The study of eye movements is a common way to non-invasively understand and analyze human behavior. However, eye-tracking techniques are very hard to scale, and require expensive equipment and extensive expertise. In the context of web browsing, these issues could be overcome by studying the link between the eye and the computer mouse. Here, we propose new analysis methods, and a more advanced characterization of this link. To this end, we recorded the eye, mouse, and scroll movements of 151 participants (...) exploring 18 dynamic web pages while performing free viewing and visual search tasks for 20 s. The data revealed significant differences of eye, mouse, and scroll parameters over time which stabilize at the end of exploration. This suggests the existence of a task-independent relationship between eye, mouse, and scroll parameters, which are characterized by two distinct patterns: one common pattern for movement parameters and a second for dwelling/fixation parameters. Within these patterns, mouse and eye movements remained consistent with each other, while the scrolling behaved the opposite way. (shrink)

Nehemiah Grew (1641–1712) devoted more than 10 years of his life to developing a science of plants and vegetation, a project in which observation (often at the microscopic level) and experimentation played a prominent role. Grew started by composing a natural history of plants that was concerned with their anatomical structure and functioning, but, as I suggest, he also aimed to use observations and experiments to develop an experimental science that investigated the causes and principles of vegetation. Apart from studying (...) the structure of plants, Grew also treated them as instruments in which different chemical operations took place (such as filtration, digestion, fermentation, and the separation of particles of matter). At a methodological level, the science of plants and vegetation is a project based on experimental comparisons, variations, and extensions that, in some cases, led Grew to revise his explicative hypothesis. (shrink)

This paper investigates the relation between Gabriel Plattes’ (c. 1600–1644) cosmology and theory of matter, on the one hand, and his method of experimentation, on the other. In my view Plattes based his cosmology and theory of matter on specific “principles of nature” expressed as alchemical qualitative relations between bodies, and these principles formed the theoretical framework for his experimental method and technologies. I also claim that Plattes’ method of experimentation has heuristic purposes, acting as a tool to instantiate and (...) illustrate these natural principles. By quantifiable manipulations of matter (expressed in terms of proportions and numbers), Plattes made use of experimentation to provide technologies whose immediate purpose was to ameliorate or improve the material world. (shrink)

The paper develops a phenomenology of hyper-reading (i.e. the act of reading hypertexts) moving from the prejudicial approach to such texts, developing the three moments of presence, boredom and authority and concluding with some remarks on the freedom of readers in the act of navigation of hypertexts – especially those on the Web.

Romania was the first country in the Eastern bloc to initiate diplo­matic relations with the Federal Republic of Germany. On January 31, 1967, the Embassy of the FRG was opened in Bucharest, Romania. In this context, which marked the intensification of the cultural exchange between the two countries, with special attention paid to the exchange of students and researchers, in this article I aim to tackle the situation of the Humboldt fellows from Romania during 1965-1989, as agents of knowledge transfer (...) and actors of soft-power strategies between the two blocks. (shrink)

This article examines influential recent arguments in science studies which stress the interactive and mutually transformative nature of human-animal relations in scientific research, as part of a broader ontological proposal for science as material engagement with the world, rather than epistemic detachment from it. Such arguments are examined in the light of ethnography and interviews with field biologists who work with meerkats under conditions of habituation. Where philosophers of science stress the mutually modifying aspect of scientific interspecies relationality, these researchers (...) present habituation as a way to study meerkats ‘in the wild’, and to access their putatively natural, undisturbed, behaviour. Building on this contrast, I will argue that the logic of scientific habituation remains difficult to grasp as long as we think of it exclusively in terms of human-animal relations. The seeming ‘paradox’ of habituation – the idea that it transforms precisely that which it aims to hold stable, namely the ‘wildness’ of animals – is an artefact of a frame of analysis which takes animals to be the object of the science of animal behaviour. Habituation ceases to look paradoxical, however, if we remain faithful to these researchers’ own interests, for whom the scientific object does not coincide with the animal as a whole, but is rather only a selected subset of its behaviour. In conclusion I suggest that this account of habituation sheds a new light on the articulations and disjunctions between diverse practices and commitments in social anthropology, philosophy and biological science. (shrink)

