Mahamudra and Atiyoga are particular forms of Buddhist spirituality: Mahamudra, the `Great Seal', is considered by Tibetan teachers to be the essence of both the short path and the final instructions that conclude the gradual common and esoteric paths of Buddhist doctrines; Atiyoga or `Extreme Union' represents the Buddhist Dzogchen or `Great Completeness' doctrine. This volume comprises the translations, commentaries on and transliterations of some ancient Tibetan texts, authored by Buddhist mystics and Tantric teachers of Mahamudra and Atiyoga. The first (...) two texts are ascribed to Tilopa (928-1009). They are 'Advice on the Great Seal' (Phyag rgya chen po'i man ngag) and "The Treasury of Hymns" (Do ha mdzod). The third text is entitled 'The Introduction to Awareness - Natural Liberation through Seeing Nakedly' (Rig pa ngo sprod gcer mthong rang grol). Its author is Padmasambhava, the legendary Buddhist guru hailing from an ancient Indian kingdom known as Uddiyana. (shrink)

The dependence on history of both present and future dynamics of life is a common intuition in biology and in humanities. Historicity will be understood in terms of changes of the space of possibilities as well as by the role of diversity in life’s structural stability and of rare events in history formation. We hint to a rigorous analysis of “path dependence” in terms of invariants and invariance preserving transformations, as it may be found also in physics, while departing from (...) the physico-mathematical analyses. The idea is that the invariant traces of the past under organismal or ecosystemic transformations contribute to the understanding of present and future states of affairs. This yields a peculiar form of unpredictability in biology, at the core of novelty formation: the changes of observables and pertinent parameters may depend also on past events. In particular, in relation to the properties of synchronic measurement in physics, the relevance of diachronic measurement in biology is highlighted. This analysis may a fortiori apply to cognitive and historical human dynamics, while allowing to investigate some general properties of historicity in biology. (shrink)

The time marked by the clock hands, the so-called “objective time,” is deeply different from the one perceived by the individual. Starting from this hypothesis, directly connected to the subjective modality of “living” the time and defined as time perspective, we will try to understand how much it affects the various domains of people's lives, attitudes, and experiences. Therefore, the research investigates whether all our decisions can be influenced by one or more time perspectives beyond our awareness. Last, but not (...) least, we will try to understand if some time perspectives in specific contexts are more functional and adaptive than others. (shrink)

In this book they describe the density wave theory with the goal of making the key concepts and astrophysical implications explicit and accessible.

In this work we will deal with ellipses and ovals, comparing them both from the geometric point of view and from the one of applications. There is a notable similarity between these curves so often it’s not possible to recognize which of the two figures is, unless we consider other elements to distinguish them. We will show the presence of both curves in architectural works and in treatises, motivating their use, when it’s possible, with geometric and technological considerations.

L’essai analyse la structure de la philosophie politique de Fichte en l’inscrivant dans le contexte formé par les concepts politiques mis en place par la doctrine du droit naturel. De cette science, qui a pour éléments principaux les droits des individus, la souveraineté et la représentation, Fichte découvre la logique, qu’il poursuit jusqu’à son aporie constitutive. Dans la période de maturité de sa pensée, le philosophe paraît dépasser l’autosuffisance du droit naturel en direction d’une philosophie de la pratique, ce qui (...) semble conforme à l’évolution de la Doctrine de la Science.Duso’s essay focuses on Fichte’s political philosophy stressing its relation to the context of modern political concepts and their origin within the modern science of natural right. Fichte analyses its elements and thinks back over its logic, showing its aporetical core. In the years of his maturity Fichte seems to go beyond the self-sufficiency of natural rights theories towards a philosophy of practice more consonant with the developments of his Doctrine of the Science. (shrink)

Das Buch enthält die Einführung in die Lektüre sowie den Textkommentar zu den der Analyse der Grundsätze der Modalität gewidmeten "Postulaten des empirischen Denkens überhaupt". Untersucht wird Kants gesamte Theorie der Modalbegriffe (Möglichkeit - Unmöglichkeit, Dasein - Nichtsein, Notwendigkeit - Zufälligkeit) seit Mitte der 1750er Jahre bis zur Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Die Postulate sind nach Kant nicht objektiv, sondern subjektiv-synthetisch: Der Gegenstand der Erfahrung, welcher zunächst anhand der objektiv-synthetischen Funktionen der Quantität, Qualität und Relation bestimmt wird, lässt sich nun (...) in seinem Verhältnis zum setzenden Subjekt betrachten. Die Postulate thematisieren jedoch nicht - hier liegt die konstitutive Charakteristik dieser synthetischen Urteile a priori - das Subjekt selbst, sondern das Objekt als solches und die Objektivität überhaupt. Wie diese Untersuchung zeigt, antwortet Kant erst hier - nicht in den viel diskutierten Deduktionskapiteln oder in den anderen Grundsatzkapiteln - auf die Frage "Was ist ein Objekt?" und bezieht zugleich Stellung gegenüber anderen philosophischen Theorien der Objektivität des 18. Jahrhunderts: Rationalismus, Empirismus, Idealismus, Skeptizismus. (shrink)

