Most countries have been struggling with the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic imposing social isolation on their citizens. However, this measure carried risks for people's mental health. This study evaluated the psychological repercussions of objective isolation in 1,006 Italians during the first, especially strict, lockdown in spring 2020. Although varying for the regional spread-rate of the contagion, results showed that the longer the isolation and the less adequate the physical space where people were isolated, the worse the mental health. Offline (...) social contacts buffered the association between social isolation and mental health. However, when offline contacts were limited, online contacts seemed crucial in protecting mental health. The findings inform about the potential downsides of the massive social isolation imposed by COVID-19 spread, highlighting possible risk factors and resources to account for implementing such isolation measures. Specifically, besides some known factors such as physical space availability, the local contagion rate is critical in moderating the link between social isolation and mental health issues, supporting national policies implementing regional tiers of restriction severity. (shrink)

The transcription factor CREB has been implicated in signalling pathways relevant for pathogenesis and therapy of depression. CREB is upregulated and activated in the hippocampus by chronic antidepressant treatment, similarly as neurogenesis. Surprisingly, a recent study using CREB‐deficient mice also demonstrates an upregulation of neurogenesis correlating with an antidepressant behavioral phenotype.1 Interestingly, CREB‐deficient mice show a rapid behavioral response to antidepressants, while wild‐type mice do not. This minireview tries to reconcile these new findings with established concepts on CREB, neurogenesis and (...) depression. It also outlines some crucial experiments and lines of future research that could clarify some of the pending questions. BioEssays 29:957–961, 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Mediante el término «capital emocional» Eva Illouz explora la idea de que en el capitalismo contemporáneo existen grupos sociales que, en virtud de sus habilidades afectivas e interpersonales, pueden obtener ventajas económicas y sociales. La autora analiza este fenómeno en el marco de sus estudios sobre el «capitalismo emocional», que retrotrae a los orígenes del siglo pasado y que interpreta como un proceso de traslación del habitus emocional de las mujeres al ámbito del empleo asalariado. Como se pretende mostrar, (...) resulta problemático colegir de estos planteamientos que las mujeres sean las principales beneficiadas de las transformaciones laborales aparejadas al capitalismo emocional, así como asumir una concepción estática del mismo concepto «mujeres». A partir de Cristina Morini y de otras teóricas del llamado «biocapitalismo», se argumentará que la feminización del trabajo es hoy inseparable de la precariedad generalizada que invade los circuitos productivos y que afecta también a los sujetos situados como «hombres» en la división sexual del trabajo del capitalismo contemporáneo. (shrink)

El propósito es presentar un estudio transversal del concepto “capitalismo emocional” en el marco teórico de la obra de Eva Illouz. Con el fin de aclarar los orígenes de un término que en las últimas décadas ha gozado de creciente repercusión en la literatura académica, se defenderán dos tesis. La primera, que la preocupación por las transformaciones de la cultura emocional a lo largo de los siglos XX y XXI es el principal hilo conductor del pensamiento de Illouz. Y (...) la segunda, que su análisis del fenómeno del capitalismo emocional se encuentra atravesado por una serie de ambivalencias que explican que el sentido de este neologismo no se corresponda estrictamente con el de la mayor parte de trabajos que se han interesado por las relaciones entre el capitalismo contemporáneo y la vida emocional. (shrink)

Después de los excesos y de las contradicciones a las que condujeron los diferentes humanismos que caracterizaron a la Modernidad, tanto ilustrada como tardía, el pensamiento contemporáneo ha caído en un pesimismo, hasta cierto punto justificado, respecto a las potencialidades emancipadoras y humanizadoras de la racionalidad autónoma y crítica que caracterizó a esa época. El pesimismo actual reniega del ser humano como valor y como ideal, también con cierta razón, abriendo el camino a una era antihumanista y posthumana. Desde el (...) punto de vista de la tradición cristiana se pretende recuperar el humanismo; no puede decirse que sea un nuevo humanismo pero sí uno originario. Lo que entenderemos aquí por humanismo cristiano es el resultado de la confluencia entre esas dos tradiciones que configuran el rostro de occidente,. Este debe ser un humanismo autocrítico, mesurado y autolimitado, que bajo el concepto de creaturalidad –y la contingencia que de él se deriva– pretende revalorar al hombre en el marco más general de su finitud y de su necesaria conformidad con la ley natural; de esta manera se busca recuperar ambas raíces y pilares que han definido a la cultura occidental. (shrink)

