The article argues that the end of the formal division of the world between a colonizing metropolis and a colonized periphery requires a different reading of the State’s history. The essay deals with the relation between the formation of British India and the development of Indian nationalist movement through the events related to the ‘tiger of Mysore’, Tipu Sultan, and the swadeshi movement as portrayed in Tagore’s The Home and the World. The essay shows how colonial constitutionalism developed through the (...) contemporary affirmation of the rule of law and the colonial difference. The postcolonial State emerged via concrete crossing of this difference, which today allows a different reading of the political discourses beyond the affirmation of the State as the barycenter of political organization at a global scale. (shrink)

Le infrastrutture e la logistica sono dimensioni costitutive dei processi globali e un campo di costante ridefinizione del rapporto tra spazi politici e spazi del capitale. Utilizzando contributi critici provenienti da diversi ambiti disciplinari, l’articolo analizza il rapporto tra un quadro internazionale segnato dagli effetti delle trasformazioni logistiche, dai processi di infrastrutturazione e dal rinnovato attivismo statale, concentrandosi sull’emergere degli Stati-piattaforma, degli agglomerati transnazionali e dei corridoi come spazi politici.

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.

He proposes, in his characteristically allusive and intriguing way, a politics of gestureOCoa politics of means without end.Among the topics Agamben takes up are the properly political paradigms of experience, as well as those generally not ...

Robots are increasingly envisaged as our future cohabitants. However, while considerable progress has been made in recent years in terms of their technological realization, the ability of robots to inter-act with humans in an intuitive and social way is still quite limited. An important challenge for social robotics is to determine how to design robots that can perceive the user’s needs, feelings, and intentions, and adapt to users over a broad range of cognitive abilities. It is conceivable that if robots (...) were able to adequately demonstrate this, humans would eventually accept them as social companions. We argue that the best way to achieve this is using a systematic experimental approach based on behavioral and physiological neuroscience methods such as motion/eye tracking, electroencephalography (EEG), or functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) embedded in interactive human-robot paradigms. This approach requires understanding how humans interact with each other, how they perform tasks together and how they develop feelings of social connection over time, and using these insights to formulate design principles that make social robots attuned to the workings of the human brain. In this review, we put forward the argument that the likelihood of artificial agents being perceived as social companions can be increased by designing them in a way that they are perceived as intentional agents that activate areas in the human brain involved in social-cognitive processing. We first review literature related to social-cognitive mechanisms involved in human-human interactions, and high-light the importance of perceiving others as intentional agents to activate these brain areas. We then discuss how attribution of intentionality can positively affect human-robot interaction by (a) fostering feelings of social connection, empathy and prosociality, and by (b) enhancing performance on joint human-robot tasks. Lastly, we describe circumstances under which attribution of intentionality to robot agents might be disadvantageous, and discuss challenges associated with designing social robots that are inspired by neuroscientific principles. (shrink)

Predicates such as tall or to know Latin, which intuitively denote permanent properties, are called individual-level predicates. Many peculiar properties of this class of predicates have been noted in the literature. One such property is that we cannot say #John is sometimes tall. Here is a way to account for this property: this sentence sounds odd because it triggers the scalar implicature that the alternative John is always tall is false, which cannot be, given that, if John is sometimes tall, (...) then he always is. This intuition faces two challenges. First: this scalar implicature has a weird nature, since it must be surprisingly robust (otherwise, it could be cancelled and the sentence rescued) and furthermore blind to the common knowledge that tallness is a permanent property (since this piece of common knowledge makes the two alternatives equivalent). Second: it is not clear how this intuition could be extended to other, more complicated properties of individual-level predicates. The goal of this paper is to defend the idea of an implicature-based theory of individual-level predicates by facing these two challenges. In the first part of the paper, I try to make sense of the weird nature of these special mismatching implicatures within the recent grammatical framework for scalar implicatures of Chierchia (Structures and beyond, 2004) and Fox (2007). In the second part of the paper, I show how this implicature-based line of reasoning can be extended to more complicated properties of individual-level predicates, such as restrictions on the interpretation of their bare plural subjects, noted in Carlson (Reference to kinds in English. Doctoral dissertation, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 1977), Milsark (Linguistic Analysis 3.1: 1–29, 1977), and Fox (Natural Language Semantics 3: 283–341, 1995); restrictions on German word order, noted in Diesing (Indefinites, 1992); and restrictions on Q-adverbs, noted in Kratzer (The Generic Book, ed. Carlson and Pelletier, 125–175, 1995). (shrink)

1. Dioniso, Apollo, Eleusi, Orfeo, Museo, Iperborei, Enigma -- 2. Epimenide, Ferecide, Talete, Anassimandro, Annassimene, Onomacrito (2. ed., 1994) -- 3. Eraclito (2a ed., 1982).

