We introduce quantificational modal operators as dynamic modalities with (extensions of) Henkin quantifiers as indices. The adoption of matrices of indices (with action identifiers, variables and/or quantified variables as entries) gives an expressive formalism which is here motivated with examples from the area of multi-agent systems. We study the formal properties of the resulting logic which, formally speaking, does not satisfy the normality condition. However, the logic admits a semantics in terms of (an extension of) Kripke structures. As a consequence, (...) standard techniques for normal modal logic become available. We apply these to prove completeness and decidability, and to extend some standard frame results to this logic. (shrink)

Rosso: Can you say something more about the differences between your work and Derrida’s?De Man: I’m not really the right person to ask where the difference is, because, as I feel in many respects close to Derrida, I don’t determine whether my work resembles or is different from of Derrida. My initial engagement with Derrida—which I think is typical and important for all that relationship which followed closely upon my first encounter with him in Baltimore at the colloquium on (...) “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man”—had not to do with Derrida nor with me, but with Rousseau. It happened that we were both working on Rousseau and basically on the same text, by sheer coincidence. It was in relation to Rousseau that I was anxious to define, to try to work out some … not discrepancies … but some change of emphasis between what Derrida does and what I’m doing. And there may be something in that difference between us that remained there, to the extent that in a very genuine sense—not as denegation or as false modesty —my starting point, as I think I already told you, is not philosophical but basically philological and for that reason didactical, text-oriented. Therefore I have a tendency to put upon texts an inherent authority, which is stronger, I think, than Derrida is willing to put on them. I assume, as a working hypothesis , that the text knows in an absolute way what it’s doing. I know this is not the case, but it is a necessary working hypothesis that Rousseau knows at any time what he is doing and as such there is no need to deconstruct Rousseau. In a complicated way, I would hold to that statement that “the text deconstructs itself, is self-deconstructive” rather than being deconstructed by a philosophical intervention from the outside of the text. The difference is that Derrida’s text is so brilliant, so incisive, so strong that whatever happens in Derrida, it happens between him and his own text. He doesn’t need Rousseau, he doesn’t need anybody else; I do need them very badly because I never had an idea of my own, it was always through a text, through the critical examination of a text … I am a philologist and not a philosopher: I guess there is a difference there … I think that, on the other hand, it is of some interest to see how the two different approaches can occasionally coincide, at the point that Gasché in the two articles he as written on this topic says that Derrida and myself are the closest when I do not use his terminology, and the most remote when I use terms such as deconstruction: I agree with that entirely. But, again, I am not the one to decide on this particular matter and I don’t claim to be on that level … Stephano Rosso teaches English literature at the University of Verona and is writing a dissertation in comparative literature at SUNY—Binghamton. Among other works, he has coedited, with Naurizio Ferraris, Decostruzione tra filosofia e letteratura and Estetica e decostruzione. He is presently translating Paul de Man’s Resistance to Theory into Italian. (shrink)

Instead of following the Magna Charta Universitatum, the declaration of the principles of knowledge signed in 1988 in Bologna, the academic approach pursued in Europe and the other continents over the past 30 years has strictly employed a utilitarian model of higher education. This jeopardizes academic freedom, shared governance and tenure, the three pillars of the long-established model of universities. Scientific conformism and fragmentation, educational bias and authoritarianism are the major drawbacks, together with a poor readiness to meet the emerging (...) challenges in the labor market and technology. In this book, Renzo Rosso presents a new model for countering these developments, e.g. by establishing novel democratic rules for university governance. The Slow University paradigm positions culture and education as essential tools for the long-term survival of humankind. (shrink)

This study investigated the impact of maternal reflective functioning (RF) and attachment security on children’s mentalization. The Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) was administered to mothers in a sample of 41 mother–preadolescent dyads. AAI transcripts were rated in terms of the Berkeley AAI System ( Main and Goldwyn, 1998 ) and the Reflective Functioning Scale (RFS; Fonagy et al., 1998 ). Preadolescent mentalization was assessed using a semi-structured interview adapted from O’Connor and Hirsch (1999) and also by analyzing mental-state talk produced (...) during an autobiographical interview. Relationships between maternal RF and children’s mentalization were analyzed, with consideration given to the different RFS markers and references to positive, negative, and mixed-ambivalent mental states. Children’s mentalization was positively correlated with the mother’s RF, particularly the mother’s ability to mentalize negative or mixed-ambivalent mental states. No significant differences in mentalization were observed between children of secure and insecure mothers. (shrink)