The Stoic theory of movement has never been the object of a deep investigation despite the considerable number of sources in Neoplatonist commentators. This paper explores for the first time the Stoic notion of ἐνέργεια, which plays a fundamental role in the Stoic conception of movement and generally in the characterization of interaction between bodies. I will show that the Stoics identified movement and activity, so that everything that is active is necessarily moved. This implies that the Stoics merely characterized (...) ἐνέργεια in a dynamic or kinetic sense, namely by connecting it with movement. In order to prove the coherence of this philosophical position to the Stoic doctrine, I will display the compatibility of Neoplatonists’ reports with other sources. Accordingly, I will claim that the Stoics conceived this peculiar sense of ἐνέργεια in reaction to Aristotle, who clearly distinguished between ἐνέργεια and κίνησις in his physical theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Antihumanism of the Young Deleuze:Sartre, Catholicism, and the Perspective of the Inhuman, 1945–48Giuseppe BiancoGilles Deleuze, along with Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and to a lesser extent Jean-François Lyotard, is considered an avatar of post-structuralism, and often associated with the critique of the concepts of identity and subjectivity. In this essay, I seek to identify the early sources of Deleuze's rejection of the notions of ego and person. In (...) the decade following 1944, one buzzword linked these two notions: humanism. Inspired by the evidential paradigm,1 and by using archival documents and little-known writings, I suggest why Deleuze's position, and the context in which it developed, can illuminate his mature work, especially his use of the concepts of immanence and univocity.Deleuze's engagement with anti-humanism—or, to be precise, with "inhumanism" and "impersonalism," the expressions Deleuze and his friends [End Page 795] used during the 1940s—is rooted in his radicalization of Jean-Paul Sartre's atheistic philosophy, which he read and discussed between 1943 and 1948. During this period, Deleuze was involved in gatherings organized by Catholic historians of medieval philosophy, including his mentor Maurice de Gandillac and Marie-Madeleine Davy. Gandillac, Davy, and their circles were interested in the existentialist and phenomenological movements, which they occasionally read within a theological framework. By radicalizing the positions detailed in works such as Being and Nothingness (1943) and "Transcendence of the Ego" (1936), Deleuze and his friend Michel Tournier confronted the mutation of Sartre's philosophy that began with his lecture "Existentialism Is a Humanism" (given in 1945 and published as a book the following year). They considered this turn to be incoherent with the core of his philosophy and to have conservative political consequences. This radical stance distinguished them from an older generation of scholars.Stefanos Geroulanos has shown that opposition to humanism, broadly conceived, emerged in French thought during the 1930s.2 To him, the idea that humanism had to be rejected and especially that anthropological questions had to be overcome began in the middle of that decade and reemerged in the later 1940s, with atheist and secular rejections of liberal humanism shadowing Catholic and, to a lesser degree, communist ones. However, I would argue that this ideological transformation in fact slowed somewhat in the decade following 1944. During this period, as Edward Baring has also claimed, most French intellectuals utilized "humanism" to oppose totalitarian and "anti-human" ideologies and to promote doctrines underlining the uniqueness of man as compared to other beings, the centrality of freedom, and the importance of defending human rights.3 Critiques of humanism took a final turn during the 1950s, after the publication of Martin Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism" (1947).4 From the late 1950s, and even [End Page 796] more so during the 1960s, the question of Being and the analysis of unconscious structures became common among scholars born during the interwar years as ways to overcome humanism and its limitations. During the 1960s, far more than during the 1930s, opposition to humanism and to the centrality of the notion of human subjectivity became radical and explicit; in this period, the term "anti-humanism" took hold, whereas, prior to the 1960s, it was rare and used as a pejorative. Deleuze used "inhumanism" far earlier than other authors of his cohort, already in 1945–48: by comparison, in the early 1950s, both Foucault and Derrida were still relying on different forms of humanism—in the case of the former, Marxist/existentialist; in the case of the latter, existential/spiritualist.5 Their turn toward anti-humanism during the mid-1950s was the result of the influence of Heidegger, Jean Hyppolite, Jules Vuillemin, and linguistic structuralism, through Lévi-Strauss.6 Not only did Deleuze reach antihumanist positions earlier, before even some of his professors, but he got there along a different way. Sartre's works were a defining theoretical influence at the beginning of Deleuze's intellectual trajectory, and they gave it a peculiar theoretical direction. During the 1940s, authors such as Bergson, Spinoza, and Nietzsche were not yet dear to Deleuze, and they did not occupy the important role that they... (shrink)

