In this highly topical book, Agamben ultimately arrives at original ideas about the future of democracy and casts a new light on the hidden relationship that ties law to violence.

Arguing that Western power is both "government" and "glory," this book reveals the "theological-economic" paradigm at the origin of several of the most important components of modern politics and illuminates the function of consent and the ...

In The Time That Remains, Agamben seeks to separate the Pauline texts from the history of the Church that canonized them, thus revealing them to be "the fundamental messianic texts of the West.

This paper discusses the views of three medieval thinkers—Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, and John Duns Scotus—about a specific aspect of the problem of evil, which can be dubbed ‘the Lucifer problem’. What was the object of the first evil choice? What could entice a perfectly rational agent placed in ideal circumstances into doing evil? Those thinkers agreed that Lucifer wanted to be happier, but while Anselm thought that that was something Lucifer could achieve by his natural powers, Aquinas held that it (...) was not naturally possible for Lucifer to be happier, even though it was something he could obtain supernaturally. By contrast, Scotus posited that what Lucifer wanted was beyond what was logically possible, i.e. to be as happy as God (or to be God’s equal). An interesting consequence of Scotus’s hypothesis is that God could have done nothing to make Lucifer’s evil choice less likely. (shrink)

For several decades now a set of researches from a wide range of different sectors has been developed which goes by the name of “science of complexity” and is opposed point by point to the paradigm of classical science. It challenges the idea that world is “simple.” To the reductionist idea that each process is the sum of the actions of its components it opposes a holistic view. The aim of the present article is to analyze the epistemological status attributed (...) in the science of complexity to several fundamental ideas, such as those of scientific law, objectivity, and prediction. The aim is to show that the hope of superseding reductionism by means of concepts such as that of “emergence” is fallacious and that the science of complexity proposes forms of reductionism that are even more restrictive than the classical ones, particularly when it claims to unify in a single treatment problems that vary widely in nature such as physical, biological, and social problems. (shrink)

v. 1. Antichità e Medioevo.--v. 2. Dall'Umanesimo a Kant.--v. 3. Dall' idealismo all'esistenzialismo.

1. La trasformazione dei principi di legittimazione degli ordinamenti giuridici contemporanei -- 2. I mutamenti nel sistema giuridico -- 3. Analisi del linguaggio giuridico, legistica e legimatica -- 4. I diritti difficili nel sistema giuridico.

Extramural funding provides major support for biomedical research in academia, and National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants often constitute direct evaluation criteria for promotions and tenure. Therefore, NIH budget trends influence long‐term scientific strategies and career decisions, as well as the progress of science itself. Our analysis of the last 37 years of NIH awards, however, reveals that the success rate of grant applications submitted for funding is negatively related to the total yearly amount of (inflation‐adjusted) NIH extramural expenditure. Instead, (...) as might be expected, the ratio between available funding and the number of submission directly predicts the probability of winning support in any given year. We purport that the considerable success rate variability can be parsimoniously explained by a proportional but delayed reaction of the number of applications to budget fluctuations. As a counterintuitive consequence, grant proposals conceived during lean periods might stand the best chance of success. BioEssays 29:933–936, 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)