In this work, starting from the social practice theory, we identified two kinds of creativity. A \textit{situational creativity} that takes place when a social practice is performed and a \textit{creativity of habit} that concerns the agents’ capacity of evoking different practices from habit. To test this hypothesis the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (Verbal Form A) was analyzed in the light of praxeology.

CHAPTER Structure and function In physical systems made by a large number of basic constituents one can observe collective properties which find their ...

No paradox exists in the fact that, in the Special Relativity, for the mass of a material body, considered in motion at constant speed, whose measure is u, the formula: m = m0/√ can be written, while for a photon the same formula holds, when between its source and the observer a state of relative motion at constant speed, whose measure is u, exists and it is observed along the direction perpendicular to the direction of his speed.

L'a. esamina il concetto di `amor vitae' come spiegazione della vita cosmica nel pensiero leonardiano e ritiene che questo costituisca la caratteristica inconfondibile della sua personalità. Nel secondo scritto l'a. si occupa del pensiero religioso di Leonardo «che ebbe soltanto fede nella religione serena e confortatrice della natura».

Gibson defined affordances as action possibilities directly offered to an animal by the environment. Ambitiously, affordances are meant to show the inadequacy of the subjective-objective dichotomy in the study of cognition. Armed with similar concerns, some neo-Gibsonians recently thought of affordances as latent dispositions existing independently of individual organisms or whole species. It is no coincidence that critics had, on several occasions, objected that this theoretical stance dramatically neglects the role of the perceiver in the emergence of affordances. In this (...) paper, we provide a phenomenological characterization of the perceiver’s role in affordance perception. Specifically, we borrow from Husserlian phenomenology to characterize two features of affordance perception that can enrich our understanding of the individual’s engagement with the environment, namely, its affective and temporal aspects. Taking an everyday activity such as rock climbing as a case example, we show that phenomenological investigations, if not misinterpreted as mere introspection, can represent an ally for ecological psychologists. (shrink)

Los encuentros de los europeos con los indios de América plantearon, a través de las crónicas de viajes, la revocación de tradicionales hipótesis filosóficas sobre los primitivos y los gigantes y la emergencia de la cuestión sobre la noción de "diferencia" entre culturas, así como la necesidad de unos nuevos principios de la historia. Reflexiones todas ellas precisas sobre el problema de la experiencia y su sentido en la Scienza nuova , donde las dos ciencias de lo antiguo y de (...) lo moderno anudan las cuestiones de la experiencia y de su inteligibilidad. Los principios de la ciencia viquiana toman impulso de la etnografía amerindia, p.e. de Oviedo y de Acosta, y también de la Escolástica Española .When the Europeans met the American Indians, the travel chronicles gave rise firstly to a rejection of the traditional philosophical hypothesis which hitherto have been held on the primitives and the giants and secondly to the question related with the notion of "differences" between cultures and the want to defining new principles for historical inquiries. Those were reflections connected with the problem of experience and its meaning within the New Science in which both sciences, the ancient and the modern, bond together questions related with experience and its own rationality. The principles of the Vichian science may be traced back to the American-indian ethnography, from Oviedo or from Acosta, for example, or even from Spanish Scholastic movement. (shrink)

Comprising some of the key texts, this collection illustrates not only Kant's influence on British thought in the 19th century, but also gives a greater insight into British intellectual attitudes of that time.

The rich blend of theories and experiences that made the history of physics possible still now enlightens the scientific method. We stress the need to learn from this method the force of making its principles explicit, while developing a rich diversity of theories, which are often incompatible. Unity is preserved by common founding principles and their mathematical form, such as the understanding of conservation properties (energy, momentum etc.) in terms of symmetries. When moving from the inert to the living state (...) of matter, new challenges are posed, beginning with biological “heterogenesis”, as “genesis of and from diversity” in a changing space of pertinent observables and parameters: the Darwinian ecosystem. The question that is posed is how we may consistently embed the theories of the inert into biology. By naturalization we mean an analysis of physics as part of the sciences of nature, not as the science governing them all. In particular, the founding symmetry principles of physical theories, often used to “naturalize” (but, actually, to “physicalize”) other sciences, will instead be framed in more general dynamics which deal with fundamental changes of symmetries, as they apply, in our views, in all historical sciences, beginning with biology. This paper will accordingly explore the notion of (non-)conservative extension of theories in a precise mathematical sense. We stress a perspectival epistemology that promotes a dialogue of theories, in search for bridges or even unity, inspired by the method of “unification” at the core of major theoretical inventions in physics. Our main motivation is the need to go beyond the strong dualistic separation of space (or of the more general “phase space”) as a pre-given container of the dynamics of matter, that biased physics from Aristotle to Newton and, in a technically different way, even Einstein. (shrink)

In this article the author reflects on some of the most recent instances of the hybridization of identities, brought about by movements of migration in the more general context of globalization. New situations triggered by the epoch-making historical developments of the world we live in require us to modify our notion of individual identity, which is no longer seen as a fundamental and self-referential essence of the individual, but rather as the product of a number of relational variables, many of (...) which arise from processes of ethnic amalgamation and cultural blending. In this new historical condition, one that old styles of thought are no longer able to grasp, the notion of memory is paramount. Memory, as Said has indicated, is connected to Vico’s concept of “invention” as “finding again,” that is, as an incessant process of the remembrance and the discovery of stories that are lived, leading to a “re-creation” and reconfiguration of one’s roots. This article, however, does not simply formulate, articulate and discuss the problem, but also raises the question of its genealogy, locating this in Vico’s distinction between the topical and the critical, that is connected with the triad of memory-imagination-ingenuity, and in certain philosophical positions – such as that of Dilthey, which is specifically acknowledged here – that involve an instance of hybridism, interpreted as a relationship between biological-natural and psychological subjectivity on one hand and historical-cultural identity on the other. (shrink)