Previous studies have reported a significant positive association between ability emotional intelligence and attachment security. However, these studies may, to some extent, be misleading because they relied on self-report measures of attachment security. Furthermore, to our knowledge, no study has yet investigated the relationship between ability EI and mentalization, operazionalized as reflective functioning, although EI and RF were assumed to be “conceptual cousins.” In an attempt to overcome some of the limitations of the previous research, the current study investigated the (...) relationships between ability EI, attachment security, and mentalization measured via the Adult Attachment Interview. Ninety-three volunteer participants from an Italian community population, aged from 27 to 55 years, took part in the study. Significant positive correlations were found between ability EI, attachment security, and RF. The results shed some light on the relationship between different attachment strategies and ability EI. Hyperactivating attachment strategies correlated negatively with ability EI, while the correlation between ability EI and attachment deactivating strategies depend on which defensive strategy is used: avoiding the painful emotional contact with the memory of unpleasant childhood attachment experiences positively correlated with experiential EI, whilst the resort to derogation of the attachment needs correlated with impairment in EI. Findings from the current study suggest that future studies in developmental psychology are needed to investigate the development of the ability EI in relation to the quality of the attachment models more in-depth. (shrink)

En este ensayo intentaremos realizar una pequeña aproximación al pensamiento de Gilbert Simondon, filósofo francés cuya obra podría resumirse en sus dos tesis doctorales defendidas en 1958, una de las cuales no fue publicada de forma completa sino póstumamente. No obstante, lo dicho, tras el creciente interés en su pensamiento comenzaron a publicarse ya nacido este milenio, en particular en Argentina, sus cursos sobre percepción, imaginación, invención, información, comunicación y tecnología. A pesar de su escueta obra, Simondon es un filósofo (...) de sistema, que a partir de su teoría de la individuación intentó fundar un monismo ontogenético en el cual puedan entrar en comunicación todas las disciplinas humanas; y para ello buscó explotar todos los recursos conceptuales que brindaron las revoluciones científicas de su época. En este ensayo, sin embargo, abordaremos tan sólo el tipo de realidad o estatus ontológico que Simondon atribuía a los objetos técnicos. Para ello desarrollaremos 4 apartados y un bis. En el primero, haremos un esbozo de lo que es el método filosófico propuesto por Simondon, el cual describimos como un paradigmatismo analógico. En el segundo, desarrollaremos algunas críticas a cierto paradigmatismo particular que, según Simondon, subyace en gran parte del pensamiento occidental y que nos impide, entre otras cosas, comprender la realidad propia de los OT, a saber: el hilemorfismo. En tercer lugar, analizaremos en qué medida podemos salvar la realidad de los OT de ser reducida a mero constructo social. En cuarto lugar; analizaremos algunas analogías y disparidades entre los OT y los seres vivientes. Por último, a modo de apéndice, expondremos sucintamente un artículo de Esperanza García y Villegas Jaraleño, presentado en el último volumen de Scientia in verba, en el cual se plantea la pregunta sobre el estatus ontológico de los artefactos biotecnológicos desde una perspectiva bungeana; así como pequeñas críticas y aportes que pudiésemos hacerle desde el pensamiento simondoniano. (shrink)

The present study investigated whether, and to what extent, reflective functioning (RF) during preadolescence is associated with maternal attachment security and reflective functioning, and with the child’s attachment security. Thirty-nine mother-preadolescent child dyads from a non clinical population participated in the study. Maternal and child RF were assessed by applying the Reflective Functioning Scale (RFS) to the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) and to the Child Attachment Interview (CAI) transcripts. Children of mothers who showed a secure attachment model regarding the relationship (...) with their parents during childhood reported higher levels of RF than the children of mothers who were classified as insecure on the AAI. Child RF was positively associated with maternal “Coherence of the Mind” on the AAI and negatively associated with maternal derogation of attachment.A strong, significant association was also found between child attachment security and child reflective functioning. Children who were rated as being more emotionally open, more able to balance positive and negative descriptions of their parents, more prone to support their assertions through examples, and more able to positively resolve conflicts with their parents showed higher reflective functioning. On the contrary, children who resorted to a higher extent to idealization and dismissal towards their parents showed a lesser degree of reflective functioning. Notably, a very strong association was found between the score on the “Overall coherence” subscale and the child’s ability to mentalise mixed-ambivalent mental states in the context of their family relationships.As expected, child and maternal reflective functioning resulted significantly positively correlated with each other. In particular, only maternal reflective functioning (and not maternal attachment security) predicted child reflective functioning, and only maternal ability to mentalise mixed-ambivalent mental states predicted the corresponding ability in the children. (shrink)

