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1
Gallery, Ikon, ed. Michel Franc̦ois: Pieces of evidence. Birmingham, UK: Ikon Gallery, 2014.
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2
Visson, Arielle Elan. Droit à la production de pièces et discovery: Droit fédéral, droits cantonaux de Vaud, Genève, Zurich et droit anglais. Zürich: Schulthess Polygraphischer Verlag, 1997.
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3
Chiarelli, Cosimo, and Walter Pasini, eds. Paolo Mantegazza e l'Evoluzionismo in Italia. Florence: Firenze University Press, 2010. http://dx.doi.org/10.36253/978-88-6453-186-1.
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An eclectic figure – a scientist, novelist, anthropologist, politician and man of his time – Paolo Mantegazza (1831-1910) played a leading role in Italian society and the cultural scene of the late nineteenth century, even if historic events then partially eclipsed his memory. The retrieval and valorisation of the legacy of Mantegazza were the focus of the meetings that were held in the main sites connected with his life (Monza, Florence, Lerici) at which academics in different disciplines exchanged notes on various aspects, some even little known, of his multifaceted activity. This book brings together a selection of the most significant works presented on these occasions. They represent pieces in a complex puzzle which brings fully to light the great variety of interests and curiosities of the man, and the profound methodological rigour that guided his entire scientific production and is today the most evident sign of his contemporary relevance.
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Figdor, Carrie. Pieces of Mind. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198809524.001.0001.
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Many people accept that chimpanzees, dolphins, and some other animals can think and feel. But these cases are just the tip of a growing iceberg. If biologists are right, fruit flies and plants make decisions, worms and honeybees can be trained, bacteria communicate linguistically, and neurons have preferences. Just how far does cognition go? This book is the first to critically consider this question from the perspective of the entire range of new ascriptions of psychological capacities throughout biology. It is also the first to consider the role of mathematical models and other quantitative forms of evidence in prompting and supporting the new ascriptions. It defends a default literal interpretation of psychological terms across biological domains. It also considers the implications of the literal view for efforts to explain the mind’s place in nature and for traditional ways of distinguishing the superior moral status of humans relative to other living beings.
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Spencer, Maureen, and John Spencer. 1. Exam skills for success in evidence. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/he/9780198715795.003.0001.
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The Concentrate Questions and Answers series offers the best preparation for tackling exam questions. Each book includes typical questions, bullet-pointed answer plans and suggested answers, author commentary and illustrative diagrams and flow charts. This book is a supplementary aid to coursework preparation and particularly to revision for examinations and coursework. It does not present model answers to be slavishly imitated but, rather, examples to help the student understand the topic and see how it might be approached. The examinee’s objective is to accumulate in the time allowed as many marks as possible, a goal that needs to be broken down into three stages: namely, planning, execution and review. These days law examinations can take different forms, including seen questions, open book exams and so on. To take account of this, the book includes essay answers that are closer to more fully researched pieces than to the answers in a traditional unseen examination.
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Jonathan, Peddie. Part VI Providing and Obtaining Assistance, B Obtaining Assistance, 21 Judicial Cooperation Including Obtaining Evidence. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/law/9780198716587.003.0021.
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This chapter argues that there is potential for conflict between common and civil law jurisdictions where the approach to preparation for trial, and through that the taking of evidence, differ to a large degree. In common law jurisdictions, where it is usual for private parties to be proactively involved in the evidence gathering process, it will not seem irregular for evidence to be taken by an agent of a foreign court for the purpose of proceedings on foot in that court. Such an approach may, however, offend the rules of civil law jurisdictions, where the obtaining of evidence, at least in criminal matters, is primarily the role of the judiciary. To address this potential for conflict, a number of pieces of legislation and bilateral and multilateral civil procedure conventions have evolved over time to facilitate official intervention in order to obtain cross-jurisdictional assistance in the gathering of evidence for the purpose of both civil and criminal proceedings. The various ways in which assistance may be sought by or obtained from the English courts are explored in this chapter.
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Bacon, Andrew. Vagueness and Evidence. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198712060.003.0006.
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If there are vague propositions it is natural to wonder what role they play in thought. A natural picture, given a linguistic theory of vagueness, is that one only learns a vague proposition via a public language sentence that expresses it (e.g. by hearing someone reliable asserting the sentence). This chapter argues that there are many ways to obtain vague evidence that do not involve language. It focuses on ‘inexact’ evidence acquired through imperfect perceptual faculties, and argues that the effect of inexact evidence on our credences is similar to the effect of conditioning on a vague proposition, and cannot easily be simulated by conditioning on any precise proposition. The chapter introduces the notion of an evidential role—a profile of the effects a certain piece of inexact evidence can have on your credences—and outlines the central principle of vague propositions: the Principle of Plenitude. This principle states that there is a vague proposition occupying every evidential role.
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Bruun, Christer. Roman Government and Administration. Edited by Christer Bruun and Jonathan Edmondson. Oxford University Press, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195336467.013.014.
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This chapter outlines how critical inscriptions are for our understanding of the functioning of the administrative structures of Roman government. The author discusses the best methodology for using epigraphic texts to reconstruct Roman administration, showing how even short texts can provide critical pieces of evidence, especially during the imperial period. Knowing how to use arguments from silence is shown to be a crucial element in the modern study of Roman government .
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Littlejohn, Clayton. Reasons and Theoretical Rationality. Edited by Daniel Star. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199657889.013.24.
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This chapter explores the relationship between reasons and epistemic rationality. In recent debates about rationality and evidence, internalist evidentialism is quite popular. Using this theory as our stalking horse, we examine debates about the ontology of evidence and reasons, a puzzle about rationality and evidential support relations, work on the relationship between reasons and rationality, and some underexplored issues concerning the relationship between knowledge, evidence, and normative reasons. We shall see that there are good grounds for thinking that the normative reasons that matter in epistemology are not always pieces of evidence, that there is no simple story about the relationship between believing rationally and responding correctly to the evidence or the reasons, that there are problems with formal accounts of evidential support, and that attractive views about the ontology of reasons suggest that it can be rational to believe without having a belief based on reasons.