La psicología hoy en día es una ciencia indiscutible, pero no siempre fue así. Filósofos y científicos del pasado, consideraron que el estudio de la subjetividad del hombre no era ciencia; en ese marco aparece la figura del filósofo Wilhelm Dilthey. Desde la generalización de las ideas de Auguste Comte, el argumento de los defensores de la verdad axiomática, determinista y positivista fue que, el estudio de la subjetividad humana es imposible y no confiable, ya que no es verificable (...) y mucho menos medible. Dilthey va más allá de Schleiermacher, y propone una Hermenéutica capaza de interpretar las conductas humanas. (shrink)

La psicología hoy en día es una ciencia indiscutible, pero no siempre fue así. Filósofos y científicos del pasado, consideraron que el estudio de la subjetividad del hombre no era ciencia; en ese marco aparece la figura del filósofo Wilhelm Dilthey. Desde la generalización de las ideas de Auguste Comte, el argumento de los defensores de la verdad axiomática, determinista y positivista fue que, el estudio de la subjetividad humana es imposible y no confiable, ya que no es verificable (...) y mucho menos medible. Dilthey va más allá de Schleiermacher, y propone una Hermenéutica capaza de interpretar las conductas humanas. (shrink)

El presente texto es un intento por presentar el pensamiento del filósofo político más significativo del primer tercio del siglo XX peruano. José de la Riva-Agüero y Osma, Marqués de Montealegre de Aulestia (1885- 1944) es famoso en la historia del pensamiento peruano por haber liderado la así llamada “Generación del 900”, pero más aún por sus discursos políticos y sus teorías sobre la historia y la literatura, orientadas al nacionalismo. Montealegre va a ser recuperado aquí desde el punto (...) de vista de sus contactos sociales españoles. Ésta es una clave para interpretar la dimensión de fondo, uno de los presupuestos hermenéuticos más básicos de su tesis principal en política: el nacionalismo tradicionalista. En lugar de la crítica de fuentes, se va a intentar dar un marco a las ideas del pensador sobre la base de sus relaciones biográficas, en particular las entabladas con la intelectualidad y la nobleza españolas, un trabajo que ha sido posible a través de su correspondencia. La clave biográfica de los contactos españoles mostrará claramente su influjo en el orden de las ideas. (shrink)

Review of Casati, Filippo. "Heidegger and the Contradiction of Being. An Analytic Interpretation of the Late Heidegger." Routledge, 2022.

Dieses Buch bietet eine neue kritische Ausgabe des Eryxias, eines oft vernachlässigten Dialogs über die Beziehung zwischen Reichtum und Tugend, der in Platons Korpus überliefert ist, aber wahrscheinlich in der antiken Akademie nach dem Tod des Gründers geschrieben wurde. Diese neue Ausgabe, die auf einer vollständigen Revision der handschriftlichen Überlieferung beruht, wird von einer italienischen Übersetzung, einer vollständigen Einleitung und einem ausführlichen Kommentar begleitet, die die philologischen, literarischen und philosophischen Aspekte des Textes darlegen.

Abitualmente associato alla scuola di Pitagora, lo studio delle proprietà simboliche dei numeri, o aritmologia, attraversa l’intera storia del pensiero greco, fino a definirsi come genere letterario a partire dalla tarda età ellenistica. Una testimonianza notevole di questa tradizione è il breve trattato Sulla Decade di Anatolio. Anatolio, filosofo e matematico ad Alessandria (seconda metà III sec. d.C.), in seguito vescovo di Laodicea, viene annoverato tra i maestri del neoplatonico Giamblico. L’opera, che descrive il valore simbolico dei primi dieci numeri, (...) documenta la fortuna del simbolismo numerico e della tradizione pitagorica in età romana imperiale. Nel volume, la traduzione affianca il testo critico, arricchito dal confronto con la più antica fonte diretta, il ms. Holkham gr. 71. Il saggio introduttivo interpreta il testo ed esamina il più ampio tema della presenza dell’aritmologia nel pensiero filosofico antico. (shrink)

