Developmental Systems Theories

According to the proponents of Developmental Systems Theory and the Causal Parity Thesis, the privileging of the genome as "first among equals" with respect to the development of phenotypic traits is more a reflection of our own heuristic prejudice than of ontology -the underlying causal structures responsible for that specified development no more single out the genome as primary than they do other broadly "environmental" factors. Parting with the methodology of the popular responses to the Thesis, this paper offers a novel criterion for "causal primacy", one that is grounded in the ontology of the unique causal role of dispositional properties. This paper argues that, if the genome is conceptualised as realising dispositional properties that are "directed toward" phenotypic traits, the parity of "causal roles" between genetic and extra-genetic factors is no longer apparent, and further, that the causal primacy of the genome is both plausible and defensible.

The Damasian concept of emotion and the self fits within the emotivist tradition, viewing mind and reason as embodied realities linked to the body and its social and natural interactions. Emotion, for Damásio, creates the context for reason to operate effectively, aligning with anti-Cartesian ideas. Due to the role of emotions, this may be used to suggest that living beings are not just skin-bound entities but processes integrating body and environment. Therefore, we examine both his relevance to contemporary philosophy of mind and self, and his possible contribution to naturalized metaphysics, particularly within Developmental Systems Theory.

In studying the cognitive development of children and adolescents, Piaget identified four major stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational and formal operational. Piaget believed all children pass through these phases to advance to the next level of cognitive development. In each stage, children demonstrate new intellectual abilities and increasingly complex understanding of the world. Stages cannot be" skipped"; intellectual development always follows this sequence. The ages at which children progress through ...

This dissertation is a study of identity as a key category of analysis in need of reinvention. Questioning late modern approaches to critical theory that see the Other as the constitutive outside of the self, I propose a pluralist-monist approach whereby the self is the Other within. Through the lens of posthumanism, I describe identity as discursively embodied and materially embedded, emerging from dialogue with our human and non-human others. Such concept of identity opens up opportunities for a deconstruction of the binary logic prevalent in western philosophy and humanist thought, highlighting the potential for emerging posthuman identities at the levels of ontology and praxis. I examine this potential through two separate but interconnected case studies. The first part of this text is a speculative experimentation where I “make friends” with an algorithm, the Midjourney Bot, prompting it with quotes by scholars in the field of the digital and environmental posthumanities and other branches of critical theory, to collaboratively develop AI-generated artwork exploring key themes around the emergence of identity. The second part engages with the work of Arca, a Venezuelan singer, music producer, and multimedia artist whose work focuses on the relationship between technology and the human body. Analyzing two of Arca’s recent music videos, Nonbinary (2020) and Prada/Rakata (2021), I concentrate on her use of references to ancient Greek and indigenous Venezuelan mythologies in the construction of queer new visions of identity that undermine the oppressiveness of sexual and gendered regimes. Throughout this study, I make use of the Situationist concept of détournement as a methodological tool to misappropriate, divert, and hijack established truths, reevaluating notions of authorship, agency, and accountability, as a way to shed light on the emergence of posthuman forms of identity.

What does it mean to grow up? Why is it important? How does one measure it, and what factors make it so difficult to realize? This paper explores how one's experience in an outdoor adventure education program may be observed, understood, and potentially maximized through the lens of Robert Kegan's constructive-developmental theory. This paper shares the theoretical foundation of constructive-developmental theory and related literature relevant to understanding how a program participant makes meaning of their outdoor adventure experience. The constructivedevelopmental perspective can help inform understanding of participant experiences of change and may direct practices underpinning outdoor adventure programming. Kegan's theory may provide cogent understandings of change, how it is facilitated and measured, and insight as to why some youth thrive and others struggle in outdoor adventure programs.

