatology by focusing on his system of »existential graphs« as ontography avant la lettre.

There are only three fragments expressly associated with Menecrates of Elaea. All three derive from Strabo’s Geography. Yet, an additional four excerpts attributed to a certain unidentified Menecrates may possibly be added to the writings of the man from Elaea. This suggestion is supported primarily by the content of the fragments but may be further substantiated through considerations of availability and circulation of texts.

At the end of 1907 within a couple of months Lunačarskij met both Gor’kij and Brzozowski in Italy and found many important points of contact with each. To compare Lunačarskij’s thought at that time with Brzozowski’s “philosophical program” of 1907 casts some new light on the great variety of interpretations that enlivened Easter European Marxism at the beginning of the twentieth century. On the one hand, it explains Lunačarskij’s “economism” as distinct both from Brzozowski’s extreme anthropologism and Gor’kij’s “cosmism”; on (...) the other, it shows that Lunačarskij’s “philosophy of labour” promoted a violent attitude of conquest and humankind’s domination of nature. Although he criticized Brzozowski’s sympathies with German Idealism, Lunačarskij shared with him a deep appreciation of human creative power, which is evident in his peculiar form of collectivism as well. (shrink)

The article provides a historical and philosophical analysis of the deportation of many Russian intellectuals abroad in 1922. It is known that such a vicious deed on the part of the Soviet authorities, in fact, turned out to be an act that saved many Russian intellectuals either from starvation or from repression and death in the camps. It is also widely known that the cultural activities of Russian emigrants after their arrival in the West were varied and intense. The article (...) also emphasizes that expulsion and its significance for the destinies of the country and the emigrants themselves remained a "blank spot" for a long time. It was only in the 1990s that research into the events of the 1922 exile, both in Russia and abroad, started to change. The author draws attention to the fact that the very nature of examination of the expulsion of the Russian intelligentsia has also changed over the years. At the beginning of studies in the 1990s, it was purely archival works aimed at recovering emigrants' cultural heritage and returning "forgotten" names. Over the last decade, we may observe a more critical reading of this heritage, supposing a more precise reconstruction of facts and contexts and a broader analysis of the significance of events in the history of the early 1920s. The study of the various cultural activities of the Russian migr intelligentsia allows us to strike a conversation on Russian philosophy, its peculiarity and originality, the mutual influences of the Russian and European philosophical traditions, and the meaning and significance of Soviet philosophy relevant again. (shrink)

El siguiente artículo toma como punto de partida al concepto de industria cultural desde sus principales exponentes, para exponer sus usos actuales. Este nació como concepto filosófico como parte de la obra de los autores representantes de la llamada Escuela de Frankfurt, Theodor Adorno y Max Horkheimer, con valiosos aportes de Walter Benjamin. En la actualidad ha mutado su definición, siendo utilizado de manera instrumentalpor parte del Estado y organismos internacionales, para definir al grupo de sectores de producción cultural y (...) simbólica de acuerdo a sus parámetros económicos. En este sentido, desde aquél concepto de industria cultural de los años cuarenta podremos ver que hay un recorrido en el cual se van transformando las posturas acerca de lo que el arte y la cultura posibilitan. La función social del arte va escondiéndose detrás de su inmersión cada vez más visible dentro de la producción mercantil, si bien en los últimos años la cultura aparece como motor de desarrollo económico e identitario. Esta transición será ilustrada con el caso argentino, dando cuenta de los cambios en el sector. The following article takes as its starting point the concept of Culture Industry from its leading exponents, and exposes its current uses. The Culture Industry began like a philosophical concept, as part of the work of the Frankfurt School authors, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, with contributions of Walter Benjamin. Nowadays, this concept definition has mutated, being used instrumentally by the state and international organizations, to define the cultural and symbolic production according to economic parameters. In this sense, paying attention to that idea of Culture Industry, we can see that there is a path in which the possibilities of meanings of art and culture are changing. The social function of art is subordinating behind the commodity production, although in recent years the culture appears as an engine of economic development and identity. This transition will be illustrated accounting for changes in the sector in the case of Argentina. (shrink)

Recent decades have seen the facilitation of unconventional or even extraordinary reproductive endeavours. Sperm has been harvested from dying or deceased men at the request of their wives; reproductive tissue has been surgically removed from children at the request of their parents; deceased adults’ frozen embryos have been claimed by their parents, in order to create grandchildren; wombs have been transplanted from mothers to their daughters. What is needed for requests to be honoured by healthcare staff is that they align (...) with widely shared expectations about what people’s reproductive potential ought to be, what marital relationships ought to result in, and which kinds of ties are desirable between parents and children. Costly and invasive technologies are not considered excessive when they are used to support the building of appropriate families. However, deviations from dominant reproductive norms, even if technologically simple and convenient to the participants, are unlikely to receive support. In this paper, we offer examples of such deviations and explore their implications. If reproduction is important as a way of creating genetic relationships, should reproductive material in storage be offered to genetic relatives other than the people from whom it originated? And if parents are allowed to have reproductive material collected from their offspring, or even to use it to create babies, should offspring likewise be allowed to use their parents’ reproductive material? We tackle these questions and suggest ways in which interests in genetic ties could be operationalised in a more coherent and less-invasive manner than they currently are. (shrink)

An extensive literature has focused on the impact of new public management oriented structural changes on academics’ practice and identity. These critical studies have been resolute in concluding that NPM inevitably leads to a degeneration of academics’ ethos and values. Drawing from the moral philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre, we argue that these previous analyses have overlooked the moral agency of the academics and their role in ‘moralizing’ and consequently shaping the ethical nature of their practices. The paper provides a new (...) theoretical understanding of NPM-oriented reforms in light of the virtue ethics approach, thereby directing the attention to the moral character and moral agency of academics. Our analysis of interviews collected in the business department of a Danish university provides an example of how individuals have divergent ethical understandings of these structural changes and enact/resist pre-defined social roles in different ways. While in some cases the NPM agenda of the institutions has triggered internal moral conflict and a crisis of moral character, in other cases the new logic resonates with academics’ values and evaluative standards. Partially departing from the theoretical ground of MacIntyre, we conclude that academics can play a crucial role in shaping the morality of NPM-oriented institutions and in transforming these settings into suitable contexts for the cultivation of virtues. (shrink)