A historical and philosophical reassessment of the impact of Aristotle and early-modern Aristotelianism on the development of Kant’s transcendental philosophy. Kant and Aristotle reassesses the prevailing understanding of Kant as an anti-Aristotelian philosopher. Taking epistemology, logic, and methodology to be the key disciplines through which Kant’s transcendental philosophy stood as an independent form of philosophy, Marco Sgarbi shows that Kant drew important elements of his logic and metaphysical doctrines from Aristotelian ideas that were absent in other philosophical traditions, such (...) as the distinction of matter and form of knowledge, the division of transcendental logic into analytic and dialectic, the theory of categories and schema, and the methodological issues of the architectonic. Drawing from unpublished documents including lectures, catalogues, academic programs, and the Aristotelian-Scholastic handbooks that were officially adopted at Königsberg University where Kant taught, Sgarbi further demonstrates the historical and philosophical importance of Aristotle and Aristotelianism to these disciplines from the late sixteenth century to the first half of the eighteenth century. (shrink)

The planetary boundaries concept has profoundly changed the vocabulary and representation of global environmental issues. The article starts by highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of planetary boundaries from a social science perspective. It is argued that the growth imperative of capitalist economies, as well as other particular characteristics detailed below, are the main drivers of the ecological crisis and exacerbated trends already underway. Further, the planetary boundaries framework can support interpretations that do not solely emphasize technocratic operational approaches and costs, (...) but also assume that these alone can be the solution. (shrink)

Young children interpret some acts performed by adults as normatively governed, that is, as capable of being performed either rightly or wrongly. In previous experiments, children have made this interpretation when adults introduced them to novel acts with normative language (e.g. ‘this is the way it goes’), along with pedagogical cues signaling culturally important information, and with social-pragmatic marking that this action is a token of a familiar type. In the current experiment, we exposed children to novel actions with no (...) normative language, and we systematically varied pedagogical and social-pragmatic cues in an attempt to identify which of them, if either, would lead children to normative interpretations. We found that young 3-year-old children inferred normativity without any normative language and without any pedagogical cues. The only cue they used was adult socialpragmatic marking of the action as familiar, as if it were a token of a well-known type (as opposed to performing it, as if inventing it on the spot). These results suggest that – in the absence of explicit normative language – young children interpret adult actions as normatively governed based mainly on the intentionality (perhaps signaling conventionality) with which they are performed. (shrink)

Social norms have played a key role in the evolution of human cooperation, serving to stabilize prosocial and egalitarian behavior despite the self-serving motives of individuals. Young children’s behavior mostly conforms to social norms, as they follow adult behavioral directives and instructions. But it turns out that even preschool children also actively enforce social norms on others, often using generic normative language to do so. This behavior is not easily explained by individualistic motives; it is more likely a result of (...) children’s growing identification with their cultural group, which leads to prosocial motives for preserving its ways of doing things. (shrink)

Proposition I.1 is, by far, the most popular example used to justify the thesis that many of Euclid’s geometric arguments are diagram-based. Many scholars have recently articulated this thesis in different ways and argued for it. My purpose is to reformulate it in a quite general way, by describing what I take to be the twofold role that diagrams play in Euclid’s plane geometry (EPG). Euclid’s arguments are object-dependent. They are about geometric objects. Hence, they cannot be diagram-based unless diagrams (...) are supposed to have an appropriate relation with these objects. I take this relation to be a quite peculiar sort of representation. Its peculiarity depends on the two following claims that I shall argue for: ( i ) The identity conditions of EPG objects are provided by the identity conditions of the diagrams that represent them; ( ii ) EPG objects inherit some properties and relations from these diagrams. (shrink)

Are concepts stable entities, unchanged from context to context? Or rather are they context-dependent structures, created on the fly? We argue that this does not constitute a genuine dilemma. Our main thesis is that the more a pattern of features is general and shared, the more it qualifies as a concept. Contextualists have not shown that conceptual structures lack a stable, general core, acting as an attractor on idiosyncratic information. What they have done instead is to give a contribution to (...) the comprehension of how conceptual structure organized around such a stable core can produce contextually appropriate representations on demand. (shrink)

This book explores the application of dynamical theory to cognitive science. Giunti shows how the dynamical approach can illuminate problems of cognition, information processing, consciousness, meaning, and the relation between body and mind.