My current research attempts to build a microontologyöengaging with sciences of the microcosmosöwithin biophilosophy (Hird, 2009). It is enlivened by Donna Haraway's contemplation about what can happen When Species Meet. In this short review, I hope to build on Haraway's important insights to contemplate meetings-with the Other in circumstances when the majority of Others are not species and when this Other majority meets without human recognition or involvement. At the outset of her latest work, Haraway details the community of the human body:`I love the fact that human genomes can be found in only about 10 percent of all the cells that occupy the mundane space I call my body; the other 90 percent of the cells are filled with the genomes of bacteria, fungi, protists, and such, some of which play in a symphony necessary to my being alive at all, and some of which are hitching a ride and doing the rest of me, of us, no harm. I am vastly outnumbered by my tiny companions; better put, I become an adult human being in company with these tiny messmates. To be one is always to become with many'' (page 3). Haraway asks of these families of kin and (taxonomic) kind important questions about the possibilities for becoming-with companion species. Here, relating precedes identity. Not, as Haraway points out, that species do not have ontologies-in-themselves``sometimes-separate heritages both before and lateral to this encounter'' (page 25). But there is contagion at work in Haraway's species-meeting: kin and kind defined less through``arboreal descent'' and more through``the play of bodies'' (page 30). Haraway's companion species impregnation is metaphoric to be sure in its weaving of histories of codependence and production, but it is more than this: a literal enmeshing of bodies and all of their resident companion species (and those species') in a recursive cascade that defines how we know what we know.``Turtling all the way down'' as Haraway, and Isabelle Stengers (1997) put it. This incalculable enmeshment proceeds from a different, non-human-centered ontology than Kant's sublime, Wittgenstein's lion, Lyotard's inhuman and differend, Heidegger's Hand-Werk, Levinas's dog Bobby, and ultimately Derrida's cat, each of whose epistemologies pivot on a comparison between humans and (the) animal that leads to the latter's ultimate disavowal. And while the main meetings that concern Haraway are those of dogs and humans (and all of their cascading technological, political economic, ecological, and ethical entanglements), she is clearly sympathetic to the fact that focusing on animals``big like us'' (Margulis, 2007, personal communication) encourages a profoundly myopic humanism. In short, insofar as the philosophical limit remains the human-animalöand given that humans are animalsöbacteria's faciality' remains obscured within the human imaginative horizon. Microontologies concern companion species that are not species at all: companion with not-species as it were. Populating this`unseen majority' are about 5610 30 bacterial cells on Earth: that's 5000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 bacterial cells (Whitman et al, 1998). Another estimated 10 18 ö1000 000 000 000 000 000öbacteria circulate in the atmosphere attached to dust. Most organisms are bacteria: they evince the greatest organismal diversity, and have dominated evolutionary history. Bacteria invented all major forms of metabolism, multicellularity, nanotechnology, metallurgy, sensory and

'The body' has come to represent a key signifier both within, and beyond, cultural studies. Analyzing and challenging the underlying cultural assumptions of scientific discourses of nature have keenly involved feminist theory in the project of uncovering the culture of matter. The aim of this paper is to review the important insights feminists have brought to bear on the cultural constructions of materiality. I then go on to suggest that considering the matter of culture might be both interesting and useful for feminist theory, especially in opening up new sites of analysis of sexual difference. I explore four areas of materiality that might assist feminist analyses in this area: paradigm shifts, boundaries, technology and the evolution of sexual difference.

Theoretical accounts of development exhibit several internal tensions and face multiple challenges. They span from the problem of the identification of the temporal boundaries of development (beginning and end) to the characterization of the distinctive type of change involved compared to other biological processes. They include questions such as the role to ascribe to the environment or what types of biological systems can undergo development and whether they should include colonies or even ecosystems. In this chapter we discuss these conceptual issues, and we argue that adopting an organizational approach may help solve or clarify them. While development is usually identified with the achievement of an adult form with the capability to reproduce and therefore maintain a lineage, adopting the organizational approach may provide a different strategy, which focuses also on the maintenance of the current organization of the organism. By doing so an organizational approach favors a switch in perspective which consists in analyzing how organisms maintain their viability at each moment of development rather than considering them as going through intermediate stages of a process directed toward a specific goal state. This developmental dimension of biological organization has yet to be given a general and detailed analysis within the organizational theoretical perspective, apart from some preliminary attempts. How a biological organization is maintained through a series of radical organizational changes and what these changes are issues that still require clarification. In this chapter we offer the beginnings of such an analysis of developmental transitions, understood as changes in functionality brought forth by regulatory mechanisms in the context of the continued maintenance of organizational viability at every step.

