The question of whether movies can deliver philosophical content is a leading topic in the cognitive and analytic debate on film. But instead of turning to the well-trodden terrain of narrative and emotional engagement, this is the first time fashion and costume choices are analyzed to demonstrate how movies can be said to be doing philosophy. Considering how fashion and costumes can deliver the epistemic content of a film and act as a guidance to the interpretation of the philosophical content (...) of a film, Laura T. Di Summa examines fashion and costume choices in classical and contemporary films. She discusses a number of cinematic examples, and the costumes and fashion elements within them, illustrating the importance of issues such as the performative side of fashion, the alteration between novelty and repetition, the pivotal role of the body, and the relation between fashion, style, and individual as well as collective identity. Featuring close examinations of 1950s melodramas, Hollywood blockbusters and documentaries such as All That Heaven Allows, Mad Max Fury Road, and McQueen, Di Summa uses an innovative new lens to provide fresh philosophical analysis of films. The result is not only an advancement of our understanding of the aesthetic means through which film can do philosophy, but the first insights into a philosophy of fashion. (shrink)

In the 1990s, Laurie Shrage critiqued dominant semiotic and psychoanalytic approaches to film, advocating instead for a contextual analysis attentive to audience reception. Drawing on Christopher Strong (Arzner, 1933), Shrage highlighted its capacity to “disturb patriarchal sensibilities,” particularly in its portrayal of women and marriage. This paper revisits Shrage’s thesis to explore how the film addresses issues that remain relevant today, including female agency within and beyond the institution of marriage. I argue that while the film has been recognized for (...) its narrative and dialogue, its engagement with themes such as women’s employment, motherhood, and caregiving remains critically underexplored. Through a close reading that incorporates cinematic elements, such as costume design, I examine how these themes shape the protagonist’s sense of autonomy and complicate traditional narratives of romantic drama. By situating the film within both its historical and contemporary contexts, I aim to demonstrate its enduring relevance and the significance of returning to questions of spectatorship—what we are meant to see and what we might learn to see anew through a critical, feminist lens. (shrink)

Fashion is immediately associated with looks. Its popularity and its most consumerist sides thrive in our current culture of image, further highlighting the connection between fashion and an aesthetic that is quintessentially visual. While it is impossible to deny such a connection, this paper explores the relationship between fashion and touch and fashion and “feel”, two terms that, albeit related, deserve independent consideration. I will begin by emphasizing the importance of seeing fashion in relation to a performative understanding of identity, (...) which is experiential, embodied, situated, and, quite simply, “in movement”. Such an understanding, crucial for a better grasp of sartorial design, is inevitably linked to a tactile understanding of fashion: from the selection of fabrics to the silhouettes and cuts that allow a sketch to move to a garment in three dimensions. But, crucially, a performative understanding of identity is also the starting point for a reflection on touch and fashion in our everyday tasks and judgments, judgments that often move from the aesthetic sphere to other value areas and the broader socio-political context. To further cement my arguments, I will conclude the paper with two case studies: sportswear and maternity wear. (shrink)

Our commentary suggests that different materialities (fragile, enduring, and mixed) may influence cognitive evolution. Building on Stibbard-Hawkes, we propose that predictive brains minimise errors and seek information, actively structuring environments for epistemic benefits. This perspective complements Stibbard-Hawkes' view.

There is space for children in philosophy. They are mentioned in debates over the rationality of love and in ethical and pedagogical debates on the nature of parenthood. There is also a field devoted to teaching philosophy to children. But there isn’t much discussion on children and aesthetics, on their aesthetic judgments and preferences, and on what it is like to build an aesthetic for children. There is virtually nothing on how children’s aesthetic preferences affect not only the adults they (...) will eventually become but also the adults with whom they live—their parents. In this paper, I approach the topic by looking at young children’s literature, specifically literature for children whose reading depends on the presence of an adult or, at the very least, of someone who is able to read to them. I will begin by looking at the practice of reading with children: what is read, when, and how. Responding to these questions can pave the way to answering another question: namely, why do we read to them? While the answer to the latter question may seem obvious given the extensive studies on the benefits of reading to young children, I believe an appeal to children’s aesthetics can complicate the answer and further contribute to the discussion on loving them, on growing as a parent, and on loving what they love. (shrink)