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Franklin, James. Pre-history of Probability. Edited by Alan Hájek and Christopher Hitchcock. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199607617.013.3.
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The history of the evaluation of uncertain evidence before the quantification of probability in 1654 is a mass of examples relevant to current debates. They deal with matters that in general are as unquantified now as ever – the degree to which evidence supports theory, the strength and justification of inductive inferences, the weight of testimony, the combination of pieces of uncertain evidence, the price of risk, the philosophical nature of chance, and the problem of acting in case of doubt. Concepts similar to modern “proof beyond reasonable doubt” were developed especially in the legal theory of evidence. Moral theology discussed “probabilism”, the doctrine that one could follow a probable opinion in ethics even if the opposite was more probable. Philosophers understood the difficult problem of induction. Legal discussion of “aleatory contracts” such as insurance and games of chance developed the framework in which the quantification of probability eventually took place.
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Arbache, Jorge, and Sarquis J. B. Sarquis. Growth Volatility and Economic Growth in Brazil. Edited by Edmund Amann, Carlos R. Azzoni, and Werner Baer. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190499983.013.17.
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One of the most puzzling pieces of evidence surrounding Brazil’s economic performance is that, despite the country’s ability to grow at high rates, its long-term growth has been disappointing. Behind this deficient long-term outcome, Brazil shows a high degree of growth volatility. It has experienced substantial growth booms and busts as measured by international standards. This chapter provides an analysis of growth volatility and its impact on Brazil’s growth performance and long-term trajectory. Particular attention is given to its long-term underperformance, its macroeconomic regularities, and the possible causes and implications of its limited growth potential and degree of international convergence.
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Winner, Ellen. Who Makes Art and Why? Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190863357.003.0015.
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This chapter asks who becomes an artist. The course of typical versus gifted artistic development is first delineated. This leads to the question of whether artists are individuals born with innate talent or simply the product of disciplined work. Psychologists have argued recently for the latter position, claiming that we can all achieve extreme levels in a domain as long as we are willing to engage in thousands of hours of effortful practice beginning at a young age. However, four pieces of evidence are presented against the it’s-all-practice view: early signs, biological markers of giftedness, rage to master, and evidence that individuals with the same intensity of practice don’t end up reaching the same level. The talent view turns out to have truth to it after all. The chapter concludes with a discussion and critique of evolutionary explanations for why we have art.
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Perales, José C., Andrés Catena, Antonio Cándido, and Antonio Maldonado. Rules of Causal Judgment. Edited by Michael R. Waldmann. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199399550.013.6.
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Our environment is rich in statistical information. Frequencies and proportions—or their visual depictions—are pervasive in the media, and frequently used to support or weaken causal statements, or to bias people’s beliefs in a given direction. The topic of this chapter is how people integrate naturally available frequencies and probabilities into judgments of the strength of the link between a candidate cause and an effect. We review studies investigating various rules that have been claimed to underlie intuitive causal judgments. Given that none of these rules has been established as a clear winner, we conclude presenting a tentative framework describing the general psychological processes operating when people select, ponder, and integrate pieces of causally-relevant evidence with the goal of meeting real-life demands.
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William A, Schabas. Part 6 The Trial: Le Procès, Art.69 Evidence/Preuve. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/law/9780198739777.003.0073.
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This chapter comments on Article 69 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Article 69 deals with specific evidentiary issues but lacks a general provision like the one in the Nuremberg Charter. This is addressed in article 64, stating that the Trial Chamber has the power to rule on the admissibility or reliability of evidence. According to a Trial Chamber, ‘the drafters of the Statute framework have clearly and deliberately avoided proscribing certain categories or types of evidence, a step which would have limited — at the outset — the ability of the Chamber to assess evidence “freely”’. Chambers enjoy ‘a significant degree of discretion in considering all types of evidence’. Another judge has said that article 69 provides for ‘the principle of free assessment of evidence. Hence, it is up to the competent Chamber to decide on the probative value of any piece of evidence introduced for the purpose of the confirmation hearing or the trial’.
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Hitlin, Steven, and Sarah K. Harkness. The Difficulty of Studying Morality Across Cultures. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190465407.003.0004.
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This chapter details ideas in psychology and sociology that focus on individuals and groups, the locus of the majority of morality research. Durkheim wrote about social structure as an influence on morality, but outside of a handful of anthropological theoretical pieces and some sociological ideas, there is a paucity of recent theory (much less empirical work) on links between social structure and culture as they inform moral codes and functioning. More commonly, different cultures are treated as if they a priori developed differently, even though there is evidence to suggest that structural features such as economic growth shape moral imperatives. We provide an overview of these ideas but offer a wider, more critical assessment of the various theories to more thoroughly link individual moral experience with broader social structure.
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Bowd, Stephen D. The Experiences of Civilians. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198832614.003.0004.
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The experiences of civilians in war shared some characteristics, with practical preparations for the siege or assault often accompanied by spiritual preparations such as a mass or the taking of oaths. In the heat of the assault civilians were often taken ransom, goods plundered (especially from Jews), and buildings destroyed or fired. But civilians also resisted assault and there is considerable evidence for women taking an active part in resistance or other frontline activities including foraging for food, which may be reflected in some artistic productions of the Renaissance. In the aftermath of the sack or massacre the civic authorities picked up the pieces by attempting to re-establish law and order, prevent disease or starvation, and eventually instituting commemorative events in thanks to God for ultimate deliverance.
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Miano, Daniele. A Godless Goddess. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198786566.003.0008.
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This chapter studies the negative meanings attributed to Fortuna, related to instability and bad luck. These meanings have always been attributed to the deity, and are attested already from the earliest pieces of evidence. It is argued that after the connection between Fortuna and the conquest of the Empire was made in the second century BC, there was a strong tendency to minimalize and marginalize these negative associations of the deity. However, this changes with the increasing political instability of late Republican Rome, and with the war between Caesar and Pompey in particular. If Fortuna helped to conquer the Empire, on whose side was she during the civil conflicts? The new sociopolitical circumstances favoured the increasing attribution of negative meanings to Fortuna, with some authors openly questioning her divine status.
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Schniedewind, William M. The Finger of the Scribe. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190052461.001.0001.