The corporate model of universities relies on the evaluation of both individuals and institutions under a prize and punishment approach. The doctrine rigidly hinged on metrics is inherently conservative. It substitutes appearance for substance and drops the role of students as a passive subject, a consumer to be satisfied. The atrophy of decision-making capacity and the focus of performance raise conformism and the shattering of knowledge under a brutal disciplinary fragmentation. The market-oriented attitude produces human resources with a poor capability (...) of approaching forthcoming economic and social needs, including infantilized students lacking vision. The “modern” universities also involve an unprecedented rise of authoritarianism. The value of loyalty overwhelms freedom of thought and speech; everyone must respond to others according to a close hierarchy; tenure tracks are vanishing; the third mission is subject to brand targets. The growing problem of student debt triggers reactions against the student loan mess. “Modern” universities are an essential weapon to impose a dystopia on human society because they influence many aspects of citizens’ lives by inspiring short-term policies and societal trends; let alone universities train the ruling classes of the future, thus affecting society over the long term. (shrink)

A number of tasks have been developed to measure the affective theory of mind (ToM), nevertheless, recent studies found that different affective ToM tasks do not correlate with each other, suggesting that further studies on affective ToM and its measurement are needed. More in-depth knowledge of the tools that are available to assess affective ToM is needed to decide which should be used in research and in clinical practice, and how to interpret results. The current study focuses on the Reading (...) the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET) primarily to investigate in a sample of 112 children the currently unexplored relationships in middle childhood between performance on the RMET and fluid intelligence. Relationships with receptive vocabulary, age, and sex were also investigated. Moreover, because studying the family's influence on children mentalization could have important implications in developing prevention and treatment interventions, this study offers a novel contribution to the field by exploring the family's influence on children's RMET performance. Although significant positive correlations were found among RMET-C performance, fluid intelligence, and receptive language, regression analysis revealed that fluid intelligence was the only predictor. No family influence was found on children's RMET performance. On the whole, results from the current study offer some support to the hypothesis that RMET-C is not a “pure” ToM task, specifically the effect of fluid intelligence on RMET performance should be taken into account when RMET is used both in research and in the clinical setting. (shrink)

Although only a new generation of scholars can get the current system to decline and fade, there are at least three factors showing that the twilight is not that far away: jobs, technology, and stupidity. The exclusive job-oriented approach of “modern” universities is the basis of the pact between customers and suppliers, but this Faustian bargain will no longer survive if new jobs cannot be predicted and the training requirements anticipated; thus, the transmission of notions, methods, and protocols becomes irrelevant. (...) Information and communications technology (ICT) is the second lethal weapon against the “modern” university model because it will jeopardize the system. The third issue deals with human nature: the stupidity of all bureaucratic universities. The corporate attitude has infiltrated every choice and discussion in the everyday life of universities. The management practices produce multifaceted levels of bureaucracy that simply tend to be worse than the sum of its parts. The cybernation of interpersonal relationships, the dematerialization translating every rule into an ITC procedure, and the primacy of representation over any other value can escape from the control of the supreme controllers, as in a science fiction novel where an automaton becomes an individual and the individual is no longer distinguishable from an avatar. (shrink)

The ninth centennial of the oldest university in the Western world, the Alma Mater Studiorum or the Universitas Bononiensis, fell 30 years ago. It was 1988, and on that occasion, the rectors of almost 500 European universities met in Bologna to sign the Magna Charta Universitatum, the solemn summa of the European principles of knowledge. From then on, these principles were to have addressed educational policies. After six decades, have the universities, European or otherwise, moved in the wake of these (...) principles? (shrink)

Even some small things can help building a new educational model, capable of setting aside the current “modern” but already old corporate university. If academics would just take the bull by the horns, there would be no need to start with a big uprising or an epochal reform. So far, the reforms, numerous and frequent, that stroked students and scholars have been expensive and disturbing. At the very least, these reforms have diverted their guinea pigs—both students and scholars—from quality work (...) and daily commitment, making everyday life more and more unhappy, also resulting in initiatives devoid of any cultural path or vision of the future. (shrink)

Recovering Humboldt’s ideals into contemporary education policies is not enough. The new academic model must focus on both education of citizens and progress of knowledge in order to provide citizens capable of joining the community, instead of producing human resources at risk of rapid obsolescence and acute marginalization. Education should replace preparation for the labor market by restoring the intimate relationship between the student and the professor. To this effect flipped classroom and mastery, proper approaches to education in the ICT (...) era, and continuing education should play a major role. The second challenge of the new model deals with the capability of penetrating the complexity of the world, which the traditional disciplinary approach can no longer even graze. From the nineteenth and throughout the twentieth century, the search for knowledge has been confined within narrow areas, a garden of forking paths that never merge. Transdisciplinarity is the main road to overcome the barrier that the disciplinary approach erects in every field, under the commitment of knowledge progress. The third challenge deals with establishing new democratic rules for university governance. Demarchy and mixed systems of voting and sortation are capable of establishing novel democratic rules. (shrink)