Human Language, Languages and Speech from the Perspective of Languaging and Enaction. The study of human language in the Western tradition has progressively induced a written bias which has caused the empirical nature of the linguistic phenomenon to be overlooked : an embodied activity, grounded in the interactions, conveying creativity and fostering the hominization of the speaking species. The aim of this introductory study is to sketch the orientations provided by the enactive viewpoint in language studies and to contextualize the contributions of the various studies in the issue. It starts by recalling the polysemy of the word language and the consensus that reigns around this notion and places the written bias in the historical context of the activities that have required reflection on language. It goes on to provide an initial definition of languaging, its functioning and the questioning it implies for certain central issues in language studies. To conclude, it explains the ge...

Software has been part of current culture for more than 50 years. In this era, interest is growing in application of Global Software Development (GSD) project. In project the main focus on the software quality now days. There are many methodologies in the developing the software among that there are most common are heavyweight and lightweight methodologies .Both have pros and cons. we examine the quality assurance techniques of traditional and agile approaches have described the characteristics of some traditional and agile methodologies that are widely used in software development have discussed strength and weakness between the two opposing methodologies and provided the challenges associated with implementing agile process in software industry. The trend is development industry is to move towards the Global Software Development. The characteristics of software projects the lead to challenges in applying traditional project management approaches are examine and agile alternatives ...

"Agile"-denotes the quality of being agile. This paper deals with the concept of agile methodology. It will include some of the software development process models used. In particular the aim of the agile process is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software. This paper compares the agile processes with other software development life cycle models. Advantages and disadvantages of the agile processes are also included in this paper.

This paper proposes to examine the digital event of live streaming as an entanglement of digital engagement, virtual proximity, and virtual embodiment as a possible posthuman concern, foregrounded by the ongoing COVID- 19 pandemic. The transition witnessed in the medium of communication between humans has significantly deconstructed our understanding of the ‘normal’, consequently introducing a new phase of lost corporeality, digitally. Unforeseen excessive employment of the virtual engagement system of live (life) streaming is a testament to the current human extremity. In the light of this transition, the paper attempts to explore the possibility of witnessing some semblance of reality by altering the praxis of normalcy in the practice of the COVID appropriate ‘new normal’ through the virtual medium of a live stream. Since the ontology of human exceptionalism has come under direct attack due to the current pandemic, a reassessment of the human/ technology interphase and its consequ...

In this paper is described an agile methodology for Web development based on User Stories. The main objective in this methodology is to have a more real relationship among application code and requirements. Thus, the development team and the user may come to have a greater understanding during the application development process. It is divided in three disciplines, each one refining the User Stories, from requirements specification using the Navigation Model and Story Cards until the execution of these User Stories to guide the coding. The team can also use these Stories as acceptance tests, which represent the user behaviour when using the system. With all this, in the end the development team may have more guarantees that the Web application represents what the user wants. 2 CONCEPTS AND TECHNIQUES This section presents the main concepts and techniques behind the proposed methodology for developing Web application. The core concept is the User Story (Cohn, 2004). There are also brief descriptions regarding Test Driven Development (Beck, 2003), Behavior Driven Development (North, 2006), Web Engineering (Press-man, Lowe, 2009), Scrum (Schwaber, 2004) and eXtreme Programming (Beck, Andres, 2004). Web Engineering is the starting point that led the studies to other techniques and concepts. BDD is the inspiration model for the methodology. The use of TDD is heavily encouraged in one of the disciplines of the agile methodology that is proposed here. Scrum-principally-and XP ideas are reused in some points in this process. 2.1 User Story User Stories describes functionally what it is requested and valuable for the User. In a User Story there are 3 C's which are: Card, Conversation and Confirmation; and follows the principle of INVEST:

In the last two decades, Jeanette Winterson has shown a growing interest in the limits and consequences of the evolution of technology, which have a political and ethical impact. Winterson sees in bodily modifications through the use of technology the perpetuation a social model that preserves the objectification of women, the subordination of bodies to the sexual preferences of the heterosexual male, and the reinforcement of heteronormativity. Faced with this reality, Jeanette Winterson cannot help but wonder about the impact that heteronormative technology is going to have on women, especially on the younger generation, who is going to grow in a society with such sexist standards. In her sci-fi novels, Jeanette Winterson predicts a future that is already part of our present: the cosmetic surgery industry lives off physical changes fuelled by a social pressure driven by male desire, and the creation of sexbot prototypes further reinforces said aesthetic patterns. In her essays she strengthens these ideas on the basis of current technological development and predicts future developments based on what the big enterprises are currently working on and what their short-term goals are. Needless to say, none of these projects seem concerned about the gender inequality in their developments. Thus, the author takes a pessimistic perspective on technological evolution as she faces a society whose pillars promote inequality, making it rather hard to eradicate them.

