This paper examines reports of Eremya Çelebi Kömürcüyan (1637 – 1695) and Luigi Fernando Marsili (1679/80 in İstanbul) on three churches still existing in the late seventeenth century. Their topographical informations are compared with early pictorial representations of Constantinople/İstanbul (Hartmann Schedel, 1493; Giovanni Andrea Vavassore, c. 1530/50; Onufrio Panvinio, 1600; Pîrî Reis, 16th century; Franceso Scarella, c. 1686) in order to check whether the churches can be identified with those depicted here. The church of Aya Yani (St John) (...) mentioned by Eremya Çelebi must have been located south of the Stable Gate (Ahırkapı). Marsili describes a church near the Sultan’s stables and a further one inside the Seraglio Garden. The location of the stables can be determined using the İstanbul-view from Matrakçı Nasuh (1537). The church of Aya Yani and „the church near the stables“ must therefore be identical. In Schedel’s illustration, the church in the Seraglio is erroneously designated as S. Grovus, whereas on the Düsseldorf copy after Buondelmonti’s Liber insularum Archipelagi (1485/90) it is labelled s. Maria. The building can be identified with the church of the Theotokos of the Hodegoi Monastery. Regarding the church depicted on the vedute of Vavassore and Panvinio in the former area of the imperial palace, the thesis already established by Cyril Mango is maintained, according to which the remains of the Nea Ekklesia can be seen here. Little is known about the original form of the Nea Ekklesia, but there is evidence from written sources that it was erected above substructures with underground spaces that were open to the public. If the church that Eremya Çelebi saw south of the Stable Gate, while Marsili located it near the Sultan’s stables, can be identified with the Nea Ekklesia, as suggested in this essay, then considerable remains of the building must have been still present at the end of the seventeenth century. (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)

The authors propose some methodological considerations on thanatochronological estimations. They first consider the problem of the definition of death, and then they deal with the issue of the estimations of death time, that is, with the Post-Mortem Interval (PMI). As regards the first question, they note that it does not concern only the definition of death, but also the choice of a particular kind of definition of 'definition'. With reference to the second question, the authors suggest a causal model showing (...) that the presence of many causal chains must be taken into consideration. Finally they discuss what 'most convenient and reliable causal chain' means for a thanatochronologist. (shrink)

I. Introduction Can phenomenology and pragmatism, two early twentieth century theories, be alive today and furnish a valid possibility in our philosophical landscape? Moreover, can they work together? The operation does not seem impossible since Peirce himself held a phenomenology, which is an indispensable part of his never-finished system; James’s psychology is often a phenomenology, and Husserl recognized James as an interesting author because of his phenomenological insights. However, the...

This article offers a comparative exploration of the practices of resistance Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault champion against the structures of modern power their enquiries have the merit to illuminate and contest. After a preliminary examination of their views about the relationship between theory and praxis, I shall pursue two goals: first, I shall illustrate the limitations of Adorno’s negativist portrait of an ethics of resistance and contrast it with Foucault’s more promising notion of resistance as strategic counter-conduct, which in (...) his late ethico-political writings becomes the heart of a distinctive politics of the governed. Second, despite their dissimilarities, I shall argue that their ideas can be brought together to elaborate a ‘compounded’ account of resistance, where Adorno’s politics of suffering figures as the necessary pre-condition for the creative practices of freedom Foucault seeks to encourage. (shrink)

This paper develops a philosophical investigation of the merits and faults of a theorem by Lanford , Lanford , Lanford for the problem of the approach towards equilibrium in statistical mechanics. Lanford’s result shows that, under precise initial conditions, the Boltzmann equation can be rigorously derived from the Hamiltonian equations of motion for a hard spheres gas in the Boltzmann-Grad limit, thereby proving the existence of a unique solution of the Boltzmann equation, at least for a very short amount of (...) time. We argue that, by establishing a statistical H-theorem, it offers a prospect to complete Boltzmann’s combinatorial argument, without running against the objections which plug other typicality-based approaches. However, we submit that, while recovering the irreversible approach towards equilibrium for positive times, it fails to predict a monotonic increase of entropy for negative times, and hence it yields the wrong retrodictions about the past evolution of a gas. (shrink)

The aetio-pathogenetic sequences and the physio-pathological patterns of diabetes, emphysema, cholera, circulatory shock and thrombosis have been analysed with respect to an evolutionary interpretation. The diseases, although reflecting alterations of processes that can always be described in physico-chemical language, occur only at the level of biological systems which reflects the decodification of genomic project: the teleonomic projects that have been developed during evolution. The concepts of evolutionary emergence and of downward causation have been used to discuss the relationship between the (...) molecular events responsible for the initiation of the disease, and the subsequent events responsible for the aetio-pathogenesis, for the systemic disarrangement and for the additional alterations of tissues and cells independent of the initial molecular events. In diabetes the systemic disarrangement, glycosuria and hyperglycemia, reflect the evolutionary emergence of the processes regulating carbohydrate metabolism, whereas the cardiovascular and neurological alterations are effects of the systemic disarrangement by a mechanism of downward causation. The complexity of the aetio-pathogenesis and of the physio-pathological patterns of diseases is due to the generation of information during the evolution of multi-hierarchical entities. The evolutionary epistemology approach is useful to explain the behaviour of complex systems. (shrink)

The author investigates the origin and development of the concept of liberty and its special meaning in the Republican tradition of political thought. The origin of the Western concept of liberty lies in ancient Greece, in the opposition between liberty and slavery conceived after the liberation of Athens from tyranny and the victory over the Persian empire. The author then investigates the Republican notion of liberty that originates in ancient Rome and reaches its peak with Cicero. This conception of liberty (...) emphasizes self-government and partecipation in common deliberation and runs through Western political thought up to Rousseau, Tocqueville and the authors of the Federalist Papers. (shrink)

Etica-politica come scienza unitaria: problemi di fondazione -- L'originaria costituzione intersoggettiva dell'uomo: amicizia e giustizia -- La comunità politica e la teoria delle costituzioni.