Proprioception is a crucial sensory modality involved in the control and regulation of coordinated movements and in motor learning. However, the extent to which proprioceptive acuity is influenced by local muscle fatigue is obscured by methodological differences in proprioceptive and fatiguing protocols. In this study, we used high resolution kinematic measurements provided by a robotic device, as well as both frequency and time domain analysis of signals captured via surface electromyography (sEMG) to examine the effects of local muscle fatigue on (...) wrist proprioceptive acuity in 16 physically and neurologically healthy young adults. To this end, participants performed a flexion/extension ipsilateral joint position matching test (JPM), after which a high-resistive robotic task was used to induce muscle fatigue of the flexor carpi radialis (FCR) muscle. The JPM test was then repeated in order to analyze potential changes in proprioceptive acuity. Results indicated that the fatigue protocol had a significant effect on movements performed in flexion direction, with participants exhibiting a tendency to undershoot the target before the fatigue protocol (-1.218°), but overshooting after the fatigue protocol (0.587°). In contrast, in the extension direction error bias values were similar before and after the fatigue protocol as expected (pre = -1.852°, post = -1.237°) and reflected a tendency to undershoot the target. Moreover, statistical analysis indicated that movement variability was not influenced by the fatigue protocol or movement direction. In sum, results of the present study demonstrate that an individual’s estimation of wrist joint displacement (i.e., error bias), but not precision (i.e., variability), is affected by muscular fatigue in a sample of neurologically and physically healthy adults. (shrink)

Ce volume présente une nouvelle édition et la première traduction dans une langue moderne du Lexique platonicien de Timée le Sophiste. Il présente également une histoire, riche de nouveaux matériaux, de la lexicographie platonicienne ancienne. Le texte est préfacé d’une longue introduction de Jonathan Barnes. This book contains a new edition of the Greek text of the Lexicon to Plato by Timaeus the Sophist. There is a rich commentary, and a French translation―the first translation of the work into a modern (...) language. The text is prefaced by a long introduction, by Jonathan Barnes. (shrink)

Medical imaging is predominantly a visual field. In this context, prenatal ultrasound images assume intense social, ethical, and psychological significance by virtue of the subject they represent: the fetus. This feature, along with the sophistication introduced by three-dimensional ultrasound imaging that allows improved visualization of the fetus, has contributed to the common impression that prenatal ultrasound scans are like photographs of the fetus. In this article we discuss the consistency of such a comparison. First, we investigate the epistemic role of (...) both analogic and digital photographic images as visual information-providing representations holding a high degree of objectivity. Second, we examine the structure and process of production of ultrasound scans and argue that a comparison between two-dimensional ultrasound and photography is justified. This is in contrast to 3D ultrasound images that, due to the intensive mathematical processing involved in their production, present some structural issues that obfuscate their ontological and epistemic status. (shrink)

In everyday reasoning - just as in science and art - knowledge is acquired more by "doing" than with long analyses. What do we "do" when we discover something new? How can we define and explore the pattern of this reasoning, traditionally called "synthetic"? Following in the steps of classic pragmatists, especially C.S. Pierce, Giovanni Maddalena's Philosophy of Gesture revolutionizes the pattern of synthesis through the ideas of change and continuity and proposes "gesture" as a new tool for synthesis. (...) Defining gesture as an action with a beginning and an end that carries on a meaning, Maddalena explains that it is a dense blending of all kinds of phenomena - feelings and vague ideas, actual actions, habits of actions - and of signs - icons, indexes, and symbols. When the blending of phenomena and signs is densest, the gesture is "complete," and its power of introducing something new in knowledge is at its highest level. Examples of complete gestures are religious liturgies, public and private rites, public and private actions that establish an identity, artistic performances, and hypothesizing experiments. A departure from a traditional Kantian framework for understanding the nature and function of reason, The Philosophy of Gesture proposes an approach that is more attuned with our ordinary way of reasoning and of apprehending new knowledge. (shrink)