Naturalistic observations of infant/caregiver social attention have yielded rich information about human social develop- ment. However, observational data are expensive, laborious, and reliant on fallible human coders. We model interactions between caregivers and infants using a three dimensional sim- ulation environment in order to gain greater insight into the development of infant attention sharing, specifically gaze fol- lowing. Most models of infant cognition have been only ab- stractly linked to the detail of a real life environment and to the perception-and-action physicality of human infants. Our simulation uses human data from videotaped infant/caregiver interactions and a rich 3D environment to model the develop- ment of gaze following. Initial tests suggest that infant gaze following can be learned in our simulation using parameters derived from behavioral data.

To anticipate a question that may arise in many readers' minds: why is a special issue of EJES on European posthumanism appropriate right now? Questions like this can have simple answers. And one answer to this question is simple enough. Posthumanism is in the air. It has been so for some years, and the themes and concerns that it names are now shaping English Studies in discernible ways, even when these themes are not designated by the term posthumanism. Overriding and recurring questions on what it means to be a human in the twenty-first century lend urgency to any inquiry that appears to suggest, through that fateful post-prefix, that we have already come out on the other side of humanism and humanity. We know, of course, that we have not-at least not quite yet. But instability caused by humanism's and humanity's precariousness on the one hand and their abiding, felt presence, on the other, renders posthumanism a compelling and apposite label for our times. In its most straightforward usage, this term is linked to the 'technological imagination' (de Lauretis, Huyssen and Woodward, 1980), or to what has been described as 'a mindset that enables people to think with technology, to transform what is known into what is possible' (Balsamo, 2011: 7). In more sensational usages, it countenances the conceit that it might not be hubristic to speculate that the human condition, or at least some aspects of it, can be reengineered. Away from those scenarios, the term accrues further associations specific to the current historical moment and its unprecedented challenges and affordances. Thus, for instance, questions about the nature of animal being and the extent of ecological responsibility have become increasingly pressing. Further, the evolving interfaces between humans, machines and prosthetic extensions lead to scenarios that have become conceivable only in our time. They bear distinct ethical and political provocations that raise issues concerning inhumanity, while the increasing interest in 'worlds and universes without us' scenarios brings home just

Piaget's theory, which is at the center of cognitive approach and major theoretical foundation in terms of the intelligent development, explains children's language learning by using four stages of cognitive development. For instance, Piaget maintains that Egocentrism is related to language learning as an inner speech and can affect on differentiation in cognitive development. This paper is to focus on the important educational foundation and information, which can prove how Language Egocentrism (LE) and Language Differentiation (LD) have an influence on native and second language acquisition for young children (two to seven years old), and what characteristics can be included in the subcategories of LE and LD.

Introducing the terms "science/fiction" and "imagineering", the essay aims to move beyond the "two cultures" divide and emphasises instead the interdependency between science and literature or, more specifically, between "real science" and "science fiction". It argues that technoscientific visions are indebted to narrative imaginings and that the promises of technoscience, in turn, influence individual and collective fantasies. The analytical focus is on imagineerings of the posthuman body or subject in various types of science/fiction. In order to challenge the orthodoxy of posthumanism's progressive trajectory, these figurations will be scrutinised in view of underlying liberal-humanist and, hence, androcentric, ethnocentric and anthropocentric assumptions.

