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The neglected Platonic dialogue Euthydemus is peculiar in many ways. It is, apparently, an extensive catalogue of bad arguments by disgraceful sophists; but its complex composition suggests that this focuses attention on the shape and nature of argument—attention that some think Plato is incapable of giving. He uses the idiom of games, and of seriousness and play, to provoke reflection on logical and syntactic structure and their normative features; but to see how he does so we need to consider the complex background of the fiction of a Platonic dialogue, and its use of surprise and humour. Comparison with the bbc Radio 4 game ‘Mornington Crescent’ might help.

My thesis began as a practical problem addressing the undervaluing of informal mathematical language and methods used by low prior attaining students. I wanted to gather teacher and student perspectives on mathematical methods. I began by exploring the dialogic theory of Bakhtin but discovered a debate in the field about whether Bakhtin's work could be used as an extension of Vygotsky's dialectic theory. As a result, I used Radford's connecting theories framework (2008) to shape an investigation which explores principles, methodology and research questions as points of connection between the theories of Vygotsky and Bakhtin. Linking the networking approaches of Prediger et al. (2008), to Radford's connecting theories allowed me to analyse the work of other authors in the field and develop my own analytical framework based on Vygotsky and Bakhtin. I used this framework both to analyse transcriptions of teacher group discussion and student group discussion based around examples of student work, and to explore networking approaches. Initially, I used \"comparing\"/ \"contrasting\" approaches to extend my understanding of Bakhtin's and Vygotsky's theories before adopting a \"combining\" networking approach to further investigate the perspectives of students on mathematical methods. I used a dialectic approach to represent the significance of the curriculum in discussion around mathematical methods, and a dialogic approach to analyse the detail of how the context and socio-cultural background shapes impacts on discussion. I concluded that a connecting theories approach allowed for analysis of more data and a deeper level of analysis than using a single theory. Through connecting theories, I also investigated the possibility of analysing mathematical methods as utterances using Bakhtin's work. I suggest that Bakhtin and Vygotsky's theories can be effectively networked to provide analysis and suggest a number of future steps to either apply the networked theories to practical problems or further theoretical issues.

En este trabajo se abordan las ideas de Arturo Andrés Roig, Joaquín Sánchez Macgrégor y Luis Villoro, filósofos quienes reflexionaron en torno al tema del contrapoder, el cual surge por la necesidad de poner límites al ejercicio despótico que se lleva a cabo en la práctica del poder político. Así, el epígrafe expresa la tendencia manifiesta en un número significativo de las personas que buscan los puestos de representatividad social, debido a que su objetivo de mantenerse en estos obedece a la pretensión de obtener beneficios personales y grupales. Con el propósito de ofrecer orientaciones sobre las propuestas del contrapoder o poder alternativo, se expone un análisis sobre sus características, así como de las propuestas de mediación dialéctica, debido a que en estas se exponen ideas en torno a cómo ir mejorando el malestar social.

Italo Calvino (1923-1985) travelled to Japan in the autumn of 1976 and, throughout his career, got acquainted with Japanese literature and culture: this encounter is attested to by the 'Japanese shelf' of his Roman library and by several authorial reflections, but has been granted little attention so far. The aim of this research project is to highlight for the first time the semiotic relevance of Calvino's contact with Japanese cultural configuration, as an epitome of the author's gradual relativisation of Eurocentrism, logocentrism and anthropocentrism. In particular, this study addresses Japanese gardens in light of their role in Calvino's reflections on the interdependency between the human and the other-than-human. This deconstruction of a hierarchical humanism is discussed by interlacing trans-cultural and post-human coordinates, which illuminate the poetical and philosophical mature formulation of Calvino's age-long ecological awareness. Moreover, if Buddhist meditation, as well as many poetical, artistic and architectural expressions that capture Calvino's attention in Japan can be understood as forms of praxis - interrelation of theory and practice -, they are here put in dialogue with the author's development of dialectical materialism over time, especially in his last completed work, Palomar (1983). By investigating Calvino's treatment of perspective changes, language, silence, void, time and death in his works, this thesis brings to the fore the manifold contradictions, potentialities and dialectical processes that inform these themes in Calvino's oeuvre, which fruitfully interact with his exploration of Japanese (and in general non-Western) art, literature and thought in the late 1970s.