This interdisciplinary volume brings together expert researchers coming from primatology, anthropology, ethology, philosophy of cognitive sciences, neurophysiology, mathematics and psychology to discuss both the foundations of non-human primate and human social cognition as well as the means there currently exist to study the various facets of social cognition. The first part focusses on various aspects of social cognition across primates, from the relationship between food and social behaviour to the connection with empathy and communication, offering a multitude of innovative approaches (...) that range from field-studies to philosophy. The second part details the various epistemic and methodological means there exist to study social cognition, in particular how to ascertain the proximal and ultimate mechanisms of social cognition through experimental, modelling and field studies. In the final part, the mechanisms of cultural transmission in primate and human societies are investigated, and special attention is given to how the evolution of cognitive capacities underlie primates’ abilities to use and manufacture tools, and how this in turn influences their social ecology. A must-read for both, young scholars as well as established researchers! (shrink)

The 2015 film Lost and Beautiful, directed by Pietro Marcello, en­deavors in aesthetically compelling ways to decenter the human in the frame and engage viewers in what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari term becoming animals. Part documentary film, part fairytale, this film tells the story in the nonhuman first person, of the life and journey of a water buffalo calf in the south of Italy and his relationship with the shepherd who saved him from pre­mature death, and later, with Pulcinella, (...) a mythological figure from Neapol­itan folklore, who accompanies him in a journey north. Adopting ecocritical and posthuman perspective and providing elements of environmental cultural history, this article analyses the aesthetic and narrative strategies the film em­ploys to grant subjectivity to a nonhuman protagonist and, in turn, address the viewers. Advocating for the conservation of human artifacts while also posing the question of animal rights and agency, Lost and Beautiful powerfully gestures toward a non-anthropocentric cinema. (shrink)

Resumo A era do Antropoceno, marcada por recursos limitados e responsabilidade compartilhada pelo seu uso, exige que os ambientes educacionais sirvam de modelo para práticas ecologicamente sustentáveis contra o uso indevido e o desperdício de recursos. Para isso, os ambientes de aprendizagem devem espelhar as realidades ecológicas do Antropoceno, oferecendo recursos limitados a serem compartilhados e preservados entre as gerações. Eles também devem promover práticas democráticas e participativas para distribuir a responsabilidade pela conservação dos recursos. Dada a urgência de redirecionar (...) as práticas educacionais para a sustentabilidade, nos baseamos no bem estabelecido Método Montessori, que exemplifica o aprendizado eco-sustentável ao integrar recursos locais com ferramentas educacionais especialmente projetadas. Além disso, seus princípios de liberdade, organização, cuidado e rituais demonstram a participação democrática na governança. (shrink)

The attention that prominent fashion houses have been paying to climate change and environmental concerns has never been so prominent. Fashion week of 2019 and 2020 made such a concern a staple of the fashion discourse. Designers and fashion houses are exploring fabric alternatives such as Piñatex (derived from discarded pineapple skins), they are advertising their runways as “carbon neutral,” and fashion colossuses such as Burberry, Gap, Levi’s, and H&M are vowing to reduce greenhouse gas emission by 30% by 2030. (...) However, the genuine nature of such intentions is not impermeable to criticism. While “sustainable fashion” – arguably the “it” vocabulary choice of the past couple of years – certainly has its praiseworthy sides, it is also, at times, another strategy to spike consumerism. In this chapter, I aim to investigate the viability of fashion’s current interest in environmental concerns in light of an analysis of fashion’s most indisputably prominent side: its relation to the aesthetic realm. Playing along the lines of the analytic debate gauging the relative impact of ethical values over aesthetic values and vice versa, I will consider how aesthetic demands can be steered by the necessity of ethical reflection without for this reason erasing, or at least hiding, the appreciation of style, glamour, and couture. I will conclude with a reassessment and potential solution, based on the inherently performative side of fashion, to the question of whether sustainable fashion can be seen as a current, viable, and potentially effective way of responding to contemporary environmental concerns. (shrink)