In the present essay I would like to explore the different meanings of the emotion named Schadenfreude from a perspective integrating Plato’s and Aristotle’s moral philosophy with the analyses of phenomenological anthropologists such as Scheler, Plessner and Blumenberg. In the first half of my essay I will focus on Aristotle’s distinction between, on the one hand, a pleasure at another’s misfortune which does not necessarily obstruct pity in the opposite position and provides relief from indignation, and a malicious pleasure at (...) another’s misfortune understood as the opposite of envy. In the second half of the essay I will examine the link between the joy involved in Schadenfreude and laughter by asking whether and to what extent this contemplative emotion contributes to the emergence of a theoretical attitude. (shrink)

In this article, I will explore the enactive approach to science and the pragmatic motifs that guide it. In particular, in the first half of the article, I will discuss to what extent enactivism can be seen as a philosophy of nature, and by comparing it with Sellars’s interpretation of the conflict between the manifest and the scientific image of humans in the world, I will focus on the view of nature that enactivism defends. In the second part, I will (...) compare the enactive approach with Dewey’s conception of the organism-environment interaction by focusing on the underlying similarities between their views of evolution and their way of seeing science as the most sophisticated expression of an organism’s sense-making. (shrink)

This comment on Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's article, “Zeno and the Art of Anthropology,” considers his definition of what it means to “take seriously” the world of the other, which he regards as the quintessential anthropological move. It means leaving the other's world in a state of suspended possibility, avoiding either belief or disbelief, assent or dissent. Candea's piece draws out the logic of the complementary and inverse move that grounds Viveiros de Castro's stance: “not taking seriously” the world of (...) the “same,” in this case, that of Western intellectuals such as Richard Rorty or Gilles Deleuze. Here “not taking seriously” involves (somewhat counterintuitively) argument, agreement and disagreement, rejection or adoption, of different visions. Candea identifies this controlled asymmetry between treatments of “us” and “them” as the major distinction between Viveiros de Castro's position and an older relativism, a difference that shields the former from the classic “self-refutation charge.” But this controlled asymmetry in turn raises the question of how we are to identify which visions we as anthropologists ought to take seriously and which we ought not to: where, in other words, do we draw the line, procedurally, between “us” and “them”? Candea argues that keeping this problematic and perhaps irresolvable question in view is the specific role of an “endo-anthropology” (the impossible figure of an “anthropology at home”), which is the necessary counterpart of Viveiros de Castro's “exo-anthropology.”. (shrink)

In this article, I will explore the enactive approach to science and the pragmatic motifs that guide it. In particular, in the first half of the article, I will discuss to what extent enactivism can be seen as a philosophy of nature, and by comparing it with Sellars’s interpretation of the conflict between the manifest and the scientific image of humans in the world, I will focus on the view of nature that enactivism defends. In the second part, I will (...) compare the enactive approach with Dewey’s conception of the organism-environment interaction by focusing on the underlying similarities between their views of evolution and their way of seeing science as the most sophisticated expression of an organism’s sense-making. (shrink)

The phenomenon of transnational families is a topical issue on the European Union's family policy agenda, especially in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals and the Europe 2020 Strategy. Romania, not only as a member state of the European Union, but also as a country directly affected by the scale of this phenomenon, must include in the public family policy the issue of transnational families and provide solutions for these families. Starting from the identification of the risk factors faced (...) by children whose parents are working abroad, the article proposes a critical analysis of existing programs and measures in national legislation aimed at preventing and combating the social exclusion of Romanian children from transnational families. The results of the SWOT analysis carried out indicate a number of shortcomings in covering the risk situations of these vulnerable children, the access to education and a good start in the life of these children being quite affected. The obtained results have implications at the level of decision-makers, helping to improve the efficiency of measures and programs for the left behind children and transnational Romanian families. (shrink)

In this paper we propose a conceptualization of ‘posthumous social status’ as a performative reality accomplished through collective actions that are materially and symbolically legitimated. We question the classical definitions of social status that lead to oversocialized theoretical models, and we argue for the necessity to reconsider the relation between social status and social roles in order to gain insight into the reality of a social presence after death. On this account, we claim that the prestige attached to one's position (...) in society is a social phenomenon produced through autopoietic systems of social influence rather than a pre-existent and stable feature embedded in hierarchical structures and actions. Therefore, we clarify the link between social status and systems of influence through a case study in which we discuss how the Christian-Orthodox tradition is socially organized as a powerful realm of doing posthumous social status. (shrink)