Dans le commentaire d’Alexandre d’Aphrodise sur la Métaphysique d’Aristote, nous trouvons plusieurs passages concernant « les intermédiaires » (τὰ μεταξύ). Dans cet article, j’en considérerai quelques-uns, tirés des commentaires sur les livres Alpha (6, 987b14-18) et Beta (2, 997a34-b3 ; 997b25-28 ; 998a7-9), car dans ces passages on ne trouve pas une simple paraphrase de ce qu’Aristote dit (comme c’est fréquent chez Alexandre), mais une prise de position qui me semble fort originale. À partir de cette analyse, nous trouverons une (...) confirmation de ce que l’on dit souvent, à savoir qu’Alexandre ne s’intéresse pas aux philosophes (passés et contemporains) en tant que tels, mais seulement en tant qu’objets de considération, souvent polémique, d’Aristote et des aristotéliciens « purs et durs » comme lui. On trouvera aussi une autre confirmation, à savoir qu’Alexandre essaye toujours et à tout prix d’expliquer systématiquement Aristote, même lorsque les thèses aristotéliciennes ne paraissent pas cohérentes ou bien harmonisées entre elles. D’ailleurs, il faudra constater aussi que les passages du commentaire d’Alexandre que l’on analysera ont le mérite de souligner et d’expliquer clairement les difficultés sérieuses que nous rencontrons lorsque nous réfléchissons sur les μεταξύ des Platoniciens : la difficulté de concevoir leur rapport avec la réalité sensible si on les considère comme les objets de certaines sciences mathématiques ; la difficulté de considérer leur existence si on les conçoit comme des objets immanents au réel. (shrink)

We analyze the role of ethical values in the determination of the social cost of carbon, arguing that the familiar debate about discounting is too narrow. Other ethical issues are equally important to computing the social cost of carbon, and we highlight inequality, risk, and population ethics. Although the usual approach, in the economics of cost-benefit analysis for climate policy, is confined to a utilitarian axiology, the methodology of the social cost of carbon is rather flexible and can be expanded (...) to a broader set of social-welfare approaches. [Open access]. (shrink)

This paper wishes to clarify the definitions of the central terms relating to assessment. It argues that all assessment begins with summative assessment and that formative assessment is in fact summative assessment plus feedback which is used by the learner.

In this paper I propose to read and understand gestures as logical tools within a synthetic paradigm of knowledge. This interpretation of gesture is drawn from a new pragmatist reading of reasoning in general, and synthetic reasoning in particular. Complete gestures are actions with a beginning and an end that bear a meaning. It is our regular way to embody vague ideas into singular actions with general meaning. The tool is forged by a dense blending of icons, indices, and symbols (...) and by a complexity of phenomenological characteristics as feelings, actual actions, general concepts and habits. The paper illustrates this new way to look at gestures and different kinds of complete and incomplete gestures. (shrink)

Derrida’s reading of Heidegger’s 1962 lecture On Time and Being concludes the last session of the 1978–79 seminar published in Donner le temp II. There, Heidegger suggests that the task of thinking consists of thinking Being without regard to metaphysics, while ceasing all overcoming of metaphysics as such. What is given as the task for thought is that which onto-theology makes impossible to think, that is, the constitutive aporetic remainder of metaphysical thinking. This essay contends that for both Heidegger and (...) Derrida the task of thought consists in this same matter of thinking, with which the question of the gift primarily deals. It maintains that in order to think the giving of the gift without regard to metaphysics, the gift could be thought in terms of anxiety. In this perspective, anxiety emerges as a thoughtful affect that gives an access to thinking the impossible, cutting through the onto-theological order of metaphysics. Finally, bringing together Heidegger and Lacan’s accounts of anxiety allows us to creep deeper into this liminal dimension of what is to be thought. (shrink)

Comentario en contexto de Vincent M. Colapietro, Acción, sociabilidad y drama. Un retrato pragmatista del animal humano, La Plata, Edulp, 2020 reseña por Giovanni Maddalena. Traducción: Cristina Di Gregori, Livio Mattarollo y Giovanni Maddalena.

Chemical visualizations and models are special kinds of situated, inductive arguments. In this paper, I examine several historical case studies—an archive of images from museums, special collections, and popular magazines—as examples of emergent practices of physical modeling as theoretical play which became the basis for molecular biology and structural chemistry. Specifically, I trace a legacy of visualization tools that starts with Archibald Scott Cooper and Friedrich Kekulé in the late 1800s, crystallizes as material manipulatives in Kekulé’s student Jacobus Henricus Van’t (...) Hoff and his folded paper “toys,” is legitimized in the California lab of Linus Pauling, and is glorified in the popular imaginary with James Watson and Francis Crick’s model of DNA. My tracing then follows several threads into contemporary modeling practices. I ultimately argue that modeling play, originally outside of the boundary of deductive, positivist science, is now an accepted mode of inductive reasoning in these related chemical fields. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage est l’une des premières contributions importantes à l’étude du commentaire de la Métaphysique d’Aristote par Alexandre d’Aphrodise, œuvre encore récemment ignorée. Depuis quelques années, l’éditeur de ce livre, en collaboration avec une équipe de jeunes chercheurs de l’université de Cagliari, est en train de traduire en italien l’intégralité du commentaire, y compris la partie considérée comme inauthentique (celle qui porte sur les livres Ε-Ν) : en ce sens, ce volume (qui contient...