The creation of cultural information by humans is an ability that requires to compound together different factors. Although information needs to be transmitted faithfully enough so to prevent errors, space must be left to create innovations at the same time. Individual trial and error is the principal source of innovations among all primate species, especially in emulative contexts, but it does not explain the quantity, quality or rapidity of human cultural production. On the other hand, imitation and (over)imitation explain quite (...) well faithful transmission and error control but do not explain the creation of cultural novelties nor the ratchet effect of human culture. To explain these latter components, we need a combination of trial and error in emulative contexts and (over)imitation. Here we suggest that this combination of the ability in creating innovations and transmitting them faithfully occurred for the first time during the Palaeolithic. In that time frame, we can detect the establishment of imitation as the main social learning strategy in the genus Homo. Adopting a niche construction (henceforth NC) paradigm, we propose that this combination became a social characteristic of Homo sapiens which ontogenetically happens when children reach the school age in modern humans. (shrink)

In this chapter, I critically assess the ability of autobiographical documentary to convey an authentic portrayal of the self and analyze the cinematic means through which autobiographical documentaries may be able to do so. I compare and outline the chief differences between autobiographical documentaries and literary memoirs and assess the ways in which cognitive analysis of film and post-structuralist accounts within film theory and documentary studies have dealt with the distinction between fiction and nonfiction. I lastly consider new avenues of (...) autobiographical expression such as the ones potentially offered by social media, blogs, video diaries, personal websites, and so on. (shrink)

This handbook brings together essays in the philosophy of film and motion pictures from authorities across the spectrum. It boasts contributions from philosophers and film theorists alike, with many essays employing pluralist approaches to this interdisciplinary subject. Core areas treated include film ontology, film structure, psychology, authorship, narrative, and viewer emotion. Emerging areas of interest, including virtual reality, video games, and nonfictional and autobiographical film also have dedicated chapters. Other areas of focus include the film medium’s intersection with contemporary social (...) issues, film’s kinship to other art forms, and the influence of historically seminal schools of thought in the philosophy of film. Of emphasis in many of the essays is the relationship and overlap of analytic and continental perspectives in this subject. (shrink)

Neurosurgery for psychiatric disorders, also sometimes referred to as psychosurgery, is rapidly evolving, with new techniques and indications being investigated actively. Many within the field have suggested that some form of guidelines or regulations are needed to help ensure that a promising field develops safely. Multiple countries have enacted specific laws regulating NPD. This article reviews NPD-specific laws drawn from North and South America, Asia and Europe, in order to identify the typical form and contents of these laws and to (...) set the groundwork for the design of an optimal regulation for the field. Key challenges for this design that are revealed by the review are how to define the scope of the law, what types of regulations are required, and how to approach international harmonization given the potential migration of researchers and patients. (shrink)

Advanced globalization has raised prosperity and significant progress in various areas of our lives, including healthcare. Technological innovation is a driver behind these changes, which would be unimaginable without increased automation, digitalization, and connectivity. Nonetheless, advanced globalization has increased local inequality and worsened overuse of natural resources, pollution of the environment, and waste of resources. Moreover, worldwide population is growing: from 7.6 billion in 2017 to 11.2 billion in 2100, especially in the Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs). This raises urgent (...) global health and disparities issues, as pointed out in the 2030-Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). Healthcare 5.0 emerges as a new trend towards the societal role of technologies, by pursuing three main pillars of Industry 5.0: (1) human-centric approach: i.e., the technology is adapted to different users and needs; (2) sustainability: i.e., reducing energy consumption and analysing the impact of technology on economy and society; (3) resilience: i.e., the ability to cope with change, disruptions, crises. Robotics and digital technologies play a fundamental role in shaping the future society by pursuing the aforementioned pillars. This chapter provides an overview on this topic and some examples of robotic technologies addressing the issue of human-centric design, sustainability, and resilience. (shrink)

The Philosophical Forum, Volume 52, Issue 4, Page 285-453, Winter 2021.