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The Finger of the Scribe shows how ancient Israelite scribes learned to read and write. It demonstrates that early alphabetic curriculum developed at the end of the second millennium, while Egypt still ruled over Canaan and scribes used cuneiform as a lingua franca. This political and social context provides the background for the emergence of early alphabetic literacy in Israel. Using comparisons from Mesopotamia and Egypt, archaeological evidence, and fresh interpretations of old and new Hebrew inscriptions, this book pieces together the early Israelite scribal education. A basic principle in scribal literacy was the adaptation of their education for doing their day-to-day work as well as for the emergence of new literary genres. In this way, The Finger of the Scribe illustrates the many ways in which scribal education shaped the writing of the Hebrew Bible itself.
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Boehm, Omri. Kant and Spinoza Debating the Third Antinomy. Edited by Michael Della Rocca. Oxford University Press, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195335828.013.23.
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If Kant wanted to combat dogmatism—if he wanted to deny knowledge in order to make room for freedom and faith—he must have taken Spinoza seriously. In considering the case of the third Antinomy, the chapter argues, contrary to the prevalent view, that he did. The first part of the chapter challenges the historical pieces of evidence (allegedly) supporting the conclusion that Kant never engaged with Spinoza in the first Critique. The second part considers the third Antinomy, arguing that its Antithesis, eliminating freedom by invoking the Principle of Sufficient Reason, articulates a Spinozist position—not a Leibnizian one, as is commonly assumed. The third part explores the chief Spinozist challenge to the Antinomy, drawing on Spinoza’s understanding of infinity, freedom, and adequate ideas. The conclusion defends Kant’s position by confronting Spinoza’s position on infinity and freedom with Kant’s account of the sublime.
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Surdam, David George. The Proposed NBA/ABA Merger 1971–1972. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252039140.003.0016.
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This chapter examines the Congressional hearings of 1971–1972 that addressed the petition of the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the American Basketball Association (ABA) for partial antitrust exemptions for their proposed merger. Yale Law School lawyers analyzed the proposed merger, comparing it with the professional football merger: “the concerted action produces efficiencies which arguably outweigh whatever restraints on competition are involved.” They suggested thinking of leagues as being similar to “law partnerships, a firm.” This chapter first considers the arguments presented by basketball owners to justify a merger before discussing the views of economists Robert Nathan, Roger Noll, and Benjamin Okner, along with other pieces of evidence presented at the hearings, regarding the owners' claims of losses. It also assesses the implications of the proposed NBA–ABA merger for player rights and concludes with an overview of Nathan, Noll, and Okner's recommendations about the proposed merger.
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James, Alison. The Documentary Imagination in Twentieth-Century French Literature. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198859680.001.0001.
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This book studies the documentary impulse that plays a central role in twentieth-century French literature. Focusing on nonfiction narratives, it analyzes the use of documents—pieces of textual or visual evidence incorporated into the literary work to relay and interrogate reality. It traces the emergence of an enduring concern with factual reference in texts that engage with current events or the historical archive. Writers idealize the document as a fragment of raw reality, but also reveal its constructed and mediated nature and integrate it as a voice within a larger composition. This ambivalent documentary imagination, present in works by Gide, Breton, Aragon, Yourcenar, Duras, and Modiano (among others), shapes the relationship of literature to visual media, testimonial discourses, and self-representation. Far from turning away from realism in the twentieth century, French literature often turns to the document as a site of both modernist experiment and engagement with the world.
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Danckaert, Lieven. The Development of Latin Clause Structure. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198759522.001.0001.
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The focus of this book is Latin word order, and in particular the relative ordering of direct objects and lexical verbs (OV vs. VO), and auxiliaries and non-finite verbs (VAux vs. AuxV). One aim of the book is to offer a first detailed, corpus-based description of these two word order alternations, with special emphasis on their diachronic development in the period from ca. 200 BC until 600 AD. The corpus data reveal that some received wisdom needs to be reconsidered. For one thing, there is no evidence for any major increase in productivity of the order VO during the eight centuries under investigation. In addition, the order AuxV only becomes more frequent in clauses with a modal verb and an infinitive, not in clauses with a BE-auxiliary and a past participle. A second goal is to answer a more fundamental question about Latin syntax, namely whether or not the language is ‘configurational’, in the sense that a phrase structure grammar (with ‘higher-order constituents’ such as verb phrases) is needed to describe and analyse facts of Latin word order. Four pieces of evidence are presented which suggest that Latin is indeed a fully configurational language, despite its high degree of word order flexibility. Specifically, it is shown that there is ample evidence for the existence of a verb phrase constituent. The book thus contributes to the ongoing debate whether configurationality (phrase structure) is a language universal or not.
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Leaver, Robin A. Bach’s Choral-Buch? University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252040191.003.0002.
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This chapter examines a collection of Bach chorale harmonizations copied in Dresden sometime during the 1730s, with the goal of clarifying both its likely provenance and purpose. “Sebastian Bach’s Choral-Buch” is a collection of chorales—melodies with figured bass, intended to accompany singing—given in a sequence similar to that found in many hymnals. The mid-eighteenth-century manuscript was purchased from Hans P. Kraus, Vienna, in September 1936 by the Sibley Library at the Eastman School of Music. This chapter first describes the Sibley Choralbuch before reviewing its provenance and content. It then considers the manuscript’s significance as a possible source of evidence for the practices of the circle of organists who studied with Johann Sebastian Bach in the 1730s and 1740s. It argues that Choralbuch served as a workbook for learning how to create four-part settings but had a double usefulness: Bach could assign particular chorale melodies for the pupil to work on as test pieces, while the anthology could serve to accompany chorale singing at services.
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Celkyte, Aiste. The Stoic Theory of Beauty. Edinburgh University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474461610.001.0001.