Criminal Woman [La Donna delinquente], Cesare Lombroso’s book on women criminals, published with Guglielmo Ferrero in 1893, marks the moment when the Italian criminologist first systematically integrated the animal world into his explanations of deviancy. At this time, he put forward a general theory of evolution based on femininity. This article queries the way this structure functions on the theoretical level, via a precise example: female brigands. It proposes that the textual and visual strategies of representing these women, notably their (...) virilization, was closely linked to the theory of “the primitive superiority of the female” and the lack of distinction between the sexes in certain “lower” animal species. Paradoxically, the atavism of criminal women thus brought them closer to masculine features, making them throwbacks on the evolutionary path that the “normal woman”– “a man in a state of arrested development” – had interrupted. (shrink)

The physical, psychological, and spiritual violence against fat bodies in the US, committed in service of a racist, sexist, classist, and ableist vision of an idealized body size, is death-dealing. This essay develops a theo-ethical vision of fat liberation that rejects the trappings of the “religion of thinness” and celebrates the inherent worth of fat bodies through an incarnational theology that recognizes the image of God in every body size, the presence of body size diversity in creation, and the full (...) inclusion of all body sizes at the eucharistic table. (shrink)

We study a contemporary need to complement analytic philosophy with pendular, synthetic approaches. We provide new definitions of the dyad analytics/synthetics and complete it with a natural third, horotics. Some historical trends to support a synthetic/horotic paradigm are studied: (i) Peirce’s ideas around his logic of continuity – non Cantorian continuum and existential graphs – emphasizing the importance of mathematical gestures, (ii) Gödel’s understanding of intuitionism as a synthetic counterpart of classical logic, along with a new horotic approach to his (...) work, (iii) Contemporary mathematical achievements (1950-2000), difficult to understand from analytical philosophy perspectives. Finally, we indicate some main features that a systematical synthetic/horotic reasoning should enforce, in order to fulfill its historic sequence. (shrink)

Although questionable for its style and method, irritating in its conclusions and judgments, and political in the broad sense of the word, Carlin Romano’s book is a courageous work that fully belongs to the pragmatist tradition. It recalls the style and the tone of some Italian pragmatists like Papini and Prezzolini, whose books lacked perhaps some deep technical tools but were apt to shake the intellectual world and substantially to the point in many critiques. As the Italian pragmatists for...

The idea of ‘gesture’ is present in the philosophical world in various forms. All of them might find an important theoretical grounding in pragmatist philosophy, if we combine pragmatism with some French philosophies of mathematics and read it as a way out of the Kantian philosophy of representation. The paper uses the insights of Jean Cavaillès to set out the problem of the weakness of the epistemic Kantian defense of mathematical and logical thought. Cavaillès rejected the possible amendments to Kant’s (...) explanation provided by both Husserl and Bolzano and their heirs. He used the word ‘gesture’ in order to explain the activity of mathematicians who have to act synthetically, following rules, with some physical representation, and being aware of the possibility of failure. Cavaillès conceived the use of gesture as an alternative to the Heidegerian idea of event defended by Albert Lautman. The paper then follows the idea of gesture in the French philosophy of mathematics of Gilles Châtelet and Giuseppe Longo. Finally, the paper illustrates how Peirce’s study of Existential Graphs and the main insights of pragmatism complete Cavaillès’s idea by giving to gestures a phenomenological and semiotic structure. The pragmatist philosophy of gesture is thus a new way of overthrowing Kant’s philosophy of representation without surrendering to irrationalism. (shrink)

L'antitesi di Talete. Anassimandro e l'infinito come simultaneità. L'aria di Anassimene come mediazione. Il principio d'Eraclito come equilibrio. Il fuoco eracliteo come divenire. Il fuoco eracliteo come armonia.

I. Introduction Can phenomenology and pragmatism, two early twentieth century theories, be alive today and furnish a valid possibility in our philosophical landscape? Moreover, can they work together? The operation does not seem impossible since Peirce himself held a phenomenology, which is an indispensable part of his never-finished system; James’s psychology is often a phenomenology, and Husserl recognized James as an interesting author because of his phenomenological insights. However, the...

