Examines how Leo Strauss sought to recover "nature," which he saw as inseparable from genuine philosphy since its inception in ancient Greece.

Nella sua straordinaria opera scientifica, Franco Selleri si è sempre opposto alla rinuncia alla comprensione della struttura della realtà e della natura degli oggetti fisici, che egli considera come l’elemento caratterizzante delle principali teorie della fisica del Novecento e che è stata stigmatizzata da Karl Popper come tesi della “fine della strada in fisica”. Sin dalla fine degli anni ’60, egli ha sviluppato quella riflessione critica nei confronti delle teorie fondamentali della fisica moderna, in particolar modo della teoria delle particelle (...) elementari e della meccanica quantistica, e in un secondo tempo delle teorie relativistiche, che contraddistingue il suo programma di ricerca. Nel corso della sua intensa e infaticabile attività scientifica, Selleri è entrato in proficuo contatto con molti grandi fisici e filosofi della scienza, instaurando un intenso dialogo critico con Louis de Broglie, John Bell e Karl Popper. Le sue originali e non convenzionali ricerche lo hanno portato a risultati significativi non solo nell’ambito dei fondamenti della fisica, ma anche della storia e della filosofia della fisica. Per questo abbiamo voluto dedicare un numero speciale di Isonomia al nostro impareggiabile amico e collega, sia per la sua passione instancabile e la sua profonda conoscenza dei fondamenti formali, concettuali e filosofici delle teorie della fisica contemporanea, sia e forse ancor più come maestro di una prospettiva perennemente critica che egli ha sempre seguito e proposto con particolare rigore ed estrema determinazione. (shrink)

Baseado no cogito cartesiano, mas também o submetendo a importantes reformulações, Husserl desenvolve o seu próprio conceito de subjetividade transcendental. Tais reformulações concernem, sobretudo, aos tópicos do tempo, da redução e da intersubjetividade. O presente artigo pretende apresentar e discutir como se vinculam tais temas, visando a contribuir na compreensão do estatuto do transcendental na fenomenologia husserliana. PALAVRAS-CHAVE – Husserl. Subjetividade transcendental. Tempo. ABSTRACT Based on Cartesian cogito, but also submitting it to important reformations, Husserl develops his own concept of (...) transcendental subjectivity. These reformations concern especially the topics of time, reduction and intersubjectivity. This article intends to present and discuss the link of these themes, aiming contribute to the comprehension of the status of transcendental in husserlian phenomenology. KEY WORDS – Husserl. Transcendental subjectivity. Time. (shrink)

Assessing the scope of his own phenomenological project was always of philosophical concern to Husserl. Perhaps because of this, he has never ceased to reformulate his concepts and theories, aimed at an ever greater degree of depth. This interest by the limits of Husserlian phenomenology continues in the activity of his interpreters. This article intends to present and discuss some of these readings, trying to stress that the strategy of favouring ethical components to think the limits of Husserl’s phenomenology is (...) not a fruitful alternative. The discussion should favour ontological parameters, based in the approach of key concepts correctly selected, especially the concepts of infinite and living present. (shrink)

Leo Strauss's approach to politics may indeed be regarded as realist. Some traits of his thought, however, seem to align him to an opposite, idealist tendency. Among these are Strauss's criticism of the moderns for their rejection of the political philosophy of the classics on the grounds of its being utopian and his attention toward the concept of natural right. This article shows how these traits, which at first glance oppose the classification of Strauss as a political realist, can be (...) traced back to a framework that is able to lessen, and even overturn, the apparently idealistic character of his thought. In doing so, it delves into Strauss's understanding of ancient utopianism - notably, of the best city described in Plato's Republic - and his criticism of the modern interpretation thereof. Explaining why Strauss regarded such an interpretation as based on a fundamental misunderstanding, the article emphasizes the role played by the Biblical tradition in turning philosophy from a theoretical way of life into a practical pursuit in the service of the political sphere. This also sheds light on Strauss's twofold definition of political philosophy as both the philosophical treatment of politics and the 'political' (i.e. rhetorical) introduction to philosophy. (shrink)

Terms of service of on-line platforms too often contain clauses that are potentially unfair to the consumer. We present an experimental study where machine learning is employed to automatically detect such potentially unfair clauses. Results show that the proposed system could provide a valuable tool for lawyers and consumers alike.