This paper investigates the Baconian roots of Maupertuis’s Lettre XIX. Sur le Progrès des Sciences. The Letter was published almost a decade after Maupertuis had accepted Frederick II’s invitation to move from Paris to Berlin and become the new President of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Contrary to the secondary literature that identifies a distinction between Maupertuis’s Parisian and Berliner phases, this paper argues that there is in fact greater continuity between the two. Based on a reading that empha­sizes the (...) programmatic and methodological commonalities between Bacon’s project in De augmentis scientiarum and Maupertuis’s Lettre XIX, this paper argues that, in a Baconian fashion, Maupertuis combines the roles of the “scientist” and the “natural philosopher” into an integrated plan of action with both intellectual an institutional aims. One of Maupertuis’s aims was to highlight the importance of observation and experiment not only in the development of natural philosophy but also for some aspects of speculative philosophy, while another of his aims was to reinvigorate the structure of the Berlin Academy and to model it the fashion of other similar European intellectual projects of that time. (shrink)

This paper investigates the emergence, in the second part of the 17th century, of a new body of experimental knowledge dealing with the chemical transformations of water taking place in plants. We call this body of experimental knowledge a “chemical history of vegetation.” We show that this chemical natural history originated, in terms of recipes and methods of investigation, in the works of Francis Bacon and that it was constructed in accordance with Bacon's precepts for putting together natural and experimental (...) histories. Our paper covers a wide array of experimental investigations, carried out by people with different backgrounds, theoretical assumptions, and metaphysical allegiances (Thomas Browne, Robert Sharrock, Robert Boyle, Nehemiah Grew, John Beale, and John Evelyn). We claim that, despite their differences, these naturalists had a lot in common. First, they treated plants as laboratories of chemical investigation. Second, they used the experiments with plants to develop tools, hypotheses, and operational concepts, which travelled from one naturalist to the other, even when their respective explanatory vocabularies were widely different. Third, we show that some of them also manifested an interest in defining and clarifying the limits and structure of this new body of experimental knowledge, displaying, thus, a certain disciplinary unity. (shrink)

BackgroundSexual minority (SM) older adults experience mental health disparities. Psychiatric disorders and neuropsychiatric symptoms (NPS) are risk factors for cognitive decline. Although older people in same-sex (SSR) compared to mixed-sex relationships (MSR) perform more poorly on cognitive screening tests, prior studies found no differences in rates of dementia diagnosis or neuropsychological profiles. We sought to explore the role of NPS on neurocognitive outcomes for SM populations. We compared cognitive performance and structural brain parameters of older adults in SSR and MSR.MethodsData (...) were originally collected at Alzheimer's Disease Research Centers (ADRCs). Inclusion criteria were: age of 55+ years, a study partner identified as a spouse/partner, and availability of T1-MRI brain volumes/thickness. Participants were labeled as either SSR or MSR based on their/their co-participant's reported sex. We identified 1,073 participants (1,037 MSR−555 cognitively unimpaired [CU]; 36 SSR−23 CU) with structural MRI data, Mini-Mental State Exam (MMSE), and Neuropsychiatric Inventory Questionnaire (NPI-Q) scores. A subset of the overall sample completed comprehensive neuropsychological assessment (n = 939; 908 MSR−494 CU; 31 SSR−22 CU). Covariates included in statistical models were age, sex, education, total intracranial volume, and apolipoprotein E genotype.ResultsMultivariate general linear models showed significant diagnosis-by-relationship interaction effects on the left parahippocampal gyrus volume. After stratification by relationship group, only cognitively impaired (CI) MSR had significantly smaller left parahippocampal volumes than MSR-CU. The SSR group showed better episodic memory performance. Severity of neuropsychiatric symptoms was negatively associated with volume/thickness of bilateral fronto-temporal areas and with MMSE scores, predominantly in the MSR group.ConclusionIn our study, MSR participants presented with a more compromised cognitive profile than SSR participants. MSR-CI participants showed significantly smaller left medio-temporal volumes, a neural signature of AD. Neuropsychiatric symptoms predicted smaller fronto-temporal volumes in the MSR more consistently than in the SSR group. These findings may be due to unexplored protective factors against cognitive decline in SM elders. Indeed, social support has been proposed as a protective factor warranting future investigation. (shrink)