While research on question–answer sequences has yielded important insights into the structures of responses and the actions they implement, the advising literature has illuminated how advice-giving may be resisted or avoided in certain institutional contexts. In this study, we examine the audio-recorded Q&A sections of applicant webinars delivered by a major philanthropic foundation in the United States, with a particular focus on the foundation representatives’ complex responses to audience members’ yes–no questions that seek specificity. Within a conversation analytic framework, we (...) show how the practice of going general is engaged to manage the demands of being helpful to the individual questioner without appearing to guarantee a particular outcome while foregrounding the foundation’s principles and priorities for the broader audience. Findings of this study may be useful for formulating recommendations for foundation representatives tasked with communicating effectively with potential grantees. (shrink)

This article applies the thesis of the extended mind to ambient smart environments. These systems are characterised by an environment, such as a home or classroom, infused with multiple, highly networked streams of smart technology working in the background, learning about the user and operating without an explicit interface or any intentional sensorimotor engagement from the user. We analyse these systems in the context of work on the “classical” extended mind, characterised by conditions such as “trust and glue” and phenomenal (...) transparency, and find that these conditions are ill-suited to describing our engagement with ambient smart environments. We then draw from the active inference framework, a theory of brain function which casts cognition as a process of embodied uncertainty minimisation, to develop a version of the extended mind grounded in a process ontology, where the boundaries of mind are understood to be multiple and always shifting. Given this more fluid account of the extended mind, we argue that ambient smart environments should be thought of as extended allostatic control systems, operating more or less invisibly to support an agent’s biological capacity for minimising uncertainty over multiple, interlocking timescales. Thus, we account for the functionality of ambient smart environments as extended systems, and in so doing, utilise a markedly different version of the classical thesis of extended mind. (shrink)

Il saggio ricostruisce la riflessione di J.R. Commons sul ruolo dello Stato nel tornante che precede la Grande Guerra (1899–1915). Ne emerge una nozione pragmatica e flessibile della statualità che fa luce su aspetti spesso trascurati del Progressismo e del suo rapporto con un conflitto di classe mai riassorbito dagli sforzi di riforma. In primo luogo, evidenzia la rilevanza di uno spazio politico tenuto aperto da lavoratori e lavoratrici radicali, attivismo femminile, gruppi etnici e razziali. In secondo luogo, mostra il (...) complesso intreccio della riforma con l’impegno a costruire un ordine gerarchico di lavoro, consumo e cittadinanza. (shrink)

The Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis and the social brain hypothesis have revolutionized traditional views on how primate cognition can be studied. Beyond the study of individual problem-solving capacities of various primates, these hypotheses have demonstrated the close relationship between the complexity of primate social life and the emergence of more sophisticated cognitive skills. The social brain hypothesis demonstrated the existence of a close correlation between the volume of the neocortex and the number of individuals in primate social groups. The amount of (...) studies in this area have increased dramatically and have successfully enhanced our understanding of the evolutionary roots of complex social phenomena, including theory of mind, cultural transmission, social learning, and shared attention. The cognitive capacities present in primates also underlie the evolution of cognitive capacities in humans. This chapter introduces present avenues taken in research on primate social cognition, and it walks the reader through the chapters of this volume. (shrink)

This book is dedicated to clarify ambiguous concepts from the world of creativity and innovation. One of the initial triggers for the development of the book was the perceived ambiguity of the binomials Design vs. Design Thinking and Innovation vs. Invention. Frequently, designers and innovation consultants are questioned by their clients about the relationships between these kind of concepts. Has the second emerged through the first, or vice-verse? Is one part of the other? Where are the similarities and which are (...) the differences? This conceptual incomprehension makes itself noticeable between many ambiguous concepts in the world of innovation and creativity. What is the difference between Radical and Disruptive Innovation? Or is Social Innovation the same as Social Intervention? And regarding Creativity, are Creativity and Creative Thinking the same? In this book the reader will find answers to these kinds of questions and doubts. 28 authors from 10 different countries and cultural backgrounds are questioning current definitions and perceptions, by comparing different sources and ideas, or simply by giving their personal opinions. Some of the authors have an academic background, others a practical one, being either entrepreneurs, working with innovation in companies, or being innovation/design consultants. (shrink)