This work evaluated the structure of dreams in people affected by schizophrenia. The verbal reports of 123 schizophrenic patients were compared with 123 dream reports from a control group. In accordance with the Jungian conceptualization of, dreams as texts, dream reports were assessed using textual analysis processing techniques.Significant differences were found in textual parameters, showing that the dreams reports of schizophrenic patients differ from those of the control group. It is thus possible that schizophrenia probably underlies changes in the oneiric (...) production and dream reports. This work confirms the value of textual analysis in the study of oneiric material. (shrink)

While temporal preparation has frequently been examined through the manipulation of foreperiods, the role of force level during temporal preparation remains underexplored. In our study, we propose to manipulate mental training of attentional control in order to shed light on the role of the force level and autonomic nervous system in the temporal preparation of an action. Forty subjects, divided into mental training group (n = 20) and without mental training group (n = 20), participated in this study. The influence (...) of the attentional control and force levels on the autonomic nervous system were measured using the skin conductance response and the heart rate variability; the accuracy of the motor responses was measured using a method derived from machine learning. Behaviorally, only the mental training group reinforced its motor and attentional control. When using short foreperiod durations and high force level, motor and attentional control decreased, consistent with the dominant sympathetic system. This resulted in an increased anticipation rate of responses with a higher reaction time compared to the long foreperiods duration and low force level, in which the reaction time significantly decreased, with enhancement of the expected force level, showing consistency with the dominant parasympathetic system. Interestingly, results revealed a predictive relationship between the sympathovagal balance and motor and attentional control during the long foreperiods and low force level. Finally, results demonstrate that attentional mental training leads to the reinforcement of interactions between the autonomic nervous system and attentional processes which are involved in the temporal preparation of a force task. (shrink)

_Philosophy of Molecular Medicine: Foundational Issues in Theory and Practice_ aims at a systematic investigation of a number of foundational issues in the field of molecular medicine. The volume is organized around four broad modules focusing, respectively, on the following key aspects: What are the nature, scope, and limits of molecular medicine? How does it provide explanations? How does it represent and model phenomena of interest? How does it infer new knowledge from data and experiments? The essays collected here, authored (...) by prominent scientists and philosophers of science, focus on a handful of mainstream topics in the philosophical literature, such as _causation_, _explanation_, _modeling_, and _scientific inference_. These previously unpublished contributions shed new light on these traditional topics by integrating them with problems, methods, and results from three prominent areas of contemporary biomedical science: _basic research_, _translational_ and _clinical research_, and _clinical practice_. (shrink)

In this study, bullying is examined in light of the “prosocial security hypothesis”— i.e., the hypothesis that insecure attachment, with temperamental dispositions such as sensation seeking, may foster individualistic, competitive value orientations and problem behaviors. A group of 375 Italian students (53% female; Mean age = 12.58, SD = 1.08) completed anonymous questionnaires regarding attachment security, social values, sensation seeking, and bullying behaviors. Path analysis showed that attachment to mother was negatively associated with bullying of others, both directly and through (...) the mediating role of conservative socially oriented values, while attachment to father was directly associated with victimization. Sensation seeking predicted bullying of others and victimization both directly and through the mediating role of conservative socially oriented values. Adolescents’ gender affected how attachment moderated the relationship between sensation seeking and problem behavior. (shrink)

We reconstruct essential features of Lagrange’s theory of analytical functions by exhibiting its structure and basic assumptions, as well as its main shortcomings. We explain Lagrange’s notions of function and algebraic quantity, and we concentrate on power-series expansions, on the algorithm for derivative functions, and the remainder theorem—especially on the role this theorem has in solving geometric and mechanical problems. We thus aim to provide a better understanding of Enlightenment mathematics and to show that the foundations of mathematics did not, (...) for Lagrange, concern the solidity of its ultimate bases, but rather purity of method—the generality and internal organization of the discipline. (shrink)