Debates on the moral status of human embryos have been highly and continuously controversial. For many, these controversies have turned into a fruitless scholastical endeavor. However, recent developments and insights in cellular biology have cast further doubt on one of the core points of dissent: the argument from potentiality. In this article we want to show in a nonscholastical way why this argument cannot possibly survive. Getting once more into the intricacies of status debates is a must in our eyes. (...) Not merely intellectual coherence but the standing and self-understanding of current stem cell research might profit from finally taking leave of the argument from potentiality. (shrink)

Interview by Marco Emanuele of James Brusseau. October 27, 2021, The Science of Where. Topics include: AI ethics, Accelerationism, Decentralization.

Der profilierte Marx-Forscher Marco Iorio liefert eine kundige Einführung für jeden, der unvoreingenommen wissen will, was Karl Marx denn nun wirklich zu sagen hat. In dieser kritischen und konstruktiven Gesamtinterpretation kommen alle wichtigen Themen zur Sprache: von Geschichtsphilosophie und Gesellschaftstheorie über ökonomischer und politischer Theorie bis hin zu revolutionstheoretischen und moralphilosophischen Problemstellungen. Die berücksichtigte Sekundärliteratur deckt sämtliche aktuell relevanten Strömungen ab, darunter analytischer Marxismus, Postkolonialismus, Poststrukturalismus, Post- bzw. Neomarxismus. Damit eignet sich die Einführung auch hervorragend als Kursbuch für Lehrveranstaltungen (...) und als studienbegleitende Lektüre. (shrink)

We explored the comprehension of the informed consent in 77 cancer patients previously enrolled in randomised phase II or phase III clinical trials, between March and July 2011, at the San Raffaele Scientific Institute in Milano. We asked participants to complete an ad hoc questionnaire and analysed their answers. Sixty-two per cent of the patients understood the purpose and nature of the trial they were participating in; 44% understood the study procedures and 40% correctly listed at least one of the (...) major risks or complications related to their participation in the trial. We identified three factors associated with comprehension of the informed consent: age, education and type of tumour/investigator team. We suggest several possible improvements of how to obtain informed consent that will increase patient awareness, as well as the validity and effectiveness of the clinical trials. (shrink)

This book fills a major gap in the ever-increasing secondary literature on Hannah Arendt's political thought by providing a dedicated and coherent treatment of the many, various and interesting things which Arendt had to say about law. Often obscured by more pressing or more controversial aspects of her work, Arendt nonetheless had interesting insights into Greek and Roman concepts of law, human rights, constitutional design, legislation, sovereignty, international tribunals, judicial review and much more. This book retrieves these aspects of her (...) legal philosophy for the attention of both Arendt scholars and lawyers alike. The book brings together lawyers as well as Arendt scholars drawn from a range of disciplines (philosophy, political science, international relations), who have engaged in an internal debate the dynamism of which is captured in print. Following the editors' introduction, the book is split into four Parts: Part I explores the concept of law in Arendt's thought; Part II explores legal aspects of Arendt's constitutional thought: first locating Arendt in the wider tradition of republican constitutionalism, before turning attention to the role of courts and the role of parliament in her constitutional design. In Part III Arendt's thought on international law is explored from a variety of perspectives, covering international institutions and international criminal law, as well as the theoretical foundations of international law. Part IV debates the foundations, content and meaning of Arendt's famous and influential claim that the 'right to have rights' is the one true human right. (shrink)