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)

This article contributes to the debate about the role of affect in transformative change towards gender equality, by comparing the building of affect in two recently founded women’s networks in Italian and Dutch universities. By conceptualizing networking as a social and cultural practice that organizes a collective body through the building of affect between specific groups of organizational stakeholders, we reveal the emotional, dynamic and context-dependent character of transformative change. We found that similar women’s networks build affect with organizational stakeholders (...) in different ways, shaping boundaries of different collective bodies through emotions and adapting to the cultural meaning attributed to earlier actions. By bridging bottom-up and top-down approaches to gender equality and tailoring the building of affect to the local context they potentially contribute to transformational change towards gender equality. (shrink)

L'uomo moderno è ancora capace di esperienza o la distruzione dell'esperienza è da considerare un fatto ormai compiuto? Da questo interrogativo prende avvio la ricerca che dà il titolo al volume per proporre un ripensamento radicale del problema dell'esperienza, in cui il tema si allarga sino ad abbracciare motivi apparentemente lontani; la sotterranea solidarietà di razionalismo e irrazionalismo nella nostra cultura e lo scivolare della fantasia dalla sfera della conoscenza a quella dell'irrealtà; la scissione fra desiderio e bisogno e l'apparizione (...) del concetto di inconscio; il rifiuto delle ragioni dell'esperienza da parte dei movimenti giovanili e lo spostarsi dell'avventura dal quotidiano allo straordinario; la nascita dell'io e la rivendicazione dell'inesperibile nella poesia moderna. (shrink)

The use of human biological materials involves a number of issues from both an ethical and a legal point of view. In recent decades, the purposes for which this material has been used have i...

This book is the first translation from Latin into English of the juridical writings of one of the greatest minds of the Enlightenment and one of the greatest figures in Italian philosophy. The complete text is fully annotated, supplied with an extensive introduction, completed by historical and biographical documents, and graced with evocative illustrations. Legal scholars, philosophers, historians, and political scientists throughout the world may now discover a classic by one of the world's great jurists.

In his encyclical on the environment, Laudato si’, Pope Francis proposes that the natural moral law can be reimagined as an ecological moral law that challenges us to evaluate the morality of our actions not only within our personal and nonpersonal relationships in society but also within the greater reality that is creation. In this essay, the author offers several reflections on the ramifications of this innovative proposal on a contemporary Catholic bioethics that seeks to be faithful to the classical (...) moral tradition. (shrink)

The PRDM family has recently spawned considerable interest as it has been implicated in fundamental aspects of cellular differentiation and exhibits expanding ties to human diseases. The PRDMs belong to the SET domain family of histone methyltransferases, however, enzymatic activity has been determined for only few PRDMs suggesting that they act by recruiting co‐factors or, more speculatively, confer methylation of non‐histone targets. Several PRDM family members are deregulated in human diseases, most prominently in hematological malignancies and solid cancers, where they (...) can act as both tumor suppressors or drivers of oncogenic processes. The molecular mechanisms have been delineated for only few PRDMs and little is known about functional redundancy within the family. Future studies should identify target genes of PRDM proteins and the protein complexes in which PRDM proteins reside to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the biological and biochemical functions of this important protein family. (shrink)

Journal Name: Semiotica - Journal of the International Association for Semiotic Studies / Revue de l'Association Internationale de Sémiotique Volume: 2013 Issue: 196 Pages: 391-422.

Reference may be fixed by stipulation through a speech act, just like bets and marriages. An utterance of _Let n refer to an/the F_ is a speech act by means of which, if successful, a speaker institutes a practice of referring, and a hearer coordinates by choosing a referent from the domain of discourse. We articulate a metasemantics for this view. On our view, the interlocutors can select a referent randomly, if necessary, motivated by the incentive to coordinate on the (...) use of a name. Moreover, we argue that reference fixed by a performative speech act is ‘thin’, or ‘undemanding’. Finally, we defend the thesis that co-reference might not determinately obtain despite reference being fixed. Performative reference makes sense of ordinary speakers’ practices, who appear to be very liberal and unimpressed by skepticism toward causally inert or epistemically indiscernible objects. (shrink)

Nicholas of Cusa.--The academic scholar.--Leonardo da Vinci.--Sir Thomas More.--Machiavelli.--Erasmus, Luther, and Dürer.--Michelangelo.--Copernicus.--Montaigne.--Paracelsus, Kepler, and Boehme.--Galileo.--Hakluyt.--Giordano Bruno.--Recommended further reading (p. 277-281).