In this study, we use temporally aligned word embeddings and a large diachronic corpus of English to quantify language change in a data-driven, scalable way, which is grounded in language use. We show a unique and reliable relation between measures of language change and age of acquisition (AoA) while controlling for frequency, contextual diversity, concreteness, length, dominant part of speech, orthographic neighborhood density, and diachronic frequency variation. We analyze measures of language change tackling both the change in lexical representations and (...) the change in the relation between lexical representations and the words with the most similar usage patterns, showing that they capture different aspects of language change. Our results show a unique relation between language change and AoA, which is stronger when considering neighborhood-level measures of language change: Words with more coherent diachronic usage patterns tend to be acquired earlier. The results support theories positing a link between ontogenetic and ethnogenetic processes in language. (shrink)

Der vorliegende Band befasst sich zentral mit dem Problem der Anwendung der Transzendentalphilosophie auf die praktische Philosophie. Zu Ehren von Marco Ivaldo haben sich einige der führenden Fichte-Interpreten zusammengetan, um das Thema diachronisch zu behandeln. Angefangen bei Kant bis hin zur zeitgenössischen Philosophie werden einige der philosophischen Hauptpositionen (Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Husserl, Deleuze und viele weitere) auf ihre Verträglichkeit mit dem transzendentalphilosophischen Ansatz in praktischer Hinsicht geprüft. ********************** The present volume deals with the problem of the application of transcendental (...) philosophy to practical philosophy. In honour of Marco Ivaldo, some of the leading experts on Fichte have teamed up to treat the subject diachronically. From Kant to contemporary philosophy, some of the main philosophical positions (Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Husserl, Deleuze, and many others) are examined in view of their compatibility with the transcendental-philosophical approach in a practical way. (shrink)

The social-interactive nature of the human being has produced different political, ethical, and technological structures. The Internet is one of them. A thorough understanding of the World Wide Web’s role, potentiality and risks surely requires sound sociological, psychological and cognitive paradigms but it always and above all requires a radical theoretical look at human and posthuman exists and acts on the web and its devices.

A slow study of the letters written by Nietzsche in the last five years of his conscious life shows a suffering man who trans-values the sorrow of his body recognizing it as both a face and a mask. The subject fades within history, art, science, within the time that becomes eternal through the death and beyond it, through the speech that becomes the seal of the world. Despite every insufficient reading which underlines the pathological feature in Nietzsche’s last writings madness (...) has been a real fiction: it became the Great Health in which “it’s finished” and the ego multiplies and vanishes in “all the names of History”. (shrink)

This paper has two main objectives. The first one is to reflect on the validity of data in analysis and projections that underpin the engineering asset management of organizations, considering, on the one hand, a certain resistance or even inadequate use of data and information of a subjective nature and; on the other hand, a consolidated reliance on quantitative approaches and decisions based on data series. The second objective is to contextualize the applicability of combining qualitative data based on experts’ (...) experience and on the tacit knowledge built in organizations, with approaches based essentially on quantitative data, according to the data availability and the decision scenario over the asset life cycle. We present two application of an approach combining quali and quanti data. One example interrelates Statistics with Psychology and the other combines elicitated data about asset indicators with parameters deterministically calculated. Both applications aiming at providing more realistic indicators and supporting the Asset Management process to make more assertive decisions. (shrink)

This volume presents two Leibnizian writings, the Specimen of Philosophical Questions Collected from the Law and the Dissertation on Perplexing Cases. These works, originally published in 1664 and 1666, constitute, respectively, Leibniz's thesis for the title of Master of Philosophy and his doctoral dissertation in law. Besides providing evidence of the earliest development of Leibniz's thought and amazing anticipations of his mature views, they present a genuine intellectual interest, for the freshness and originality of Leibniz's reflections on a striking variety (...) of logico-philosophical puzzles drawn from the law. The Specimen addresses puzzling issues resulting from apparent conflicts between law and philosophy (the latter broadly understood as comprising also mathematics, as well as empirical sciences). The Dissertation addresses cases whose solution is puzzling because of the convoluted logical form of legal dispositions and contractual clauses, or because of conflicting priorities between concurring parties. In each case, Leibniz dissects the problems with the greatest ingenuity, disentangling their different aspects, and proposing solutions always reasonable and sometimes surprising. And he does not refrain from peppering his intellectual acrobatics with some humorous comments. bbbbbb. (shrink)