One of the legacies of modern philosophy is to have separated or bifurcated the human from nature. Marco Altamirano offers a critique of the modern concept of nature in order to chart a new trajectory for the philosophy of nature. By examining the history of the concept of nature, Altamirano shows how a spatial and epistemological concept of nature emerged in Descartes, where a subject confronts an object in space and subsequently wonders about her mode of access to that (...) object. He then argues that a time-based concept of nature is necessary in order to reinstall the subject within its eventual ecology. Deploying conceptual resources from Bergson, Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault, and Leroi- Gourhan (among others), Altamirano shows how the concept of technology harbors an escape route from the spatial and epistemological picture of nature. Ultimately, this book draws the profile of a concept of nature based on time and technology that bypasses the nature-artifice distinction that has mired the philosophy of nature since modern philosophy. (shrink)

By inserting the dialogue between Einstein, Schlick and Reichenbach into a wider network of debates about the epistemology of geometry, this paper shows that not only did Einstein and Logical Empiricists come to disagree about the role, principled or provisional, played by rods and clocks in General Relativity, but also that in their lifelong interchange, they never clearly identified the problem they were discussing. Einstein’s reflections on geometry can be understood only in the context of his ”measuring rod objection” against (...) Weyl. On the contrary, Logical Empiricists, though carefully analyzing the Einstein–Weyl debate, tried to interpret Einstein’s epistemology of geometry as a continuation of the Helmholtz–Poincaré debate by other means. The origin of the misunderstanding, it is argued, should be found in the failed appreciation of the difference between a “Helmholtzian” and a “Riemannian” tradition. The epistemological problems raised by General Relativity are extraneous to the first tradition and can only be understood in the context of the latter, the philosophical significance of which, however, still needs to be fully explored. (shrink)

Starting with Aristotle and moving on to Darwin, Marco Solinas outlines the basic steps from the birth, establishment and later rebirth of the traditional view of living beings, and its overturning by evolutionary revolution. The classic framework devised by Aristotle was still dominant in the 17th Century world of Galileo, Harvey and Ray, and remained hegemonic until the time of Lamarck and Cuvier in the 19th Century. Darwin's breakthrough thus takes on the dimensions of an abandonment of the traditional (...) finalistic theory. It was a transition exemplified in the morphological analysis of useless parts, such as the sightless eyes of moles, already discussed by Aristotle, which Darwin used as a crowbar to unhinge the systematic recourse to final causes. With many excerpts, a chronological sequence and an analytical approach, this book follows the course of the two conceptions that have shaped the destiny of living beings in western culture. (shrink)

The notion of schema has been given a major role by Recanati within his conception of primary pragmatic processes, conceived as a type of associative process. I intend to show that Recanati’s considerations on schemata may challenge the relevance theorist’s argument against associative explanations in pragmatics, and support an argument in favor of associative (versus inferential) explanations. More generally, associative relations can be shown to be schematic, that is, they have enough structure to license inferential effects without any appeal to (...) genuine inferential processes. Associative processes are thus able to explain a number of pragmatic and linguistic phenomena which have instead been thought to require specialized inferential processes. (shrink)

Der vorliegende Band befasst sich zentral mit dem Problem der Anwendung der Transzendentalphilosophie auf die praktische Philosophie. Zu Ehren von Marco Ivaldo haben sich einige der führenden Fichte-Interpreten zusammengetan, um das Thema diachronisch zu behandeln. Angefangen bei Kant bis hin zur zeitgenössischen Philosophie werden einige der philosophischen Hauptpositionen (Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Husserl, Deleuze und viele weitere) auf ihre Verträglichkeit mit dem transzendentalphilosophischen Ansatz in praktischer Hinsicht geprüft. ********************** The present volume deals with the problem of the application of transcendental (...) philosophy to practical philosophy. In honour of Marco Ivaldo, some of the leading experts on Fichte have teamed up to treat the subject diachronically. From Kant to contemporary philosophy, some of the main philosophical positions (Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Husserl, Deleuze, and many others) are examined in view of their compatibility with the transcendental-philosophical approach in a practical way. (shrink)