The decline of the traditional university model, labeled as old and outdated, is the result of prevailing utilitarianism, focused on the production and consumption of material goods, under a novel ideological impetus since the beginning of the millennium. Based on the axiom that education and training are synonyms, “modern” universities have progressively turned into businesses, further assuming that this transformation was essential to meet the needs of the community, to use public and private resources in the best way, and to (...) meet current employment requirements from agriculture, industry, and tertiary. The primacy of management control plays the major role in ruling the change, as it occurred in parallel with what happens in other professions that are deeply modifying the organizations they work for, such as health services. Managers control the system under the commitment of centralizing decisions without any effective opposition by professors and students due to job insecurity, precarious jobs spread out, and the need for increasing the workload, part of a misunderstood race for productivity. (shrink)

This research article aims to deliver an analytical representation of the intellectual environment of the culture journal Die Kreatur (1926–1930), a religious-dialogical quarterly edited by Martin Buber, Joseph Wittig, and Viktor von Weizsäcker and enlivened by some of the most prominent figures of German-Jewish interwar culture (among others W. Benjamin, H. S. Bergman, E. Rosenstock-Huessy, F. Rosenzweig, E. Simon, and L. Strauss). Building on a recognition of the problematic relationship between the dialogical model claimed in the programmatic foreword of the (...) journal and the group narratives enacted by its key contributors, the study attempts to outline the formation process of the intellectual plexus of the journal and to provide a differentiated analysis of its singular constituents via a sociologically informed framework. The representation of the intellectual network of Die Kreatur in accordance with the model of a “circle of circles” provides insight into the elusive dialectic of interaction and divergence that determines the relations between the main actors of the journal and thus contributes to unfold the interplay of biographical intersections and conceptual synergies, as well as incongruities, frictions, and contradictory instances that determines its editorial and philosophical profile. (shrink)

This paper, which is mainly based on unpublished material, focuses on the scientific influence that Felice Casorati exerted on Salvatore Pincherle. This influence can be traced, in particular, in Casorati’s work on the finite-difference calculus as conceived and published between 1879 and 1880 when Pincherle was living in Pavia. Casorati’s work has an interesting back story related to his entry to the 1880 Grand Prix of the French Académie des Sciences that helps us in understanding Casorati’s personality. Moreover, the correspondence (...) that Casorati exchanged with other mathematicians on his work reveals that some of the results contained in Casorati :10–45, 1880b) had been obtained—though in a narrower context—in an early paper by Christoffel. Finally, the letters between Casorati and Pincherle contain a short unpublished note by Pincherle on a paper by Jules Tannery :113–182, 1875). This note offers the first evidence of the influence of Casorati :10–45, 1880b) on Pincherle’s work on the finite-difference calculus. (shrink)

In this paper we propose the exam of one of the key points in the work of Cornelius Castoriadis: autonomy, as individual and collective project. Our purpose is to review the development in his view of the subject that motorizes social transformation. For this, we start from Castoriadis' critics to the role that Marxist theory assigns to the proletariat as a revolutionary class to reach an idea of human subjectivity with reflection and deliberation capacities. We will highlight the contributions of (...) the Freudian psychoanalytic perspective in this conception, as well as the distances with the Marxist perspectives than think the transformation of the individual as an awareness process. (shrink)

The concept, the declinations and the implications of the possible ideas of the future, in the field of architecture both in its practical and speculative parts, have long been a fruitful subject of debate and interpretation for the architect, whether designer or intellectual. These issues have often represented an important portion for the theoretical construction of the discipline. In addition to being directly involved by means of the object shaped by the project (through its possible prefigurations) and observed throughout the (...) theoretical lens of the writings, the interpretation and instrumental use of the idea of the future are unavoidable aspects in the practice of architecture, be it written or built. How consciously are these aspects, practiced and investigated by the individuality and sensitivity of the architect?Starting from the categories (four possible ‘positions’ of the architectural project with respect to the future) proposed in the book Teoria del progetto architettonico by Armando and Durbiano, the contribution attempts a survey-through words rather than drawn projects- of four extracts expressing the partial points of view of four architects, and their mutual correspondences and differences. The aspects and the topics touched by the extracts have guided their very identification, thereby providing a direct testimony, at the same time choral and autonomous. What emerges is a panorama that although partial, provides a complex horizon capable of involving both individual positions as well as social tendencies. (shrink)

We analyze central mythical material in the ideology of female mapuche textile masters and the initiation ritual that the aspirants to the title of textile master undertake. These myths refer to foundational mythical narratives that explain the key categories upon which the ideology of the female textile masters is built. The myth establishes the contextual and practical frame of the performative aspects of the ritual and the essential categorical system that every novice weaver must dominate. Likewise, textile initiation practices are (...) coated by a thick aesthetics based in the spiders and women’s web; textures, colors, icons and folds that visually complement the meaning of the myths and rites. (shrink)