The vision of an art masterpiece is associated with brain arousal by neural processes occurring quite spontaneously in the viewer. This aesthetic experience may even elicit a response in the motor areas of the observers. In the neurorehabilitation of patients with stroke, art observation has been used for reducing psychological disorders, and creative art therapy for enhancing physical functions and cognitive abilities. Here, we developed a virtual reality task which allows patients, by moving their hand on a virtual canvas, to (...) have the illusion of painting some art masterpieces, such as The Creation of Adam of Michelangelo or The birth of Venus of Botticelli. Twenty healthy subjects and four patients with stroke performed this task and a control one in which they simply colored the virtual canvas. Results from User Satisfaction Evaluation Questionnaire and the NASA Task Load Index highlighted an appropriate level of usability. Moreover, despite the motor task was the same for art and control stimuli, the art condition was performed by healthy subjects with shorter trajectories and with a lower perception of physical demand. In experiment 2, only the patients treated with artistic stimuli showed a reduction in the erroneous movements performed orthogonally to the canvas. This finding reminds the so-called Mozart effect that improves the performance of subjects when they listen to classic music. Thus, we called this improvement in the performance when interacting with an artistic stimulus as Michelangelo effect. (shrink)

Proprio perché fuori moda è bene occuparsi di Kelsen – è questa la convinzione sottesa ai contributi qui pubblicati di Bernardo Sordi, Sara Lagi e Carlos M. Herrera. E proprio per fare emergere l’eccentricità di Kelsen rispetto al mainstream giusfilosofico contemporaneo e, quindi, proprio per questo motivo, la sua perdurante attualità, gli autori hanno trattato del suo pensiero a partire da un’angolatura diversa da quella consueta – una prospettiva “al di là della purezza”.

A common assumption in non-relativistic quantum mechanics is that self-adjoint operators mathematically represent properties of quantum systems. Focusing on spin, we argue that a natural view considers observables as determinable properties and their eigenvalues as their corresponding determinates. We provide a taxonomy of the different views that one can hold, once it is accepted that spin can be modelled with the determinable-determinate relation. In particular, we present the two main families of views, dubbed Spin Monism and Pluralism, and we show (...) that the current literature does not take a stance between the two. Then we put forward two arguments in favour of the former. Finally, we present a new account of Spin Monism, that is absent in current literature; such a view is worth discussing, or so we contend, because several compelling considerations support it, and it opens new ways of thinking about the ontology of quantum mechanics. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose we replace the anthropocentric paradigm with an ethoanthropological one that can account for the fact that the human being is just a part of the world and of “nature”. Theoretical reflection and recent findings in the natural sciences confirm that ancient anthropocentric dualisms – the ancient body/soul, and res extensa/res cogitans divide – are obsolete. Here I argue that the human being is a bodymind continuum, comprising action, experience, nurture, and culture. To develop a broader (...) and at the same time more specific science of man is possible only on the condition that we give up the anthropocentric view and replace it with an ethoanthropology. This would also provide compelling reasons to forego harmful experimentation and exploitation of other animal species, including animal biotechnology. Keywords: Anthropology; Biotechnology; Ethology; Nurture; Culture Per una etoantropologia Riassunto: In questo articolo si avanza la proposta di rimpiazzare il paradigma antropocentrico con un paradigma etoantropologico rivolto a ricomprendere dell’essere umano all’interno del mondo e all’interno della “natura”. La riflessione teorica e le scienze naturali confermano che l’antico dualismo antropocentrico – l’antico dualismo tra corpo e mente, tra res extensa e res cogitans – è semplicemente obsoleto. L’essere umano è un continuum di corpomente, azione, esperienza, educazione e cultura. Sviluppare una scienza dell’uomo che sia più ampia ed al contempo più precisa è possibile a patto di superare il provincialismo antropocentrico e di sostituirlo con una etnoantropologia. Questa potrebbe fornirci delle ragioni forti per rinunciare alle pratiche più distruttive operate sugli animali, comprese quelle biotecnologiche. Parole chiave: Antropologia; Biotecnologia; Etologia; Educazione; Cultura. (shrink)