We prove that the category of Nachbin’s compact ordered spaces and order-preserving continuous maps between them is dually equivalent to a variety of algebras, with operations of at most countable arity. Furthermore, we observe that the countable bound on the arity is the best possible: the category of compact ordered spaces is not dually equivalent to any variety of finitary algebras. Indeed, the following stronger results hold: the category of compact ordered spaces is not dually equivalent to any finitely accessible (...) category, any first-order definable class of structures, and any class of finitary algebras closed under products and subalgebras. An explicit equational axiomatisation of the dual of the category of compact ordered spaces is obtained; in fact, we provide a finite one, meaning that our description uses only finitely many function symbols and finitely many equational axioms. In preparation for the latter result, we establish a generalisation of a celebrated theorem by Mundici: our result—whose proof is independent of Mundici’s theorem—asserts that the category of unital commutative distributive lattice-ordered monoids is equivalent to the category of what we call MV-monoidal algebras.Abstract taken directly from the thesis.E-mail: marco[email protected]: https://air.unimi.it/retrieve/handle/2434/812809/1698986/phd_unimi_R11882.pdf. (shrink)

This article gives a practice-based overview of the implementation aspects of Corporate Responsibility. After discussing the success factors for implementing Corporate Responsibility, the article describes a model for implementing Corporate Responsibility. Special attention is given to the success factors in the subsequent phases of implementation (sensitivity to the organizational environment, awareness of core values and clear leadership), to ensure that the most optimal results attainable for the organization can be reached. The implementation-model is clarified by looking at experiences in implementing (...) Corporate Responsibility at Chiquita. (shrink)

The nature of time is rooted in our body. Constellations of impulses arising from the flesh constantly create our interoceptive perception and, in turn, the unfolding of these perceptions defines human awareness of time. This study explored the connection between time perception and interoception and proposes the Interoceptive Buffer saturation (IBs) index. IBs evaluates subjects’ ability to process salient stimuli from the body by measuring subjective distortions of interoceptive time perception, i.e., the estimated duration of tactile interoceptive stimulations. Thirty female (...) healthy subjects were recruited through consecutive sampling and assessed for common variables related to interoceptive alterations: depressive symptoms (Beck Depression Inventory, BDI-II), eating disorders (EDI-3) risk, and anxiety levels (State Trait Anxiety Inventory, STAI). Interoceptive cardiac accuracy (IAc) was assessed as well. Subjects performed verbal time estimation of interoceptive stimuli (IBs) delivered using a specifically designed interoceptive tactile stimulator, as well as verbal time estimation of visual and auditory stimuli. Results showed that IBs index positively correlated with IAc, and negatively with EDI-3 Drive for Thinness (DT) risk subscale. Moreover, IBs index was positively predicted by IAc, and negatively predicted by DT and somatic factors of depression. Our results suggest that underestimations in interoceptive time perception are connected to different psychological conditions characterized by a diminished processing of high salience stimuli from the body. Conversely, overestimations of the duration of interoceptive stimuli appear to be function of subjects’ ability to correctly perceive their own bodily information. Evidence supported IBs index, fostering the concept of interoceptive treatments for clinical purposes. (shrink)

This text is an authorial presentation of Marco Zingano’s Aristotle and the Rehabilitation of Homonymy: A Metaphysical Journey Through Words and Things (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2025), prepared at the request of Aristotelica. It aims to introduce the scope, structure, and main lines of argument of the book, in order to situate it within current research on Aristotle’s metaphysics and related areas. The book offers a systematic investigation of Aristotle’s notion of homonymy, arguing that it plays a central and (...) constructive role in his metaphysics, ethics, and natural philosophy. For Aristotle, homonymy does not merely signal conceptual confusion or linguistic ambiguity; quite the opposite, Aristotle develops a sophisticated account of homonymous notions to address a fundamental philosophical difficulty: the absence of generic unity in the most basic domains of scientific inquiry. The study argues that Aristotle’s response to this problem consists in a progressive ‘rehabilitation’ of homonymy, under the pattern of what the book calls attenuated homonymy: a form of homonymy mitigated by definitional overlap, which allows for conceptual unity without recourse to the genus-species model. Contrary to a widespread position on this issue, which ultimately rests on Alexander’s interpretation of focal meaning as the only intermediary between pure homonymy and total synonymy, the book’s central claim is that Aristotle employs a plurality of non-generic unifying devices, each suited to a different philosophical context. These include hierarchical forms of unity (such as focal meaning, serial order, and subordination), but also non-hierarchical forms (analogy and resemblance). Overall, the book contends that attenuated homonymy is not only compatible with scientific discourse but is, in certain domains, indispensable to it, at least as Aristotle conceives of it. (shrink)