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The monograph aims to show that the Stoa, an ancient Greek philosophical school, made a substantial line of enquiry into the nature of aesthetic properties, and thus there are good reasons to analyse and discuss the sub-field of the Stoic thought that could be called ‘Stoic aesthetics.’ This study of Stoic views on beauty begins with the question of indifferents and the challenge it poses for aesthetics. The controversial Stoic theory of values states that ‘beauty’ is one of the so-called indifferents, that is, the things that do not contribute to human happiness and therefore ought not to be treated as the good. It is argued that a thorough reading of the material shows that beauty is not treated as irrelevant in general; the evidence only shows that beauty is an inferior value to virtue. This leaves the possibility of theorising aesthetic objects. This leads to a systematic interpretation of Stoic aesthetics by looking at other pieces of extant evidence where beauty is mentioned, including the argument ‘that only the beautiful is the good’, theological arguments, the claim that only the wise man is beautiful and the Stoic definition of beauty as summetria. The latter, it is argued, is a succinct formulation of the idea that beauty is a function composition, and this idea has emerged in the previous discussions of various arguments involving aesthetic terms. The monograph ends with a discussion of the Stoic views in ancient Greek philosophical context.
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Feu, Montse. Fighting Fascist Spain. University of Illinois Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.5622/illinois/9780252043246.001.0001.
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Fighting Fascist Spain pieces together the story of Spanish immigrants in the United States in their fight against fascism, as reflected in the periodical España Libre and the grassroots activism of the organization that sustained that publication, the Sociedades Hispanas Confederadas, or the Confederadas. Although Espana Libre was run by Spanish immigrants and exiles and published in Brooklyn and New York City, the organization had a clear transnational consciousness: old migrants and new exiles coalesced in overlapping communities across the United States that were linked to similar antifascist networks in other countries. Fighting Fascist Spain identifies the web of anarchist, anarcho-syndicalist, and socialist connections that facilitated the political engagement of local activists and organizations and enlarged the global reach of the Confederadas during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1939–1975) and until democratic elections were held again in Spain (1977). Using extensive and previously ignored literary, visual, and archival sources, the manuscript explores anarchist literature and antifascist humor. The broad objective of Fighting Fascist Spain is not merely to recover evidence of migrant activism and literature but to articulate how workers’ culture and politics shaped their antifascism.
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Oldfield, Paul. ‘To Destroy a City so Great and Remarkable’. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198777601.003.0023.
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Medieval works of urban panegyric, some of which adhered to the so-called laus civitatis paradigm, ostensibly represented initiatives formed to praise and promote the profile of a given city. This literary genre flourished particularly in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and can be connected to fundamental transformations that were occurring in medieval urban life. Indeed, while in many cases these works served unexpressed agendas, they were not simple pieces of fiction and rhetoric. Their power lay in their reapplication of Classical and Christian traditions, in their reflection of some of the deep realities of urban living, and in their association with the heated conceptual debates surrounding the very idea of the medieval city. In this context, the inclusion of material which could lament or dishonour the name of a city, or which could imply a threat to its integrity may seem both incongruent and significant. Focusing primarily on Bonvesin della Riva’s celebrated De Magnalibus Mediolani (1288), this chapter thus explores the dissonant presence of lamentation and critique presented in works of urban panegyric in order to produce a more nuanced and holistic understanding of this literary genre as well as a new appreciation of the evidence it can offer for understanding medieval urban mentalities at a crucial point in the process of European urbanization.
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Poehler, Eric E. The Traffic Systems of Pompeii. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190614676.003.0006.
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If each piece of evidence of traffic records the thousands of times a Pompeian cart driver made the same choice as the drivers before him and his intent to do so, to what do all these moments of shared intent add up across the breadth of an entire city? Chapter 6 combines all this disparate but diagnostic evidence for the directional movement of traffic to document the existence of a system, or rather evolving and overlapping systems, that once governed the behaviors of Pompeian cart drivers. To describe these systems and how they functioned, the totality of the data is considered through several filters including structural (the shape of the street network), directional (the evidence for two-way and one-way streets), and chronological (the evolution of the system over time) approaches.
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Comstock, Gary. Concerning Cattle. Edited by Anne Barnhill, Mark Budolfson, and Tyler Doggett. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199372263.013.6.
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Should people include beef in their diet? This chapter argues that the answer is “no” by reviewing what is known and not known about the presence in cattle of three psychological traits: pain, desire, and self-consciousness. On the basis of behavioral and neuroanatomical evidence, the chapter argues that cattle are sentient beings who have things they want to do in the proximal future, but they are not self-conscious. The piece rebuts three important objections: that cattle have injury information but not pain; that cattle have goal-directed behavior but not desire; and that the absence of evidence for bovine self-consciousness should not be taken as evidence that cattle lack self-consciousness. In sum, what is known about cattle cognition shifts the moral burden of proof on to the beef eaters.
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Carruthers, Peter. Language in Cognition. Edited by Eric Margolis, Richard Samuels, and Stephen P. Stich. Oxford University Press, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195309799.013.0016.
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The article discusses the ways in which natural language might be implicated in human cognition. The Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky developed his ideas on the interrelations between language and thought, both in the course of child development and in mature human cognition. One of Vygostky's ideas concerned the ways in which the language deployed by adults can scaffold children's development, yielding what he called a ‘zone of proximal development’. He argued that what children can achieve alone and unaided is not a true reflection of their understanding. Vygotsky focused on the overt speech of children, arguing that it plays an important role in problem solving, partly by serving to focus their attention, and partly through repetition and rehearsal of adult guidance. Clark draws attention to the many ways in which language is used to support human cognition, ranging from shopping lists and post-it notes, to the mental rehearsal of remembered instructions and mnemonics, to the performance of complex arithmetic calculations on pieces of paper. Researchers have claimed that animals and pre-verbal infants possess a capacity for exact small-number judgment and comparison, for numbers up to three or four. There is also some evidence that natural language number-words might be constitutive of adult possession and deployment of exact number concepts, in addition to being developmentally necessary for their acquisition.
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Ivanič, Suzanna. Cosmos and Materiality in Early Modern Prague. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192898982.001.0001.