This study examines linguistic co-occurrence patterns in the discourse of individuals with communication impairments who use augmentative and alternative communication devices in the workplace by comparing them to those of non-AAC users in similar job settings. A typical workweek per focal participant was recorded and transcribed to create a specialized corpus of workplace discourse of approximately 464,000 words at the time of this analysis. A multidimensional analysis of co-occurrence patterns along functional linguistic dimensions, following Biber [Variation across Speech and Writing. (...) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Dimensions of Register Variation: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press], reveals differences in the macro discourse characteristics of AAC vis-a-vis non-AAC texts. Results indicate that AAC texts make use of more informational, non-narrative, and explicit textual features of discourse than their non-AAC counterparts. Implications to improve the capabilities of AAC devices to produce speech that matches baseline expectations of co-workers in the workplace are discussed. (shrink)

In this commentary, we support a complex, mosaic, and multimodal approach to the evolution of intelligence. Using the arcuate fasciculus as an example of discontinuity in the evolution of neurobiological architectures, we argue that the strict dichotomy of modules versus G, adopted by Burkart et al. in the target article, is insufficient to interpret the available statistical and experimental evidence.

The Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis and the social brain hypothesis have revolutionized traditional views on how primate cognition can be studied. Beyond the study of individual problem-solving capacities of various primates, these hypotheses have demonstrated the close relationship between the complexity of primate social life and the emergence of more sophisticated cognitive skills. The social brain hypothesis demonstrated the existence of a close correlation between the volume of the neocortex and the number of individuals in primate social groups. The amount of (...) studies in this area have increased dramatically and have successfully enhanced our understanding of the evolutionary roots of complex social phenomena, including theory of mind, cultural transmission, social learning, and shared attention. The cognitive capacities present in primates also underlie the evolution of cognitive capacities in humans. This chapter introduces present avenues taken in research on primate social cognition, and it walks the reader through the chapters of this volume. (shrink)

Artistic work is often born through a thought, the deepening and the study of themes, which are the fundamental principles of art, being used and becoming subjects of a different work, parallel to that of the creative one.

This chapter reports the results of several studies designed to explore the gender stereotypes that professional philosophers and philosophy students hold about philosophy. We found that both women and men explicitly associate philosophy with maleness. However, the implicit picture was more complicated and surprising. Men tend to implicitly associate philosophy with maleness, but women tend to implicitly associate it with femaleness. We explore the implications of these findings for explanations of the underrepresentation of women in philosophy that turn on implicit (...) bias and stereotype threat. We argue that our findings are compatible with these explanations, and that they suggest a hopeful picture for the prospects of combating stereotype threat among women in philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper I will present the accounts of two influential contemporary moral philosophers, Grace Clement and Amartya Sen, to argue for the social context and inter-related nature of autonomy. In fact, there can be no autonomy for anyone without a loving and caring social environment that actively promotes independent thinking and capacity empowerment among people. This social dimension of autonomy has often been ignored by traditional theorists, who have considered autonomy to be an individual accomplishment that is a function (...) of an individual's will power, intellectual ability, or self-discipline and virtue. (shrink)

