This book examines the life and work of mathematician Giovanni Battista Guccia, founder of the Circolo Matematico di Palermo and its renowned journal, the Rendiconti del Circolo matematico di Palermo. The authors describe how Guccia, an Italian geometer, was able to establish a mathematical society in Sicily in the late nineteenth century, which by 1914 would grow to become the largest and most international in the world, with one of the most influential journals of the time. The book highlights (...) the challenges faced by Guccia in creating an international society in isolated Palermo, and places Guccia’s activities in the wider European context through comparisons with the formation of the London Mathematical Society and the creation of Mittag-Leffler’s Acta Mathematica in Stockholm. Based on extensive searches in European archives, this scholarly work follows both historical and scientific treads, and will appeal to those interested in the history of mathematics and science in general. (shrink)

Pubblicata nel 1930 come summa delle lezioni universitarie del biennio precedente, "La filosofia dell'arte" il primo vero confronto di Giovanni Gentile con il tema dell'Estetica. Dopo decenni in cui il pensatore si era approcciato soltanto in parte o di sfuggita al problema dell'arte, in questo volume affronta esplicitamente l'argomento, per fornire il suo punto di vista - in polemica velata, fra gli altri, con Benedetto Croce - e inquadrarlo meglio all'interno della sua visione attualista, che tanto ha influenzato (...) il pensiero della prima met del XX secolo. (shrink)

This article was inspired by the recent publication of a volume that brings together the Italian translation of Das Heilige and other important writings of Rudolf Otto. It explores in particular the reception of this theologian and philosopher of religion's thought in Italy during the first half of the twentieth century by such important figures as Ernesto Buonaiuti, Benedetto Croce, Giovanni Miegge and Piero Martinetti.

Social psychology has based its development on triangle structures. Such are the cases of Symbolic Interactions and Social Representations. These triangle structures are not able even to draw an epistemology of common sense.

We argue that, in the case of research biobanks, there is a need to replace the currently used informed consent with trusted consent. Accordingly, we introduce a proposal for the structure of the latter. Further, we discuss some of the issues that can be addressed effectively through our proposal. In particular, we illustrate: i) which research should be authorized by donors; ii) how to regulate access to information; iii) the fundamental role played by a Third Party Authority in assuring compliance (...) with the reciprocal expectations and obligations of donors and scientists. Finally, we briefly analyse two issues that might represent important elements of a ‘new alliance’ between researchers and donors to which the trusted consent could pave the way: i) the correlations between needs and rights of the two parties, and ii) possible economic transactions. (shrink)

The automated identification of national implementations of European directives by text similarity techniques has shown promising preliminary results. Previous works have proposed and utilized unsupervised lexical and semantic similarity techniques based on vector space models, latent semantic analysis and topic models. However, these techniques were evaluated on a small multilingual corpus of directives and NIMs. In this paper, we utilize word and paragraph embedding models learned by shallow neural networks from a multilingual legal corpus of European directives and national legislation (...) to develop unsupervised semantic similarity systems to identify transpositions. We evaluate these models and compare their results with the previous unsupervised methods on a multilingual test corpus of 43 Directives and their corresponding NIMs. We also develop supervised machine learning models to identify transpositions and compare their performance with different feature sets. (shrink)

Introduction: Motor evoked potentials (MEPs) to transcranial magnetic stimulation are known to be susceptible to several sources of variability. However, conflicting evidences on individual characteristics in relatively small sample sizes have been reported. We investigated the effect of age, height, and sex on MEPs of the motor cortex and spinal roots in a large cohort. Methods: A total of 587 subjects clinically and neuroradiologically intact were included. MEPs were recorded during mild tonic contraction through a circular coil applied over the (...) “hot spot” of the first dorsal interosseous and tibialis anterior muscles, bilaterally. Central motor conduction time (CMCT) was estimated as the difference between MEP cortical latency and the peripheral motor conduction time by cervical or lumbar magnetic stimulation. Peak-to-peak MEP amplitude to cortical stimulation and right-to-left difference of each parameter were also measured. Results: After Bonferroni correction, general linear (multiple) regression analysis showed that both MEP cortical latency and peripheral motor conduction time at four limbs positively correlated with age and height. At lower limbs, an independent effect of sex on the same measures was also observed (with females showing smaller values than males). CMCT correlated with both age (negatively) and height (positively) when analyzed by a single regression; however, with a multiple regression analysis this significance disappeared, due to the correction for the multicollinearity within the dataset. Conclusions: Physical individual features need to be considered for a more accurate and meaningful MEPs interpretation. Both in clinical practice and in research setting, patients and controls should be matched for age, height, and sex. (shrink)

Benedetto Croce was a keen reader of the Italian works of Giordano Bruno when Giovanni Gentile published the Dialoghi metafisici e morali in 1907-1908. Just like his mentor Francesco De Sanctis, Croce sees Bruno as "a great thinker" and "a great writer". What he attaches great value to above all is Bruno as a philosopher deeply engaged in distinguishing between science and philosophy and combating the Aristotelians of the Renaissance. He used Bruno in his own fight against the (...) "Aristotelians" of his age: the Neo-Kantians. In his interpretation of the Italian Renaissance as the age of rationalism, whose main thread was soon broken, Croce puts Bruno and Campanella among the «few scattered and scared apostles of the future» who continued to weave the thread of rationality, later taken up by Vico and Giannone and, finally, by the Italian Risorgimento, starting with the Neapolitan patriots of 1799. When he defined the Italian Renaissance as the historical age of the emersion of rationality and of a true break the tradition, Croce made use of the fundamental intuition of Spaventa and of some of the latter’s disciples. They had stressed in the name of Bruno the sharp break between the Middle Ages and Renaissance philosophy while Croce here came closest to the philosopher from Nola, who had made a trenchant critique of the biblical myth of the "golden age". (shrink)

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