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Prague in the seventeenth century is known as having been home to a scintillating imperial court crammed with exotic goods, scientists, and artisans, receiving ambassadors from as far away as Persia; and as a city suffering plagues, riots, and devastating military attacks. But Prague was also the setting for a complex and shifting spiritual world. At the beginning of the century it was a multiconfessional city, but by 1700 it represented one of the most archetypical Catholic cities in Europe. Through a material approach, this book pieces together how early modern men and women experienced this transformation on a daily basis. The book presents a bold alternative understanding of the history of early modern religion in Central Europe. The history of religion in the early modern period has overwhelmingly been analysed through a confessional lens, but this analysis shows how Prague burghers’ spiritual worlds were embedded in their natural environment and social relations as much as, if not more than, in confessional identity in the seventeenth century. While texts in this period trace emerging discourses around notions of religion, superstition, and magic, and what it was to be Catholic or Protestant, a material approach avoids these category mistakes being applied to everyday practice. It is through a rich seam of material evidence in Prague—spoons, glass beakers, and amulets, as much as traditional devotional objects like rosaries and garnet-encrusted crucifixes—that everyday beliefs, practices, and identities can be recovered.
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Coward, John M. Making Images on the Indian Frontier. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252040269.003.0005.
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This chapter explores some of the most important Indian illustrations of Theodore Davis, one of the first illustrators to travel west following the Civil War. His pictures of a Kansas stage attack and arrow-pierced skeletons of soldiers helped popularize images of Indian violence as an important—and sensational—visual trope in an era of Western expansion. The stage attack came to represent something more than a few moments of terror on the plains of western Kansas; it became a vivid and useful symbol of the taming of the West. Meanwhile, Davis's illustrations of arrow-pierced skeletons on the plains became immediately infamous and provided powerful evidence that the Indians deserved to be punished.
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Otgaar, Henry, and Mark L. Howe. When Spontaneous Statements Should Not Be Trusted. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190612016.003.0004.
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Statements provided by eyewitnesses and victims have a paramount role in legal cases. Such statements are often the only piece of evidence in criminal trials, hence it is vital to understand how reliable these statements are. This chapter provides an overview of the latest work on how statements can be infected by spontaneous false memories. It first shows that statements that arise spontaneously and without any external suggestive pressure contain a high degree of accuracy. However, the chapter then shows that spontaneous statements can also lead to memory errors, especially when during the experience of an event associations are made concerning the experience. Interestingly, this chapter presents new evidence that when this idea of associative activation is taken into account, adults are more susceptible to the formation of spontaneous and suggestion-induced false memories than children.
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Gann, Kyle. Oh, How We Misunderstand. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252035494.003.0001.
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This chapter is an introduction to the oft-misunderstood opera of Robert Ashley. Ashley's works do not fit the profile of what people generally think of as opera. In his pieces, people sing in a style that resembles speech, and plots are rarely evident in his works. The chapter argues that his works are far more stylistically complex than they initially appear, and that furthermore his oeuvre not only fits the very definition of opera, but even updates it in certain cases. It highlights the unconventionality of his opera and yet situates them squarely among the classical greats. In doing so, the chapter also delves into Ashley's own merits as a composer.
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Freudenberg, Nicholas. At What Cost. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190078621.001.0001.
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Every day people decide what to eat, how to educate their children, where to find health care, and how to connect to others. For many, freely choosing a lifestyle defines the American dream. But in the 21st century, these choices are increasingly constructed by corporations and designed not to promote well-being, happiness, and planetary health, but to increase corporate profits and power. As a result, the decisions that corporations encourage individuals to make can lead to premature death, illness, or psychological distress as well as environmental pollution and social conflict. At What Cost: Modern Capitalism and the Future of Health maps the landscape of the changing role of capitalism in shaping health in America, documenting the human costs of the dominant political and economic system. It describes how globalization, financial speculation, monopoly concentration, and business control of science and technology have enhanced the ability of corporations and their allies to overwhelm influences of government, family, and community. It analyses how 21st-century capitalism structures the choices that affect the well-being of individuals, families, communities, and the planet. The book also explores how people, governments, civil society, and social movements are challenging corporate domination and forging alternative paths to a healthier, more sustainable world. While other books have explored pieces of this story, At What Cost offers a comprehensive analysis of the health consequences of modern capitalism. It provides citizens, parents, activists, scholars, and policy makers with the evidence they need to construct a better world for current and future generations.
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Cavanagh, Patrick, Lorella Battelli, and Alex Holcombe. Dynamic Attention. Edited by Anna C. (Kia) Nobre and Sabine Kastner. Oxford University Press, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199675111.013.016.
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The authors review how attention helps track and process dynamic events, selecting and integrating information across time and space to produce a continuing identity for a moving, changing target. Rather than a fixed ‘spotlight’ that helps identify a static target, attention needs a mobile window or ‘pointer’ to track a moving target, picking up pieces of evidence along the way to determine not just what the target is, but what it is doing. Behavioural studies show that this dynamic version of attention is model-based, using familiar trajectories to help identify a target and to guide encoding of continuing input from its path. Attention has very coarse temporal resolution for both static and moving targets. However, when the focus of selection is on the move, a given location on a moving target’s path can be selected for extremely brief instants, as little as 50 ms, compared to the typical ‘dwell time’ or minimum duration of attention selection at a fixed location, of 200 ms or more. To determine the path of a moving object, attention must accurately process and sort the onsets and offsets in order to match an offset to the subsequent onset. This aspect of dynamic attention has been called the ‘when’ pathway and patient studies show that it is a qualitatively different system from spatial attention, being completely based in the right parietal lobe for events in both hemifields. Finally, like the salience map of spatial attention, temporal attention may have its own map that guides allocation to upcoming, current, and recent moments to select information at the appropriate time, changing the experience of time as it does so.
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Kerr, David J., Daniel G. Haller, Cornelis J. H. van de Velde, and Michael Baumann, eds. Oxford Textbook of Oncology. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/med/9780199656103.001.0001.
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This new 3rd edition of the Oxford Textbook of Oncology is a major piece of scholarly work that details the evolution, evidence base and current best practice in multidisciplinary practice in oncology. Oncology is the largest hospital multi-specialty and the contributors to this 3rd edition are all internationally recognised key opinion leaders in their field. It includes all aspects of oncology, including surgery, radiotherapy, and medical oncology. It focuses on the clinical aspects of oncology while also covering the basic sciences. It provides introductory chapters covering basic science (cell and molecular biology and genetics), translational science (pharmacology, pharmo-genetics, drug discovery, drug development, radiation oncology), general principles of surgical radiation and medical oncology, cancer imaging and pathology, followed by a series of disease-associated chapters.
