Non c’è dubbio: la scienza è il basso ostinato del tempo, il tema principale della nostra cultura. I giornali dedicano uno spazio crescente all’ultima scoperta, i festival e le letture pubbliche veicolano le nuove visioni del mondo e la lettura scientifica dei fatti e dei comportamenti fa capolino anche nel quotidiano. Il rischio è quello di dimenticare che la scienza è una pratica cognitiva,non una piramide di verità rivelate e accumulate una volta per tutte. Educare alla scienza significa dunque (...) spaziare tra conoscenze variamente interconnesse, attraversate dalle correnti dell’incertezza, evitando cristallizzazioni ideologiche e tentazioni mediatiche di semplificazione. I saggi qui raccolti si muovono fra fisica teorica, biologia e intelligenza artificiale: l’eredità di Turing, la figura di Majorana, la scala di Planck, il bosone di Higgs, i sistemi viventi, gli agenti economici, il riduzionismo e i processi emergenti, passando per i rapporti tra scienza, letteratura e arte. Il tutto organizzato come una serie di piccole variazioni musicali sul tema delle proiezioni culturali e mediatiche della scienza e delle sue inevitabili implicazioni epistemologiche, etiche, estetiche. (shrink)

The article explores cross-modal iconic relations in nine diverse Western-music songs ranging from 1600 to 2015, all of them thematizing dysphoric weeping. Initial input comes from five recurrent features observed in ancient Greek texts associated with performative events, including the prominence of sound, interjections and strong self-referentiality, repetitions and refrains, the motif of endlessness, and tears associated with streams of water, dew, and libation liquids. The analysis adopts Peirce’s conceptual distinction between image, diagram, and metaphor iconicity, although the continuum reading (...) proposed by several scholars is ultimately favored. The sample turns out to offer plenty of evidence of iconic relations. Interjections, falsetto, verbal repetitions, musical repetitions, musical rendering of sighs and endlessness, ostinato patterns, downward notes, and water images (rain and rivers), all of this is shown to substantiate cross-modal iconicity encompassing weeping, lyrics, music (including musical notation), and images, in different combinations. Quantitative investigations confirming/disconfirming and adding iconicity patterns, and comparative analyses linking Western and non-Western lament traditions constitute desiderata for future work. (shrink)

The meticulous printing at a moderate price of this remarkable work is a credit to the publisher. During the past thirty years M. Gilson has been the greatest single influence upon lay readers in reviving serious interest in the clerical speculation, which for twelve hundred years conscientiously spanned the gap between the collapse of Greek science and Roman law and the late sweep of modern sciences and their secular philosophies. Preoccupation with short-term apologetics after the Reformation increased clerical aloofness from (...) professional science and philosophy and probably increased the non-scholastic’s assumption that the Christian Era was merely a dark or middle age between ancient and modern intellectual life. In fact, early and medieval thinkers gradually confronted their Christian faith and pagan science and against the basso ostinato of secular warfare developed the varied themes of scientific theology and human philosophy, which crystallized into the mature Scholasticism of the thirteenth century. Hence the seventeenth century founders of modern philosophy, as M. Gilson first found à propos of Descartes, started to philosophize from a metaphysical inheritance much richer than the original Greek patrimony, especially in the light it cast upon the reality of God, the origin of the universe in which man lives, the nature and destiny of man himself. To overlook this linking inheritance, is to make modern philosophy less intelligible; while to personally judge its value, we must return to its historical sources. This is the task to which M. Gilson has devoted his pioneering judgment; this work is probably the final synthesis of his scholarship. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.1 (2001) 181-196 [Access article in PDF] Bookmarks What is Genius? Denis Dutton There's a school of thought which holds that there's nothing much of interest that can be said about genius. The root idea is older than Kant, but it was well summarized by him: genius is a natural endowment, deep, strange, and mysterious, at least with respect to putative explanations. Schubert can get up (...) in the morning and before lunch knock off five songs that captivate us hundreds of years later. There's no way for us to account for this, and we ought not to expect, Kant claims, that genius can explain itself either: Schubert doesn't have a clue how he does it.Yet trying to figure out how creative geniuses do it remains a permanent source of fascination, most of it fairly naïve. When the ingénue reporter is sent out by the City Editor to interview the famous, crusty old novelist, the first question is normally, "Where do you get your ideas?" Of course, if the novelist knew that, he'd not be likely to blab it in the press. Kant's point is that he cannot really know; no one can. Monroe Beardsley relays a story about Picasso, who claimed to suffer from "an indigestion of greenness" from walking in the woods on a summer's day: "I must empty this sensation into a picture," Picasso said. "Green dominates it. The painter paints as if in urgent need to discharge himself of his sensations and his visions." Beardsley observes that green indigestion could have been even more plausibly used to "explain" a red painting ("I needed an antidote to all that green"), or a pen-and-ink drawing ("I needed to get away from color"), or anything else. There is in this a general point about why we are so often disappointed by interviews with artists. The artist can do; the artist can't explain how. [End Page 181]It does not follow, however, that nothing of interest can be learned, at least at a descriptive level, about genius. Dean Keith Simonton has spent most of a career looking at the subject as a psychologist, and his Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives on Creativity (Oxford University Press, $27.50) ties together much of his research and that of others in a way that extends thinking on genius far beyond armchair meditations or mere platitudes. At the heart of Simonton's project are two very different ideas: first, he argues that evolution and processes of natural selection provide illuminating models to explain the existence and operation of creative genius in the sciences and the arts. Second, he propounds a rather more dubious thesis, that the process of natural selection itself is an adequate model for understanding genius at work, that the history of human ideas demonstrates a kind of secondary evolution. To these hypotheses, Simonton adds a further Darwinian overlay: he returns repeatedly to the personality and biography of Charles Darwin himself as the paradigm of a life of creative genius. While this has the advantage of anchoring the discussion, giving it a kind of ostinato ground, it diverts Simonton from the manifestations of genius, especially artistic genius, which do not resemble Darwin's personal example.Creative genius is defined by Simonton as the capacity to originate scientific discoveries, artistic works, technical inventions, or engage in political leadership, in a manner that achieves what is conventionally termed eminence. The eminent person creates, discovers, or invents something that passes the test of time and, like the similar test devised by Hume to mark out artistic greatness, appeals to cultures beyond that of the original act of creation. It is not hard for the philosophically trained reader to devise counter-examples to Simonton's general theses, but the value of his book does not require a rigorous definition at the outset. Whatever genius is, and however we might dispute it, there is no doubting that Leonardo Da Vinci, Shakespeare, Newton, and Einstein count as creative geniuses in Simonton's sense. High raw IQ is frequently associated with genius... (shrink)

It is by now something of a commonplace for readers of Blanchot to claim that the limpid quality of his prose and the wealth of allusion woven through even his more opaque writings often have the paradoxical effect of making his work both engagingly lucid and approachable and utterly resistant to interpretation or even comprehension in any ordinary sense. At the core of this paradoxical experience is a theory of creativity that Blanchot frequently alludes to and often appears to be (...) about to reveal before allowing it to vanish into what he calls his “third night,” a darkness beyond both day and night, being and non-being, from which the artist, writer or composer draws the inspiration required for both the initiation and completion of the textual artefact or, as will be argued here, the musical event. Focusing on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice that Blanchot outlines most fully in “The Gaze of Orpheus,” and deploying this writer’s own theory and practice of xenosonics, the fundamental question here will be – and to borrow from his friend Bataille – the “use-value” of Blanchot’s evasive theory of creativity for the creator of music, text or art. (shrink)