The ArgumentDuring the later European Renaissance, some scholars began to write about the history of scientific disciplines. Some of the issues and problems they faced in constructing their narratives have had long-term effects on the history of science. One of these issues was how to relate scholars from the Islamic traditions of scientific scholarship to those of antiquity and of postclassical Europe. Recent historians of science have rejected a once-common Western opinion that the contribution of these Islamic scientists had lain (...) mainly in their preservation of ancient texts that were then handed over to Western scholars, who mastered them and then moved beyond them as part of the scientific revolution. This article examines the first effort to write a history of mathematics, theLives of the Mathematiciansby Bernardino Baldi (1553–1617), to determine how he treated this issue in his work. Baldi's efforts are especially important here because he was also an early European scholar of Arabic.An examination of the work shows that Baldi did not share the negative views held by later Europeans about these non-European scientists. However, despite his knowledge of Arabic he had no active contacts with ongoing mathematical scholarship in Arabic. As a consequence, his narrative does follow the chronology of those later Europeans who would limit consideration of these mathematicians to approximately the ninth to the fourteenth centuries. In Baldi's writings, then, we can see the later narrative shape used by Western historians of science until recent years, but not the subsidiary role accorded to non-European scholars. (shrink)

Summary The reception process of Aristotle's Mechanical Questions during the early modern period began with the publication of the corpus aristotelicum between 1495 and 1498. Between 1581 and 1627, two of the thirty-five arguments discussed in the text, namely Question XIV concerning the resistance to fracture and Question XVI concerning the deformation of objects such as timbers, became central to the work of the commentators. The commentaries of Bernardino Baldi (1581–1582), Giovanni de Benedetti (1585), Giuseppe Biancani (1615) and (...) Giovanni di Guevara (1627) gradually approached the doctrine of proportions of the Renaissance architects, some aspects of which deal with the strength of materials according to the Vitruvian conception of scalar building. These aspects of the doctrine of proportions were integrated into the Aristotelian arguments so that a theory of linear proportionality concerned with the strength of materials could be formulated. This very first theory of strength of materials is the theory to which Galileo critically referred in his Discorsi where he published his own theory of strength of materials. Economic and military constraints are determined as the fundamental reasons for the commentators’ commitment to developing a theory of strength of materials that later linked Galileo's work to the practical knowledge of the architects and machine-builders of his time. (shrink)

In this paper, first, we determine the number of sublogics of variable inclusion of an arbitrary finitary logic ⊢ with a composition term. Then, we investigate their position into the lattice of co...

Cet ouvrage s'inscrit dans le fil du travail collectif entrepris en 1995, l'Histoire de la pensée médicale en Occident (trois volumes sous la direction de Mirko D Grmek, Seuil, 1995, 1997, 1999). Il rend compte du déploiement des recherches pluridisciplinaires et transdisciplinaires de la pensée médicale et aborde les discussions et controverses actuelles sur les politiques de santé. Du fait du développement des connaissances théoriques et des innovations techniques, la notion même de soin, sous ses aspects sociaux, économiques, mais aussi (...) épistémiques, se trouve questionnée. La pensée médicale ne saurait se limiter aux données biologiques, et ses composantes spécifiquement humaines et sociales sont explorées et interrogées ici dans une perspective historique qui tient compte des découvertes du dernier siècle. (shrink)

Los conceptos de democracia y de gobierno representativo están inevitablemente conectados y vinculados entre ellos, y uno de los principios fundamentales de la democracia representativa es el principio de mayoría. Este articulo es una aproximación a la teoría de John Stuart Mill sobre el gobierno representativo en relación con el principio de mayoría y bajo su perspectiva elitista. Mill consideró el sistema representativo el modelo político más eficaz, aunque quiso subrayar los puntos críticos y los posibles desvíos negativos de la (...) democracia y, en particular, el riesgo de una dictadura de la mayoría y el contextual aislamiento político de las minorías. El filósofo inglés propuso un ideal de democracia basado sobre el mandato representativo que supone la independencia del representante si bien una independencia restringida y condicionada. Por otra parte, insistió sobre la importancia de que cada ciudadano fuese educado en la conciencia pública y se dejase influenciar por los hombres más cultos y iluminados de la comunidad. (shrink)

A bibliography about the relationship between Aesthetics and Naturalism in the range of years 1990-2012.