Proprioception has a crucial role in promoting or hindering motor learning. In particular, an intact position sense strongly correlates with the chances of recovery after stroke. A great majority of neurological patients present both motor dysfunctions and impairments in kinesthesia, but traditional robot and virtual reality training techniques focus either in recovering motor functions or in assessing proprioceptive deficits. An open challenge is to implement effective and reliable tests and training protocols for proprioception that go beyond the mere position sense (...) evaluation and exploit the intrinsic bidirectionality of the kinesthetic sense, which refers to both sense of position and sense of movement. Modulated haptic interaction has a leading role in promoting sensorimotor integration and it is a natural way to enhance volitional effort. Therefore, we designed a preliminary clinical study to test a new proprioception-based motor training technique for augmenting kinesthetic awareness via haptic feedback. The feedback was provided by a robotic manipulandum and the test involved 7 chronic hemiparetic subjects over three weeks. The protocol included evaluation sessions, that consisted of a psychometric estimate of the subject’s kinesthetic sensation, and training sessions, in which the subject executed planar reaching movements in the absence of vision and under a minimally assistive haptic guidance made by sequences of graded force pulses. The bidirectional haptic interaction between the subject and the robot was optimally adapted to each participant in order to achieve a uniform task difficulty over the workspace. All the subjects consistently improved in the perceptual scores as a consequence of training. Moreover, they could minimize the level of haptic guidance in time. Results suggest that the proposed method is effective in enhancing kinesthetic acuity, but the level of impairment may affect the ability of subjects to retain their improvement in time. (shrink)

The standard view of classical cognitive science stated that cognition consists in the manipulation of language-like structures according to formal rules. Since cognition is ‘linguistic’ in itself, according to this view language is just a complex communication system and does not influence cognitive processes in any substantial way. This view has been criticized from several perspectives and a new framework (Embodied Cognition) has emerged that considers cognitive processes as non-symbolic and heavily dependent on the dynamical interactions between the cognitive system (...) and its environment. But notwithstanding the successes of the embodied cognitive science in explaining low-level cognitive behaviors, it is still not clear whether and how it can scale up for explaining high-level cognition. In this paper we argue that this can be done by considering the role of language as a cognitive tool: i.e. how language transforms basic cognitive functions in the high-level functions that are characteristic of human cognition. In order to do that, we review some computational models that substantiate this view with respect to categorization and memory. Since these models are based on a very rudimentary form of non-syntactic ‘language’ we argue that the use of language as a cognitive tool might have been an early discovery in hominid evolution, and might have played a substantial role in the evolution of language itself. (shrink)

Para examinar el desarrollo sintáctico durante la adolescencia, el presente trabajo se propuso estudiar las frases nominales en textos explicativos escritos por 80 estudiantes de séptimo básico y tercero medio pertenecientes a colegios de dos grupos socioeconómicos, NS alto y medio-bajo. Se analizó la frecuencia, densidad, diversidad léxica, función sintáctica y complejidad de las frases nominales y se aplicaron pruebas de varianza para determinar el efecto de las variables independientes (edad/nivel escolar y NS). Los resultados muestran que la edad / (...) nivel escolar es el factor con mayor incidencia en los desempeños sintácticos observados, con un efecto particularmente significativo en la densidad sintáctica de las frases y su diversidad léxica. Se concluye que después de los 12 años los usos sintácticos experimentan importantes cambios y ajustes necesarios para alcanzar un dominio más especializado del lenguaje y de los géneros discursivos. (shrink)

This paper deals with the system of modal logicGL, in particular with a formulation of it in terms of sequents. We prove some proof theoretical properties ofGL that allow to get the cut-elimination theorem according to Gentzen's procedure, that is, by double induction on grade and rank.

Dr. Marco Forgione (University of Milan), COSMOS team member, interviewed Prof. Peter Galison (Harvard University) in occasion of the event “Photographs from Outer Space”.