This paper explores the intertwinement of ontology and history that happened after the idealist turn of Kantian transcendentalism, particularly in classic German idealism and later in American pragmatism. The paper focuses on the less remarked-upon consequence of this intertwinement, namely the possibility of a new reading of history based on changes in concepts and habitual mentality. The paper proposes a new take on historiography that vindicates Hegel’s insight but changes his approach to a pragmatist one, more apt to face historical (...) changes in a technical way and less easily twistable into ideological frameworks. The paper argues that the notion of habit, as phenomenologically and semiotically described by Peirce, is the fundamental cellule of the pragmatist take on the entanglement of history and ontology. The paper elaborates on the notion of habit, singling out a special form of it called “gesture” that can be a useful tool for reading the history of the human spirit without incorporating Hegel’s dialectic and Absolute. The paper compares the notion of gesture as it originated in the pragmatist tradition with the parallel use of the term in the early studies of Michel Foucault and argues that the notion of gesture is better equipped to tackle a theoretical reading of history. (shrink)

Nynfa Bosco (1929-2013) was an interesting, important and eccentric character in Italian post-World War II philosophy studies. She was one of the first women to successfully pursue a university career, capable of mastering several languages when few in Italy could decently speak one, and gifted with an agile and compelling writing style. Nynfa Bosco published in 1959 the first Italian monograph on Peirce and in 1977 a translation of some important articles of the founder of pragmatism. Despite the technical approximation, (...) mainly determined by the texts available at that time, Bosco understood the original ethical and metaphysical dimension of Peirce's logical writings, anticipating some readings that would emerge only many years later. (shrink)

Dans cet article j’analyse quelques extraits de la traduction latine du De anima d’Alexandre d’Aphrodise, faite par Girolamo Donato (1457-1511), noble vénitien, ambassadeur de la Serenissima auprès de plusieurs cours en Italie et en Europe, homme de lettres ami de Poliziano, Marsilio Ficino et Aldo Manuzio. En comparant les extraits avec l’original grec, le but est d’en vérifier la valeur : la fidélité du latin au grec, la compréhension générale du contenu et, en l’occurrence, la possibilité de rendre plus clairs (...) certains passages obscurs du texte d’Alexandre. (shrink)

Porphyry’s Expositio per interrogationem et responsionem can help us to understand some obscure passages of chapter seven of Aristotle’s Categories, focused on the relative. The Porphyrian analysis of πρός τι presents indeed developments which are both useful for the understanding of the Aristotelian text and very innovative too. First, we can mention the general Porphyrian thesis according to which categories are predicates. This theory fits very well with πρός τι, which are predicates corresponding to properties that subjects only possess because (...) of an observed reciprocal relationship. This brings us to the second novelty of Porphyry’s analysis, really important for modern developments of the notion of relation, namely the difference between σχέσις and πρός τι, which depends on it. Finally, we will mention the important Porphyry’s contribution to the understanding of a particularly obscure issue concerning the relationship between the two definitions of πρός τι that Aristotle provides. Porphyry points out the Platonic origin of the first definition, without dismissing it though: instead, he will just consider it too vast and encompassing the true πρός τι, object of the second definition. (shrink)

The paper will focus on Rorty’s project as it emerges in the compelling introductions to his books from Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature onwards. Even disagreeing with his conclusions, some interesting items suggest that Rorty was a legitimate member of the pragmatist family and that he shared with classic pragmatists much more than a reader can see at first glance. First, Rorty understood better than anyone else that the fight against Kant’s rationalism is crucial to pragmatism considered as a (...) whole. He paralleled Kantism with the history of explaining knowledge as a mirroring representation and he wanted to get rid of it. Second, Rorty shared with classic pragmatists what I call the “synthetic drive” of philosophy, namely, the view of philosophy as the habit of action of looking at anything in a way that makes it “hang together with everything else.” Third, the outcome of the synthetic drive is conceiving philosophy as a transformative activity. In all these cases, Rorty took roads at odds with classic pragmatism but he did not betray the general aim and spirit of the American movement of thought. (shrink)

Western philosophy often overlooked the problem of technology. It is a long-standing prejudice of a nominalist or idealist mentality that goes on from ancient Greece up to today. Compared to other contemporary currents of thought, the pragmatist tradition had some interesting ideas because it united in a profound continuum theory and practice, overthrowing any dualism. This move was particularly effective in Peirce’s studies on continuity, logical modalities, logic of abduction, and existential graphs as well as in Dewey’s approach to logic (...) as an integrated tool of inquiry in which technology is part of the human organism. However, also the pragmatist tradition remained somehow only with a good analysis of synthesis and a good theory of practice but did not complete its drive toward a different vision of syntheticity and technology. The philosophy of gesture that I will propose in this paper wants to complete the unfinished work of this tradition relying heavily on pragmatist phenomenology and semiotics. In the first part, I will sum up the main structure of this philosophy of gesture, as I name it (I). In the second part, I will show the fundamental application of this philosophy to technology (II). At the end, I will illustrate an application for blind people to see a museum that is inspired by the Philosophy of gesture (III). (shrink)