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Gillon, Carrie, and Nicole Rosen. Articles. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198795339.003.0005.
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This chapter focuses on the article system in Michif. Articles are particularly problematic for the French DP/Plains Cree VP split posited for Michif (Bakker 1997). Despite being French-derived, the Michif articles do not behave like their French counterparts. Michif definite articles occupy a lower position within the DP than French definite articles do, and Michif lacks definiteness, despite having borrowed both the definite and indefinite articles. Even more problematically, the singular definite articles are used to Algonquianize non-Algonquian vocabulary—both within the DP and the VP. Thus, a piece of French morphosyntax has been appropriated to create structures that can be interpreted within Algonquian syntax, providing more evidence that ultimately the Michif DP is Algonquian, rather than French.
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Woodfield, Ian. Italian Opera Reprieved. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190692636.003.0005.
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In the light of the imminent closure of the opera buffa troupe, Da Ponte arranged a collective benefit for the performers: a lighthearted satirical piece entitled L’ape musicale, which featured the most popular music of recent seasons. His campaign to persuade Joseph II to change his mind over the decision to discontinue Italian opera bore fruit in January 1789, following the Russian victory at Ochakiv, following which a lighter public mood was briefly evident in Vienna. Da Ponte could now offer his pasticcio on behalf of the whole troupe as an expression of gratitude for the reprieve they had been granted.
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Miller, Peggy J., and Grace E. Cho. Origins of the Self-Esteem Imaginary. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199959723.003.0001.
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Chapter 1, “Origins of the Self-Esteem Imaginary,” traces the social imaginary of childrearing and self-esteem to its origins in the writings of William James and other nineteenth-century visionaries. This is the first of two chapters that sketch the intellectual history of self-esteem and its intersection with progressive childrearing. Although psychologists “invented” self-esteem, propounded a host of theories, and conducted the first major study of children’s self-esteem, bestselling novelists and authors of popular childrearing manuals played an important role in spreading these ideas to the reading public in the mid-twentieth century. At the same time, children’s self-esteem became a critical piece of evidence in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision that dismantled the legal basis for racial segregation. Countering assaults to self-esteem became part of the discourse of the social justice movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
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DuBois, John W. Ergativity in Discourse and Grammar. Edited by Jessica Coon, Diane Massam, and Lisa Demena Travis. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198739371.013.2.
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This chapter considers how a discourse profile may provide a key piece of the puzzle for explaining the distribution of ergative grammatical structures within and across the world’s languages. The ergative discourse profile, isomorphic to the ergative-absolutive pattern of syntactic alignment, is found in a typologically diverse array of languages including ergative, accusative, and active. Speakers tend to follow soft constraints limiting the Quantity and Role of new and lexical noun phrases within the clause. Evidence for the universality of the ergative discourse profile is examined from typology, child language, and diachrony. A conflicting discourse pressure for topicality motivates accusativity, giving rise to competing motivations. As one recurrent resolution of competing demands, ergativity represents an evolutionarily stable strategy realized in grammar. While discourse-pragmatic and cognitive motivations contribute crucially to a functional explanation of ergativity, additional factors must include semantics of verbs, constructions, aspects, and splits; inherited morphosyntax; and more.
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Samuelsson, Christer. Statistical Methods. Edited by Ruslan Mitkov. Oxford University Press, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199276349.013.0019.
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Statistical methods now belong to mainstream natural language processing. They have been successfully applied to virtually all tasks within language processing and neighbouring fields, including part-of-speech tagging, syntactic parsing, semantic interpretation, lexical acquisition, machine translation, information retrieval, and information extraction and language learning. This article reviews mathematical statistics and applies it to language modelling problems, leading up to the hidden Markov model and maximum entropy model. The real strength of maximum-entropy modelling lies in combining evidence from several rules, each one of which alone might not be conclusive, but which taken together dramatically affect the probability. Maximum-entropy modelling allows combining heterogeneous information sources to produce a uniform probabilistic model where each piece of information is formulated as a feature. The key ideas of mathematical statistics are simple and intuitive, but tend to be buried in a sea of mathematical technicalities. Finally, the article provides mathematical detail related to the topic of discussion.
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Hopkins, Jim. Understanding and Healing. Edited by K. W. M. Fulford, Martin Davies, Richard G. T. Gipps, George Graham, John Z. Sadler, Giovanni Stanghellini, and Tim Thornton. Oxford University Press, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199579563.013.0073.
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There is a tension in psychiatry between clinical and neurobiological approaches to mental disorder. The accounts provided by Freud and his successors, however, should not be taken as alternatives to a fuller neurobiological understanding, but rather as indicating paths we might take towards attaining one. The main mental disorders are rooted in emotional conflict, and these are conflicts to which the basic emotional regulatory systems that produce both behavior and consciousness are liable. These emotional conflicts, in turn, are rooted in evolution, together with the "moral" emotions that go awry in mental disorder as well. Although these claims are speculative they are increasingly sustained by evidence. Insofar as they are correct we should expect psychoanalysis and our future claims about the neurobiology of mental disorder to converge, at least within the limits set by their categories. Understanding mental disorder in this way is of a piece with understanding the irrationalities that are part of human nature, and we may hope to progress in both together.
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Winner, Ellen. Feeling From Music. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190863357.003.0004.
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This chapter addresses the emergence of feelings in the music listener. We hear a sad piece and feel sad, but we are not sad about the music, and nothing bad has happened to us. Some philosophers have therefore concluded that music cannot elicit emotion. Instead, perhaps we are confusing the emotion we hear expressed in the music with the emotion we feel. But research shows that people do feel emotions from music, and they distinguish the emotions they hear in the music from the emotions the music makes them feel. There is no empirical support for the philosophical position that we do not experience emotion from music. However, emotions from music are softened by aesthetic distance—we know these emotions are caused by the music and not by a life event. The chapter concludes with a consideration of some conflicting evidence about whether the emotional response to music is innate or influenced by one’s musical culture.