Of words and terms, I often think, they are what they door what can be done with them. I want to ask, in this brief afterword, not what posthumanism is but what it does, which is also a way of asking, what it does now and what might it do for those who still invoke it. So the point becomes to say, with Robert Sawyer, Monika Sosnowska, and the contributors "we have always been posthuman," but also then to ask "what can and should we do with that now?" Although most references to origins are dubious (and the unsavory powers associated with them), I start with two early invocations of both postmodernism and the posthuman, fully aware, in the context of this special issue, that it would be no surprise to succumb to the temptation to add "early" before any use of the term modern, modernism, or modernity, or to substitute "early modern" for any of the references to either modernism or postmodernism. This was of course very much on my mind in the years of collaboration with Scott Maisano on the volume Renaissance Posthumanism, which we thought of not as a variety of posthumanism but as an attempt to understand how the stage for later (including recent) disenchantment with and the de-centering of the human was more than capaciously set by the thinkers and the writers at heart of anything one might call Renaissance humanism. 1 In the heady days of 1976, as postmodernism was taking root both as a way of describing the world and as a staple of academic discourse, Ihab Hassan seems to have coined the term "posthumanist" in "Prometheus as Performer: Toward a Posthumanist Culture," which was first the keynote address at the International Symposium on Postmodern Performance and then later a published text appearing in the Georgia Review. 2 "Prometheus as Performer"

Cyborg is defined by Donna Haraway, in her “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1986), as “a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity.” A cyborg or a cybernetic organism is a hybrid of machine and organism. The cyborg theory de-stabilizes from gender politics, traditional notions of feminism, critical race theory, and queer theory and identity studies. The technologies associated with the cyborg theory are complex and diverse. It valorizes the “monstrous, hybrid, disabled, mutated or otherwise ‘imperfect’ or ‘unwhole’ body.” Scholars have founded it useful and fruitful in the social and cultural analysis of health and medicine. Cyborg theory is an intriguing approach to analyze the range of arenas such as biotechnology, medical issues and health conditions that incorporate disability, menopause, female reprodu...

This book brings together well-researched essays by established scholars as well as forward-thinking aspiring researchers to study how literary and non-literary texts highlight 'animal presence' and explore non-anthropocentric relationships between human and animals. To be precise, it offers Posthumanist readings of animal-centric Literary and Cultural texts. The contributors take positions that put the precepts and premises of humanism into question by considering the animal presence in texts seriously. The essays collected here focus primarily on literary and cultural texts from varied interdisciplinary and theoretically-informed perspectives advanced by critical approaches such as Critical Animal Studies and Posthumanism. Contributors select texts beyond geographical and period boundaries, and demonstrate how practices of close reading give rise to new ways of thinking about animals. By implicating the "Animal turn" for the field of literary and cultural studies, this book urges us to problematize the separation of the human from other animals and rethink the hierarchical order of beings through close readings of select texts. It offers some fresh perspectives of Posthumanist theory, so that we can revisit those criteria that created species' difference from the early ages of human civilization. This book will constitute a rich and thorough scholarly resource on the politics of representation of animals in literature and culture. The essays in this book are empirically and theoretically informed; and they explore a range of dynamic, captivating and highly relevant topics. This book does more than simply decentering the 'human' by bringing animals onto the center of critical discourse and challenging the anthropocentric hierarchical relationship, which are the basis of Posthumanist readings. It also highlights the theoretical intersections between Animal Theory and other relevant cultural theories, that is the latest advancement in this field. The volume is divided into four main sections

Gaze following is the ability to look where someone else is looking. We discuss recent progress in developing computational models explaining why and how human infants learn this behavior. A key feature of these models is the attempt to describe the real time interaction of the developing infant with its social environment. Such models are useful for theorizing about the cognitive development of infants, they have the potential to shed light on developmental disorders in which gaze following does not emerge normally, they ...