This article shows that solidarity, a primarily positive force, creates a dialectic dilemma. It is based, a priori, on the notions of linking and strengthening but unless it is wisely employed it risks creating unnecessary divisions between various groups of people and their collective memories, which results in weakening them. I focus on the positive outcomes of solidarity then I discuss the divisions it can possibly create in today's global world emphasizing those affecting feminism. On the one hand, solidarity unites people from different places and walks of life and uncovers collective memories but it goes beyond the local. Subsequently one is not trapped in the amnesia created sometimes by the control of memory. Furthermore, it strengthens various creative groups by networking them with others who have the same interests. On the other hand, it sometimes diminishes identification with one's own collective memory, which constitutes her/ his roots, thus exposing a society or certain groups in it for decomposition strategies in which the more powerful wins. This is especially true in the case of women and feminism. Women, in the so- called underdeveloped countries, are presented with feminist models that come mainly from USA and Western Europe; and they are coerced into accepting these models as 'the ideal'. However, these models do not take into consideration the specificity of 'other' women's conditions and because they are imported as final models, they are not open for the classic process of reshaping and evolution. Hence they could entrap solidarity rather than make it enabling. I suggest that the dialectic dilemma of solidarity can be resolved by rooting solidarity in local collective memories rather than negating them and by taking into consideration the concepts of scale and proportion.

With limited studies available to understand the human dimension of organizational sustainability, the present study contributes to the knowledge base by identifying what can be done to enable thriving at work among services sector employees by exploring the concept of heedful interrelating. Self-determination theory posits that individuals are autonomously motivated when the social context in which they function satisfies their basic psychological needs of competence, autonomy, and relatedness, causing them to not just survive but thrive towards effective functioning and enhanced positive outcomes. Research on self-determination theory highlights an unplugged dialectic gap that exists between the individual and social context, which arises when the same social context tends to support and thwart the forward momentum of an individual toward active engagement and psychological growth. Through semi-structured interviews and textual analysis conducted among service professionals, evidence of a dialectic gap and the mindset adopted to overcome the gap were tacitly identified. Using the knowledge of agentic work behaviours that are crucial to thriving at work, the researcher tries to plug this gap by introducing heedfulness as an agentic work behaviour to be engaged in by the employees as they collaborate in a social setting. A conceptual model was designed to validate the mediating role of heedful interrelating as self-determined behaviours facilitate thriving at work. This conceptual model utilizes a self-empowerment perspective, helping service professionals move from an a motivated to a thriving state in the course of their group tasks.

The interpretation of the category of complex is given on the basis of dialectical positivism, in the framework of which the principle of dialectic symmetry is formulated. It, in turn, is based on the consideration of matter and information as paired dialectic categories. In accordance with this principle, information objects form a hierarchy similar to that which corresponds to different levels of matter organization (mechanical, chemical, biological, social). As \"complex\", one should interpret the system that is the medium for the information object at least one level higher than the level related to trivial information (that is, one that is inextricably linked with the object itself). This level is the level corresponding to estranged information (simplifying information about a certain object recorded on another medium).

[...]when I was listening to you, I was seeing how you read the progression of the essay, and I think that my obsession is to avoid double trouble, double problems. Specifically, with respect to the oil as the dead sun (and I appreciate the Bataille element of this, of course I'm fascinated by your whole discussion of it), but Negarestani leans very heavily on the biophysicist Thomas Gold, who in fact makes an argument that it's not a dead sun that is producing the oil, it's an anti sun, it's a form of biochemical, deep biosphere that is a form of life that specifically is not photosynthetic. The dead and the dead sun. Because I wanted to give a certain kind of voice to the ghost, maybe I keep it too quickly, and so maybe.the dead sun, the anti sun, yeah. What I try to say, and try to jump from one idea to another, is that we have to be a little bit biocentric, and we have to be able to take care of the sun before being able maybe to be even more cosmological.

The author carries out in it a detailed analysis of Marx's text generally known as Introduction of1857, which contains his most extensive and exhaustive reflection on the question of method. The mode of articulation of the abstract and the concrete or the relation between the epistemological order and the historical order raised in this text have been the object of the most diverse interpretations within Marxism, many of them incompatible with each other. The analysis of Fernández Liria not only establishes the coherence of the different approaches presented in the text, thus revealing the fundamental elements of Marx's conception of method, but also shows the irreducible difference that split it up from the historicist conceptions that have dominated in Marxism, as well as the unfeasibility of the interpretation of dialectics that these conceptions sustain. Los conceptos que permiten explicar de manera científica la realidad social son el resultado de un proceso de abstracción, que va produciendo conceptos cada vez más simples a partir todo el conjunto de datos que se presentan a la aprehensión inmediata, que Marx denomina lo \"concreto representado\" y lo califica como una \"representación caótica\" (43), desde donde no resulta posible el conocimiento de esa realidad.