Born shortly after the close of the Civil War, she witnessed during her life the most momentous transformation of the nation she saw the change from an agricultural community into an industrial empire the tremendous development of capital in this country, with the accompanying misery and degradation of labor. In the real history of the struggle for human emancipation, her name will be found among the foremost of her time. Voltairine de Cleyre belongs to this gallant array of rebels who swore allegiance to the cause of universal liberty, thus forfeiting the respect of all “honorable citizens,” and bringing upon their heads the persecution of the ruling class. They inaugurated the tremendous sex revolt among the American women-a purely native movement which has yet to find its historian. Hardened by a fierce struggle and strengthened by a vicious persecution, those brave champions of sex-freedom defied the respectable mob by proclaiming their independence from prevailing cant and hypocrisy. To call their attention to these facts is quite as futile as to point out that the tocsin of revolt resounds in the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Whitman, Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and other seers of America just as futile as to prove to them that the pioneers in the movement for woman’s emancipation in America were permeated with Anarchist thoughts and feelings. James, Moses Harman, Ross Winn, and a host of other Anarchists who sprang from the native stock and soil. Greene, or Benjamin Tucker, nor familiar with the propagandistic work of Albert R. Neither are they acquainted with the writings of Lysander Spooner, Josiah Warren, Stephen Pearl Andrews, William B. Those wise Solons are ignorant of the fact that Anarchist theories and ideas were propounded in our Commonwealth ere Proudhon or Bakunin entered the arena of intellectual struggle and formulated their thesis of perfect freedom and economic independence in Anarchy. Hence the ridiculous attempt of our lawmakers to stamp out Anarchy, by passing a statute which forbids Anarchists from other lands to enter the country. The average American still holds to the belief that Anarchism is a foreign poison imported into the States from decadent Europe by criminal paranoiacs. But let us hope that we will find time and means to publish at least a part of this correspondence in the near future. To collect and publish this correspondence as a part of Voltairine de Cleyre’s works is impossible the task is too big for the present undertaking. Those letters addressed to her comrades, friends, and admirers would form her real biography in them we trace her heroic struggles, her activity, her beliefs, her doubts, her mental changes-in short, her whole life, mirrored in a manner no biographer will ever be able to equal. Like many other women in public life, Voltairine de Cleyre was a voluminous letter writer. What could be added to this splendid tribute by Jay Fox to the memory of Voltairine de Cleyre? These admirable words express the sentiments of all the friends and comrades of that remarkable woman whose whole life was dedicated to a dominant idea. Although MNs activity may in fact be a mechanism we use to understand goal-directed behavior, it is certainly not logically necessary and sufficient for understanding goal-directed behavior.“Nature has the habit of now and then producing a type of human being far in advance of the times an ideal for us to emulate a being devoid of sham, uncompromising, and to whom the truth is sacred a being whose selfishness is so large that it takes in the whole human race and treats self only as one of the great mass a being keen to sense all forms of wrong, and powerful in denunciation of it one who can reach into the future and draw it nearer. MN activity, on my view, is more closely related to understanding goal-directed behavior than intentional actions. I take into consideration some of their theories. MNs are in these last years the focus of a inter-disciplinary debate about the correct interpretation of the many experiments on MNs between many scientists and philosophers. The central argument of the book is that «the brain that acts is also and above all a brain that understands» (Ib., p.3). One of the best books in reporting experiments and implications arising from this discovery is Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia (2006). These conceptual preliminaries help us to understand and explain better, on my view, the discovery of mirror neurons (MNs). The third set concerns the distinction between possession and use of mental functions. A second set of reflections is about mind-body problem. My first group of reflections is about the way in which mind-body problem is placed within the “neurosciences”.
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