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Noam, Vered. The Rupture with the Pharisees. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198811381.003.0004.
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The story treated in this chapter, an etiological tale whose purpose is to pinpoint the beginnings of the enmity between the Hasmonean dynasty and the Pharisees, opens a series of legends which outline the gradual downfall of the dynasty. In the Josephan version the story still concerns John Hyrcanus, whereas in the Babylonian Talmud the episode relates to the figure of his son Janneus. The chapter analyzes both versions in their Josephan and rabbinic context, and concludes that this tale is in fact a rare piece of a lost Pharisaic apologetic work, as evidenced by its vocabulary and syntax, its pesher-like style, and its political, intersectarian content, all familiar to us from the Dead Sea Scrolls. Josephus has integrated this pro-Pharisaic tradition into a context that is much more hostile towards the Pharisees and sympathetic to the Hasmonean ruler. The rabbis depicted the Hasmonean protagonist of the story as a bitter enemy of the sages, as opposed to the more balanced portrayal in the original legend.
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Ginsberg, Benjamin. The Fall of the Faculty. Oxford University Press, 2011. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199782444.001.0001.
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Until very recently, American universities were led mainly by their faculties, which viewed intellectual production and pedagogy as the core missions of higher education. Today, as Benjamin Ginsberg warns in this eye-opening, controversial book, "deanlets"--administrators and staffers often without serious academic backgrounds or experience--are setting the educational agenda. The Fall of the Faculty examines the fallout of rampant administrative blight that now plagues the nation's universities. In the past decade, universities have added layers of administrators and staffers to their payrolls every year even while laying off full-time faculty in increasing numbers--ostensibly because of budget cuts. In a further irony, many of the newly minted--and non-academic--administrators are career managers who downplay the importance of teaching and research, as evidenced by their tireless advocacy for a banal "life skills" curriculum. Consequently, students are denied a more enriching educational experience--one defined by intellectual rigor. Ginsberg also reveals how the legitimate grievances of minority groups and liberal activists, which were traditionally championed by faculty members, have, in the hands of administrators, been reduced to chess pieces in a game of power politics. By embracing initiatives such as affirmative action, the administration gained favor with these groups and legitimized a thinly cloaked gambit to bolster their power over the faculty. As troubling as this trend has become, there are ways to reverse it. The Fall of the Faculty outlines how we can revamp the system so that real educators can regain their voice in curriculum policy.
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Cheeseman, Nic, ed. The Oxford Encyclopedia of African Politics. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acref/9780190632342.001.0001.
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Over 100 entries This encyclopedia is the most comprehensive and up-to-date resource on African politics ever produced. In these peer-reviewed entries, readers will find authoritative overviews of the key methodologies and approaches, as well as all of the major topics in African politics, one of the fastest growing and most dynamic areas of political science. Under the editorial directorship of Nic Cheeseman and associate editors Rita Abrahamsen, Gilbert M. Khadiagala, Peace A. Medie, Rachel Beatty Riedl, and Etienne Smith, The Oxford Encyclopedia of African Politics brings together world-leading researchers from Africa, the United States, and Europe. The Encyclopedia features cutting-edge chapters on a remarkably broad range of topics, and particular areas of strength include: political institutions; identity politics and the significance of ethnicity and religion; the African state and its strengths and weaknesses; development politics; economic policy and management; ideas and ideologies; international relations and regional politics; conflict, violence, and civil war; political and social movements; media and political communication; elections and democracy; research methods and approaches; and ethics and the politics of research. Each clearly written piece provides a concise summary of the state of the art before drawing on new ideas and evidence to push the debate forward. The encyclopedia is therefore essential reading for all who seek to understand core and emerging topics within the vast and growing literature on African politics.
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Quick, Laura. Dress, Adornment, and the Body in the Hebrew Bible. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198856818.001.0001.
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Dress, Adornment and the Body in the Hebrew Bible is the first monograph to treat dress and adornment in biblical literature in the English language. Beyond merely filling a gap in scholarship, the book moves beyond a description of these aspects of ancient life to encompass notions of interpersonal relationships and personhood that underpin practices of dress and adornment. I explore the ramifications of body adornment in the biblical world, informed by a methodologically plural approach incorporating material culture alongside philology, textual exegesis, comparative evidence, and sociological models. Drawing upon and synthesizing insights from material culture and texts from across the eastern Mediterranean, I reconstruct the social meanings attached to the dressed body in biblical texts. I show how body adornment can deepen our understanding of attitudes towards the self in the ancient world. In my reconstruction of ancient performances of the self, the body serves as the observed centre in which complex ideologies of identity, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and social status are articulated. The adornment of the body is thus an effective means of non-verbal communication, but one which at the same time is controlled by and dictated through normative social values. Exploring dress, adornment, and the body can therefore open up hitherto unexplored perspectives on these social values in the ancient world, an essential missing piece in understanding the social and cultural world which shaped the Hebrew Bible.
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Murphy, Clifford R., ed. The New England Cowboy. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252038679.003.0008.
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This chapter explores how the New England country and western musician's important place in New England social history has been obscured for over fifty years now by the same industrial forces that obscure its place in the continental story of country and western music, where the sanctity of regional identity is crushed by the industrial weight of country music's southern thesis. What remains is a sense of loss and disenfranchisement as well as a rich social capital toward which New England country and western contributes a significant sum. This drama plays out against a larger, darker backdrop of industrial exploitation and abandonment of New England working people, evident in the crumbling stone walls, rotting piers, and empty mills whose ghosts speak of the region's agricultural, maritime, and manufacturing past.
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Hinton, Alexander Laban. Aesthetics (Theary Seng, Vann Nath, and Victim Participation). Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198820949.003.0007.