Le but de cet article est de présenter quelques considérations sur les relations temporelles, stratigraphiques et épistémologiques entre la surface archéologique (et les matériels céramiques collectés pendant les prospections) et les niveaux souterrains (avec leur potentiel informatif). Il ne s’agit pas donc d’une étude archéologique spécifique ou de la discussion d’un problème méthodologique. Mais plutôt d’une réflexion sur les contradictions implicites à certaines approches archéologiques : la lecture linéaire du temps et des évolutions, l’application de notions typiquement occidentales (bien qu’utiles) (...) à des contextes non-occidentaux, ainsi que l’absence d’intérêt archéologique pour la culture matérielle actuelle (sur la surface). La temporalité traditionnelle et linéaire (fondée sur la notion d’une Grande Fracture entre passé et présent, antiquité et « modernité »), est strictement liée aux postulats d’un évolutionnisme linéaire d’empreinte coloniale et crée des apories archéologiques qui peuvent être dépassées par l’adoption d’une temporalité non-linéaire et « aplatie ». Des exemples archéologiques sont brièvement présentés pour montrer le caractère souvent non linéaire des transformations techniques et culturelles et comment la culture matérielle du présent peut être approchée par des méthodes strictement archéologiques. (shrink)

The essay has the aim to analyze the genetic relationship between aesthetic faculties and symbolic performances. The field chosen by the author for his remark is the work of Walter Benjamin, in which the centrality of the subject is detectable both in its first and in its last part. Following the theory of Fabrizio Desideri’s last book La percezione riflessa and trying to apply its results to this specific field, the essay sheds light on the mimetic link between symbol and (...) perception, therefore it results perspicuous the role of aesthetic faculties in the genesis of human symbolism. (shrink)

In these pages the reader will find a bibliography whose subject is the relationship between Wittgenstein’s Work and Aesthetics in the range of years 1960-2012.

Through an analysis of the European Court of Human Rights’ decisions concerning the practice of veiling, this article problematises the semiotics-architectural structure of article 9 of the European Convention of Human Rights (Freedom of thought, conscience and religion), questioning which representation of the human and the female subject is recognised and therefore protected by secular/liberal and Human Rights law. It argues that the semiotics-architectural structure of article 9, which is based on the distinction between faith and its manifestation, not only (...) relies on a particular ontological understanding of the religious subject as well as a specific notion of religion, but it also reveals a distinct relationship between the individual and sovereign power through the division between the public and the private spheres. In light of this, the western debate surrounding the women’s veiling overlooks how liberal secularism perceives and defines the religious and legal gendered subject in the modern world, and how this understanding is embedded in and reproduced through the law, which emerges as an instrument for regulating minority religious communities. (shrink)

Here we study polysemy as a potential learning bias in vocabulary learning in children. Words of low polysemy could be preferred as they reduce the disambiguation effort for the listener. However, such preference could be a side-effect of another bias: the preference of children for nouns in combination with the lower polysemy of nouns with respect to other part-of-speech categories. Our results show that mean polysemy in children increases over time in two phases, i.e. a fast growth till the 31st (...) month followed by a slower tendency towards adult speech. In contrast, this evolution is not found in adults interacting with children. This suggests that children have a preference for non-polysemous words in their early stages of vocabulary acquisition. Interestingly, the evolutionary pattern described above weakens when controlling for syntactic category (noun, verb, adjective or adverb) but it does not disappear completely, suggesting that it could result from a combination of a standalone bias for low polysemy and a preference for nouns. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to discuss pure variable inclusion logics, that is, logical systems where valid entailments require that the propositional variables occurring in the conclusion are included among those appearing in the premises, or vice versa. We study the subsystems of Classical Logic satisfying these requirements and assess the extent to which it is possible to characterise them by means of a single logical matrix. In addition, we semantically describe both of these companions to Classical Logic in (...) terms of appropriate matrix bundles and as semilattice-based logics, showing that the notion of consequence in these logics can be interpreted in terms of truth (or non-falsity) and meaningfulness (or meaninglessness) preservation. Finally, we use Płonka sums of matrices to investigate the pure variable inclusion companions of an arbitrary finitary logic. -/- . (shrink)

This article explores the relation between cinema and philosophy through the lens of interest shown by some filmmakers in the lives and works of philosophers. It begins by delving into contemporary perspectives on the relationship between philosophy and cinema. In order to assess how the constitutive dissimilarity of the two terms and the ways in which they can be brought together are at the origin of speculative short circuits and experiences of wonder, it brings together the works of thinkers – (...) Cavell, Benjamin, and Kracauer; and filmmakers Rossellini, Montaldo, Keaton, and Jarman. Reflecting on the aesthetic and cultural impact of cinema is all the more important given the current omnipresence of images and prosthetic technologies that, with their incessant solicitations, threaten the processes of apprehension, learning, and conveying of knowledge. Thinking and perceiving differently thus becomes an essential function of cinema, one keenly performed in Safaa Fathy’s Derrida’s Elsewhere, analyzed in the last two sections. (shrink)