Sensorimotor incorporation is the most intimate form of environmental dependence; it transforms external objects into an integral part of ourselves, often changing our agency irreversibly. Existing accounts oscillate between excessively strong conceptions, which limit incorporation to body-part-like objects, and weaker views, which equate it with skillful tool use. Building on enactive ideas, we propose an operational definition of incorporation that avoids these extremes by emphasizing two key features: portability, the capacity to use the incorporated object across contexts, and irreversibility, the (...) transformation of agency such that the object becomes central to the agent’s viability. An object is central when its loss renders the agent’s form of life unviable or requires significant adaptive effort to restore viability, in either case affecting her identity. We further argue that only concrete objects—those whose potentialities are actualized through interaction—can be incorporated. Incorporation, thus, forms an integrated agential system that is portable, versatile, and operationally dependent on the incorporated object. While the incorporated object becomes central for a given agent’s form of life, it can still be replaced by another particular object, provided it can be equivalently concretized. This account clarifies the nature and apparent paradoxes of incorporation and its role in shaping sensorimotor agency. (shrink)

La storia della follia assume i tratti di uno straordinario racconto, laddove trame e personaggi s’intrecciano in uno svolgimento comune e condiviso. Questa storia, però, perturba gli animi, poiché essa alterna disumane crudeltà a rivoluzionarie pre- se di consapevolezza. In certi periodi e contesti storici, infatti, il folle diviene beffarda maschera del male, da allontanare, internare o, addirittura, perseguitare. Su di lui s’abbatte la crudeltà umana, dietro il velo menzognero di un’improbabile cura. La follia diviene malattia, demone, male assoluto da (...) estirpare a ogni costo, finanche sacrificando alcune sue vittime. In tal senso, la storia della follia ricorda quella dello schiavismo, o quella delle deportazioni e dei genocidi. In altri periodi e contesti stori- ci, invece, il folle diviene emblema di lotta sociale e culturale, per l’affermazione del- la soggettività umana e del suo assoluto rispetto. Egli diviene, così, il simbolo della rinascita culturale e spirituale, con gesta simboliche, come la rottura delle catene nei manicomi, sino addirittura a mettere in dubbio, o negare, l’esistenza stessa della follia. In tal senso, la storia della follia ricorda quella delle rivoluzioni, o dei moti insurrezionali, o dei radicali cambiamenti del paradigma scientifico. Nel mezzo, infine, tra estremismi così netti, s’inserisce lo scorrere della storia stessa della follia, con modali- tà spesso più sfumate e altre meno. Questa storia assume multidimensionalità, come fosse l’insieme di tante storie parallele. C’è, infatti, una storia dei luoghi della follia: dai più indegni e disumani, come i lebbrosari convertiti, le navi dei folli e i manicomi, ai più accoglienti e sensibili, come le case morali e le comunità terapeutiche. C’è, inol- tre, una storia delle idee sulla follia: da quelle che la definiscono una malattia simile a una sostanza agente, come l’organicismo, a quelle che la definiscono, invece, una proprietà o condizione esistenziale dell’individuo, contingente e risolvibile, come il mentalismo; o da quelle che la definiscono una disarmonia spirituale e una forza avversa, come l’animismo, a quelle che la definiscono, invece, una compromissione di natura ambientale, come l’ambientalismo. C’è, infine, una storia dei trattamenti della follia: da quelli più bruti e ciechi, come la bara d’acqua e la lobotomia, a quelli più umani e terapici, come l’arte della consolazione e la buona relazione. (shrink)

The relationship between architecture and urban centers and concepts such as community and identity is undeniably complex and has been described, by both philosophers and architectural theorists, in radically different ways. In this essay, I will focus on the contrast between the role of architecture and cities as providers of a sense of identity while also emphasizing the risks associated with this conception. I will begin with an overview of a few theories arguing—on aesthetic, moral, and functional grounds—for the necessity (...) of a connection among architecture, identity, and community. I will then move, in the second part, to what can be seen as the critical and theoretical dismantling of such a notion: a dismantling that, however, does not end the discussion of identity as much as it problematizes it. Architecture and urbanism, I aim to show, are still discussing the means and terms of the debate on identity, but the interpretation of such a concept has changed in significant ways. Specifically, in the second and last section of the essay, I will argue for what I will refer to as a terminological and conceptual change: for if identity is lost, or too ambitious a goal, identification, and the practices leading to it are still “in the making.” Learning to identify might be even harder than finding identity, but it has become an essential skill in our present, multicultural, and dangerously fluctuating society. (shrink)