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The second part of the book, “Turbulence,” centers on the transitional justice encounter of three survivors (Theary Seng, Vann Nath, and Bou Meng) involved in victim participation at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). Chapter 4, for example, is loosely structured around the idea of aesthetics and the experience of two victims who participated in the proceedings, Theary Seng and former S-21 prisoner Vann Nath. If the 2008 reenactment highlighted the performative dimensions of the transitional justice imaginary, it also suggested an implicit aesthetics as a former prison that had been converted into a genocide museum was, in this moment, envisioned as a crime site now inhabited by court personnel, victims and witnesses, and defendant, and evidence. The ECCC has a similar aesthetics of justice, ranging from court regalia and symbols to courtroom demeanor, technologies, styles of speech and movement, and public participation. The first part of the chapter centers on the experience of the first civil party, Theary Seng. Originally skeptical of the ECCC, Seng came to believe it had transformative possibilities in terms of promoting democracy in Cambodia. To this end, in a series of pretrial hearings, she sought to speak directly in court. Initially successful, Seng was eventually silenced as the Pre-Trial Chamber ruled that civil parties could only speak through their lawyers. Seng, for her part, became increasingly critical of the court, stating that she refused to be a piece of “décor” in a “sham.” Eventually she would renounce her civil party status and become an outspoken critic of the court, which was increasingly beset by controversy. The remainder of the chapter focuses on Vann Nath’s Case 001 testimony. On the day of his testimony, the 500-seat courtroom was packed, as it would be during many subsequent trial sessions. Vann Nath’s art, much of which he had produced during People’s Republic of Kampuchea for display at Tuol Sleng, was reintroduced as juridical evidence and shown in court. The chapter explores some of these aesthetic dimensions of the transitional justice imaginary even as it considers the lived experience and practices that informed Vann Nath’s art, including Buddhist aesthetics and beliefs.
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Sepúlveda, Jovanny, ed. Interdisciplinariedad, pedagogía y proyectos formativos. CUA - Medellin, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.52441/edu202003.
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La comunicación de la ciencia, en sí misma no es ciencia, pero sí contribuye a ella y a la difusión del conocimiento. ¿Por qué publicamos? Primero porque la investigación científica hoy es epistemología + metodología + tecnología+ comunicación del conocimiento, lo que también plantea la importancia de la gestión del conocimiento. La ciencia hoy no se hace para que se quede en informes o anaqueles, sino para que pueda ser difundida, utilizada y apropiada por otros. La publicación es un paso de puesta en validación en el medio, entre pares o entre beneficiarios finales de los resultados del proceso de investigación, y por tanto, de la gestión del conocimiento iniciada con un proyecto en su momento. La publicación hace visibles los hallazgos, pero también los nuevos saberes, las nuevas ideas, las nuevas explicaciones, los nuevos objetos dentro de la cultura de lo humano. La ciencia, la tecnología y la innovación, como prácticas sociales -tal como lo expresa el prólogo- son además actividades culturales que buscan ser visibles, hacerse públicas para dar pie a una función social y cognitiva más profunda: generar trascendencia del saber humano en la historia. Las publicaciones son solo piezas retóricas de un quehacer mucho más comprometedor: motivar nuevos procesos de búsqueda, nuevos procesos cognitivos en otros. Y es que como dice Bruno Latour (2017), hacer ciencia tiene mucho de ejercicio político y de ejercicio cultural en nuestras sociedades contemporáneas. Los científicos contemporáneos desde su función social, plantean -no todos, pero sí los más conscientes- la batalla contra la dictadura del beneficio (la rentabilidad económica de la ciencia que se inculcó durante el siglo XX), a partir de la libertad y la gratuidad del conocimiento y la investigación. Publicar, y mucho más volver al libro como dispositivo de comunicación, motiva un conocer diferente, un conocer desde el deseo de entregar como acto generoso lo aprendido. La ciencia en la antigüedad, como lo plantea Ordine (2013), nace de la curiosidad y de la admiración. Son los fenómenos de lo cotidiano, de lo común, los que mueven a los primeros filósofos a generar saber. El estudio, como dice Ordine es en primer lugar adquisición de conocimientos que “sin vínculo utilitarista alguno, nos hacen crecer y nos vuelven autónomos” (p. 45). Así pues, el estudio y la investigación están motivados por la gratuidad de la admiración del mundo y de la realización del ser humano en su proceso de búsqueda de sabiduría. Aquí cabe retomar a Poincaré (1904 citado por Ordine, 2013): El hombre de ciencia no estudia la naturaleza porque sea útil; la estudia porque encuentra placer, y encuentra placer porque es bella. Si la naturaleza no fuera bella, no valdría la pena conocerla, ni valdría la pena vivir la vida. No hablo aquí, entendámoslo bien, de esta belleza que impresiona los sentidos, de la belleza de las cualidades y de las apariencias; no es que la desdeñe, lejos de ahí, pero no tiene nada que ver con la ciencia. Quiero hablar de esa belleza, más íntima, que proviene del orden armonioso de las partes y que solo una inteligencia pura puede comprender. Por así decirlo es ella la que da un cuerpo, un esqueleto a las halagadoras apariencias que embellecen nuestros sentidos, y sin este soporte, la belleza de estos sueños fugitivos sería imperfecta, porque sería indecisa y huiría siempre (p. 61). Y finaliza Ordine: Hay que saber poner la mira en “la belleza intelectual” que “se basta a sí misma”. Por ella sola, “más quizá que por el bien futuro de la humanidad”, “el hombre de ciencia se condena a largos y penosos trabajos” (p. 21). Sin este laborioso y desinteresado esfuerzo, sería realmente difícil pensar en hacerse mejores (p. 61). Los autores de la presente compilación han comprendido esta belleza intelectual desde los saberes y disciplinas más diversos: la antropología pedagógica, la educación, la psicología, la comunicación. Si bien el eje central es la educación y este libro se enmarca en una visión de educación desde diferentes intereses, el origen de nuestros autores es variado y multidisciplinar, como podrá evidenciar el lector en las siguientes páginas. La educación, es una práctica cultural propia de nuestras sociedades occidentales que debe hacer visibles sus reflexiones desde la perspectiva científica. La capacidad de sistematización de lo aprendido en el aula, del proceso de conocimiento desde los niveles más básicos hasta los más avanzados, es la clave de una producción científica desde el campo formativo. Hoy encontramos esa evidencia de las búsquedas, de las comprensiones, de las iniciativas de realización del ser humano en muchos de los apartados de estos textos que los autores comparten con nosotros.