Feminist productions in the fields of literary, cultural and social studies are almost exclusively-though for good reasons-informed by a radical constructivism. Drawing on discourse analysis and semiotics, such work relies predominantly on gender as a category of analysis in order to examine the social, cultural and psychic construction of subjectivity, while neglecting questions of biological sex. The general refusal of scholars from those disciplines to engage with the materiality of bodies, with their physiological, biochemical or microbiological details, forms and formations, is indicative of an anti-essentialist stance which is very understandable from a historico-political perspective: When politicians and scientists have for centuries recurred to "natural" (because biological) differences to explain and legitimate social discrimination, oppression and inequality between the sexes and between human beings of different classes and ethnicities, it was more than necessary to counter, if not downright deny, biologistic argumentations. Meanwhile, however, the hostile attitude towards the natural sciences and empirical research has "naturalised" itself and the socio-cultural framing of bodies and gender has simply become the counterpart of the ideology known as biological reductionism, insofar as influences of the environment and society as well as individual technologies of the self count as the determining factors now that, in their turn, can be acted upon by the feminist subject. As a consequence of this disciplinary division of labour, scientific debates between and within different academic fields remain trapped in the dead-end street of the dualisms nature/culture, essentialism/constructivism, materiality/discourse and sex/gender. Judith Butler's attempt (in Gender Trouble and even more so in Bodies that Matter) to dissolve the sex/gender dichotomy by negating the preceding materiality of gender or, conversely, by postulating sex as a discursive and performative construct, is not particularly fruitful for transdisciplinary models of explanations and research questions beyond the nature/culture or nature/nurture divide.i I am not arguing for the abandonment of the (de)constructivist method in gender studies-on the contrary: as I will argue in more detail later, I would like to foster a much broader and literally deeper understanding of the constructedness of bodies as "material". This understanding would result in an approach that balances the overemphasis of discursive analyses not only by including aspects of bodily (self-)experience, how bodies are present in space and time, and the social practices of the corporeal, but also brings in the weight of biological dimensions in the construction of subjectivities-without, however, reinforcing naturalist-essentialist assumptions. If this

Charlotte Mutsaers’ essayistic and literary work displays a complex relation to Kafka’s animal writing. While Mutsaers often refers in her work to Kafka’s animal texts, she also distances herself from Kafka’s representation of a ‘becoming-animal’ in his short story Die Verwandlung (1912). In order to better understand Mutsaers’ relation to Kafka and to gain insight into the underlying animal poetics and politics of the Dutch author, this article focuses on Mutsaers’ novel Rachels Rokje (1994). Using the framework of the Cultural and Literary Animal Studies (CLAS) and Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking on animality, it shows how Mutsaers both deterritorialises and reterritorialises Kafka’s animals in her novel. By referring to a zoe -approach as defined by Braidotti (2011), this article argues that Mutsaers’ zoopoetics not only occurs in a playful manner, but also in a biopolitical perspective in which a form of affinity and egalitarianism between species is put forward.

Naturalistic observations of infant/caregiver social attention have yielded rich information about human social development. However, observational data are expensive, laborious, and reliant on fallible human coders. We model interactions between caregivers and infants using a three dimensional simulation environment in order to gain greater insight into the development of infant attention sharing, specifically gaze following. Most models of infant cognition have been only abstractly linked to the detail of a real life environment and ...

In this paper I will investigate the possibility of defending the concept of 'mental representation' against certain contemporary critiques. Some authors, like Anthony Chemero, argue that it is possible to explain offline actions with dynamic concepts. Hence, the dynamic discourse preempts the representational one. I doubt that this is a recommendable strategy. A form of representation is necessary, though one which is different from the classical one. Instead of eliminating the concept of representation (as radical dynamicists do) or of splitting cognitive explanation in two separate discourses (as the adepts of the hybrid cognition version do), I consider that a dynamic concept of 'representation' is a better option. In my view, the higher level order resulted from the complex brain-body-environment coupling can be interpreted as being representational in nature. The dynamic paradigm involves a significant change concerning the intentional nature of representational states: the basic forms of representations are not maps of reality implemented as such in the brain, but limit conditions, attractors constraining the cognitive system's evolution in its space state to reach its goals. On a certain threshold of complexity, the system develops stable attractors and attractor landscapes which could be interpreted as standing for something outside the system. This conception offers the advantages of avoiding preemption argument, of unifying the cognitive explanation and, by its interscalar account, offers dynamic tools for building more complex artificial intelligent systems.

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Naturalistic observations of infant/caregiver social attention have yielded rich information about human social development. However, observational data are expensive, laborious, and reliant on fallible human coders. We model interactions between caregivers and infants using a three dimensional simulation environment in order to gain greater insight into the development of infant attention sharing, specifically gaze following. Most models of infant cognition have been only abstractly linked to the detail of a real life environment and ...