Context and AimsAlthough some exercise-based interventions have been associated with lower levels of pain and performance-related musculoskeletal disorders among musicians, the evidence is still mixed. Furthermore, little is known about musicians’ general engagement in physical activity, their knowledge of PA guidelines, or the relevant training they receive on pain prevention and the sources of such training. Similarly, little is known about the relationship between PA and PRMDs and other risk factors for PRMDs.MethodsFollowing a cross-sectional correlational study design, both standardized andad (...) hocmeasurements were used to investigate self-reported PA [International Physical Activity Questionnaire – Short Form ], knowledge of PA guidelines, and barriers to engaging in PA [Centers for Disease Control ; Determinants of Physical Activity Questionnaire ]; sedentary behavior [Sedentary Behavior Questionnaire ]; pain [36-Item Short Form Survey Instrument ] and PRMDs ; reported physical exertion ; anxiety [Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale ]; practice behaviors ; and relevant training among conservatoire students in the United Kingdom. The entire set of questionnaires was administered both online and via hard copies between June 2017 and April 2018.ResultsDemographic information was obtained from 111 respondents, mostly undergraduate students from seven conservatoires. They reported high levels of engagement in PA, despite poor knowledge of PA guidelines. Teachers were the most frequently mentioned source of pain prevention information, and 62% agreed that they had received advice on why they should engage in cardio PA. Sedentary behavior was comparable to normative data. Levels of bodily pain and PRMDs were low, but 43% showed “abnormal” clinical anxiety and found playing their instruments “somewhat hard” on average. Bodily pain interfering with practice and performance was positively correlated with frequency and severity of PRMDs, anxiety, and RPE. Frequency and severity of PRMDs were also associated with sedentary behavior at the weekend. Anxiety was associated with RPE. No association was found between PA and PRMDs.ConclusionThe relationship between PA and PRMDs and pain remains unclear and needs further investigation. While health education needs to be improved, other pathways may need to be taken. Given the high levels of anxiety, the ideology of Western classical music itself may need to be challenged. (shrink)

In this article, I propose a comparison between Natorp, Husserl, and Sellars that has a twofold aim. First, I ask to what extent Sellars’s perspective can be considered to be Neo-Kantian. Second, I demonstrate that the point of divergence among these three thinkers does not have to do with the role they ascribe to givenness in knowledge, but with the way they conceive the activity of thinking. Focusing on Husserl’s reading of Natorp’s theses concerning the subjective and objective ground of (...) knowledge, I show that both Natorp and Husserl agree with Sellars on the limits of a positivistic and empiricist perspective that relies on what is given in perception for the justification of one’s epistemic beliefs. On the other hand, the differences between the three thinkers emerge as soon as we consider how they attempt to integrate the spontaneity of thinking into the sphere of intuition from a renewed Kantian perspective. (shrink)

Riassunto: Il 12 e il 13 gennaio 2017 si è svolto a Pisa un seminario di studi su La filosofia di Massimo Barale. Di seguito si presenta un resoconto degli interventi tenuti in quell’occasione dagli ultimi allievi di Massimo Barale e da alcuni degli studenti che hanno seguito i suoi ultimi corsi. Gli interventi abbracciano gran parte degli interessi e degli studi di Massimo Barale, dalla critica al metodo adottato da Kant nella Critica della ragion pura alla valorizzazione della prospettiva (...) della Critica del Giudizio condotta sulla scia dell’influenza di Eric Weil, dalla sua originale interpretazione delle prospettive dell’idealismo tedesco e della fenomenologia di Husserl e di Sartre sino al suo confronto con le filosofie della mente, per concludersi con una discussione dei limiti e delle potenzialità della rivalutazione di Barale del punto di vista trascendentale in filosofia. Parole chiave: Massimo Barale; Filosofia trascendentale; Idealismo tedesco; Fenomenologia; Filosofia della mente Massimo Barale’s Philosophy: In the following article, I will provide an account of the conference on The Philosophy of Massimo Barale, held in Pisa 12-13 January 2017. Younger scholars who had studied with Professor Barale or attended his last classes discussed Barale’s work and ideas. Some of them analyzed Barale’s criticism of Kant’s method in Critique of Pure Reason and his appreciation – in line with Eric Weil – for the perspective of the Critique of Judgement. Other scholars explored Barale’s interpretations of Classical German Philosophy and Phenomenology. One talk dealt with Barale’s discussion of the perspective of philosophy of mind and the last three talks focused on the limits and the potential of Barale’s revaluation of a transcendental point of view in philosophy. Keywords: Massimo Barale; Transcendental Philosophy; German Idealism; Phenomenology; Philosophy of Mind. (shrink)