Cognition is defined as the mental processes that is involved in obtaining and processing information which are essential for daily living; it helps the person with problem solving, planning and improve intelligence (Magni & Bilotta, 2016). According to Bjorklund (2005)

Cognition is defined as the mental processes that is involved in obtaining and processing information which are essential for daily living; it helps the person with problem solving, planning and improve intelligence (Magni & Bilotta, 2016). According to Bjorklund (2005) cognitive abilities that helps the individuals to understand the environment and adopt to it accordingly includes attending, perceiving, learning, thinking, and remembering. Cognitive development is considered as the changes happen in those mental abilities (Shaffer & Kipp, 2010). There are three main cognitive perspectives in development: Piaget's theory of cognitive development, Vygotsky's Sociocultural viewpoint and Information Processing theory. This assignment will be focusing in these three theories in detail. Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development Piaget's theory of cognitive development is also known as genetic epistemology (Shaffer & Kipp, 2010). It looks at how children develop rationally throughout the entire childhood. He stated that the way children think is profoundly different to the way adults think (Piaget,1936). His theory is based on his construct of cognitive structures which means the physical and mental abilities that causes the acts of intelligence, these structures are also known as Cognitive Schema (Ikiugu, 2007). According to Piaget, intelligence helps people to adopt to the environment and in the process of adaptation, schemas change through the assimilation and accommodation process (Ikiugu, 2007). Assimilation is the process of understanding new experiences by merging them into prevailing schemes and accommodation is the process of altering prevailing schemes to understand or adapt to new experiences (Shaffer & Kipp, 2010). The start of this process is from the concept of Equilibrium, it's a synchronization between schemes and experiences of a person (Shaffer & Kipp, 2010). Piaget stated that due to changes in thinking patterns, development

Reconstructions of Romantic-era life science in general, and epigenesis in particular, frequently take the Kantian logic of autotelic ''self-organization'' as their primary reference point. I argue in this essay that the Kantian conceptual rubric hinders our historical and theoretical understanding of epigenesis, Romantic and otherwise. Neither a neutral gloss on epigenesis, nor separable from the episte-mological deflation of biological knowledge that has received intensive scrutiny in the history and philosophy of science, Kant's heuristics of autonomous ''self-or-ganization'' in the third Critique amount to the strategic capture of epigenesis from nature, for thought, in thought's critical transcendence of nature. This essay looks to Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and his English contemporary Erasmus Darwin to begin to reconstruct the rigorously materialist, naturalist, and empiricist theories of epigen-esis (still) marginalized by Kantian argumentation. As theorists of environmental and social collaboration in the ontogeny of viable forms, Lamarck and Darwin illuminate features of our own epigenetic turn obscured by the rhetoric of ''self-organization,'' allowing us to glimpse an alternative Romantic genealogy of the biological present.

This article aims to present the main characteristics of the Developmental Systems Theory (DST) promoted by Susan Oyama and its important consequences in the field of the philosophy of biology, comparing it to the French sociologist Bruno Latour's Actor-Network Theory (ANT), trying to bring out the peculiarities that the two approaches have in common and what their promises are.

In the following essay I would like to go back and reconnect a few things that may have become disjointed in sketches of posthumanist theory. In particular, the points to revisit are: the poststructuralist critique of the subject, the postmodernist approach to autobiography and the notion of the posthuman itself. I will briefly return to the work of Haraway and Hayles, before setting out the relationship between the often proclaimed 'death of the subject', postmodern autobiography, and a few examples of what might be termed 'posthuman auto-biographies'. Post-human-ism As the posthuman gets a life, it will be fascinating to observe and engage adaptations of narrative lives routed through an imaginary of surfaces, networks, assemblages, prosthetics, and avatars. (Smith, 2011, p. 571) It's probably fair to say that the official (auto)biography of posthumanism runs something like this: Traces of proto-posthumanist philosophy can be easily found in Nietzsche, Darwin, Marx, Freud and Heidegger and their attacks on various ideologemes of humanism. This critique was then taken further by the (in)famous antihumanism of the so-called '(French) poststructuralists' (Althusser, Lacan, Barthes, Kristeva, Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze, Derrida y), who were translated , 'homogenized', received and institutionalized in the English-speaking r