This paper deals with the role played by science in the elaboration of a philosophical image of nature. In particular, I will consider two alternative approaches. On the one hand, I will look at Sellars’ distinction between the manifest image of man, stemmed from common sense framework, and the scientific image, which involves the postulation of imperceptible entities to explain the behaviour of perceptible things. On the other hand, I will focus on Merleau-Ponty’s redefinition of the Husserlian distinction between the (...) natural dimension of lifeworld and the artificial horizon of scientific attitude. I will show that Sellars’ scientific realism turns out to be a mere reduction of Nature to complexes of physical particles; by contrast, Merleau-Ponty’s emergentism describes Nature as an articulated structure divided in different layers, each of them understood as a self-organizing totality. Accordingly, I claim that Merleau-Ponty’s rehabilitation of Philosophy of Nature, as an attempt to think the complexity of reality, becomes an inquiry on the way through which “Science” arises from the symbolic and virtual behaviour of that living organism called “man”. (shrink)

Even if the theoretical prestige of the notion of ecology is recent, an ecological writing has already been racticed, without receiving this name, by Roland Barthes. On several occasions, progressively after Writing Degree zero, Roland Barthes envisaged writing as a multifaceted practice, the most suitable for overturning the only order worth to be revolutionized, the symbolic order. We will take a fresh look at Barthes' writing as a theoretical concept in the early 1950s, along a shift that takes the term (...) first to the name of a technique. Finally, in the mid-1970s, writing comes to be defined by Barthes as a practice that ignores the dichotomy between matter or body and mind or idea, and which arrives, in a spiral return movement, at an inclusive conception that recovers both the concept and the practice. This is where writing meets, in Barthes' work, the act that Latour calls "greening" and which he defines above all as a new relationship between facts and values. In the light of the latest research in "Barthesian studies" we would like to show that the future of "theory", if it is ecology today, lies in the practice and ecological commitment of writing, as a mediator of meaning, a tool of "charitable fiction", at the confines of spirit and matter. (shrink)

In this article I discuss the primacy that, following Sellars, Robert Brandom ascribes to the intersubjective and discursive space of reasons over all other processes in which the human mind is involved. I will compare Brandom’s perspective with that of the situated approach to the study of mind. At first, my aim is to show that the origin of intentionality has to be found in the sphere of sentience and the living body. Second, by comparing the enactivist account of language (...) that derives from the naturalization of Husserl’s phenomenology with the neo-pragmatist approach to the linguistic turn, I argue for a heuristic primacy owing to the linguistic practice of giving and asking for reasons. This allows me to reflect with a meta-philosophical approach on to what extent two families of views such as pragmatism and phenomenology, with their different variants, interact in the attempt to blend things together, i.e., nature and culture; mind and world; and what happens inside the human body and what happens outside it. (shrink)

_Five Faces of Modernity_ is a series of semantic and cultural biographies of words that have taken on special significance in the last century and a half or so: _modernity_, _avant-garde_, _decadence_, _kitsch_, and _postmodernism_. The concept of modernity—the notion that we, the living, are different and somehow superior to our predecessors and that our civilization is likely to be succeeded by one even superior to ours—is a relatively recent Western invention and one whose time may already have passed, if (...) we believe its postmodern challengers. Calinescu documents the rise of cultural modernity and, in tracing the shifting senses of the five terms under scrutiny, illustrates the intricate value judgments, conflicting orientations, and intellectual paradoxes to which it has given rise. _Five Faces of Modernity_ attempts to do for the foundations of the modernist critical lexicon what earlier terminological studies have done for such complex categories as _classicism_, _baroque_, _romanticism_, _realism_, or _symbolism_ and thereby fill a gap in literary scholarship. On another, more ambitious level, Calinescu deals at length with the larger issues, dilemmas, ideological tensions, and perplexities brought about by the assertion of modernity. (shrink)