¿Es hoy aún posible pensar la creatividad sin el método, la invención sin la regla? La historia nos enseña que el arte es siempre inevitablemente tanto fantasía como disciplina, tanto creatividad como técnica, tanto genialidad como orden, y allí donde prevalece sólo uno de los dos momentos la creación artística corre siempre el riesgo de degenerar o en un mero delirio creativo sin resultados concretos o en un exasperante formalismo sin inspiración. De las reflexiones barrocas de Baltasar Gracián y de (...) Giambattista Vico nos viene la invitación a concebir la creatividad como ingenio, por lo tanto, a entender la creatividad como la capacidad de captar relaciones inéditas entre las cosas, las ideas o las palabras, o de formular intuiciones imprevisibles e imprevistas para los esquemas de pensamiento habituales o tradicionales, aunque reelaborando y conectando originalmente materiales ya dados. Este diverso modelo de creatividad, un modelo especialmente barroco, trata así de evitar el doble peligro de la exasperación fantástica, por un lado, y de la mortificación creativa, por el otro. Descubrir y profundizar la relación entre creatividad e ingenio, así como fue elaborado por Gracián y por Vico, puede entonces contribuir a arrojar nueva luz sobre la noción misma de creatividad, enriqueciéndola siempre con nuevos y más amplios significados.Palabras clave: creatividad, ingenio, Gracián, Vico. Is it still possible to think about creativity without method, or invention without rule? We can learn from history that art is always, unavoidably, a matter of fantasy as well as of discipline, of creativity as well as of technique, of geniality as well as of order; and that wherever only one of those moments prevails, artistic creation runs the risk of degenerating into mere creative delirium, with no concrete results, or in exasperating formalism, deprived of any inspiration. Baroque reflections of Baltasar Gracian and Giambattista Vico invite us to understand creativity as inventiveness, namely the capacity to grasp unprecedented links between things, ideas or words, or to formulate intuitions that were unpredictable and unpredicted for the traditional schemes of convencional or traditional thought, even if re-elaborated, and connecting well known materials in an original way. It is the aim of this particularly baroque model of creativity to avoid the double danger of fantastic exasperation, on the one hand, and creative mortification, on the other. Discovering and considering the relationship between creativity and inventiveness, as Gracian and Vico devised them, could therefore throw some light on the very notion of creativity, enriching it with new and broader meanings.Keywords: creativity, inventiveness, Gracian, Vico. (shrink)

Der vorliegende Band diskutiert die Geschichts- und Sprachphilosophie Giambattista Vicos, primär in Bezug auf die Rechtslehre. Dabei wird Vico sowohl als Denker seines Zeitalters als auch in der Auseinandersetzung mit Autoren wie Suárez, Bacon, Descartes etc. gelesen und es ergeben sich immer wieder Bezüge zu aktuellen Debatten.

Certaines critiques décoloniales des concepts d’hybridation, de pensée-frontière et de métissage mènent parfois sur le terrain des surenchères identitaires. Certaines analyses affirment que le capitalisme néolibéral ferait son miel des concepts contestataires d’anthropophagie politique qui ont animé la pensée décoloniale brésilienne, d’Oswald de Andrade à Suely Rolnik. Mais, dit Giuseppe Cocco, « le capitalisme contemporain n’est pas anthropophage, il est parasitaire » : s’il aime le métissage, ce n’est pas pour l’assimilation de l’autre, mais pour son extraction sans partage (...) ; il n’est pas une anthropophagie (manger l’autre, et se laisser changer par lui), mais une anthropoémie (le vomir). Ce pourquoi il reste d’actualité de cannibaliser le décolonial. (shrink)

_Riassunto_: La _Deep Brain Stimulation _(DBS) è un dispositivo annoverato tra le interfacce-cervello computer e che si qualifica come una promettente soluzione medica per far fronte al decorso di alcune malattie neurodegenerative come il Parikinson. Decenni di utilizzo clinico della DBS hanno permesso di comprenderne gli effetti collaterali e il loro impatto sul PIAAAS (_Personality, Identity, Agency, Authenticity, Autonomy and Self_). In tal senso, per sondare cambiamenti psicologici legati all’uso della DBS si è fatto ricorso a metodi quantitativi, come questionari (...) incentrati su valutazioni di ordine numerico, e metodi qualitativi, che si appoggiano alle esperienze riportate dai pazienti tramite interviste. Questo articolo ha l’obiettivo di evidenziare come, a prescindere dai metodi di indagine utilizzati, la ricerca sia stata sempre focalizzata sugli effetti collaterali della DBS e gli eventuali cambiamenti sulle dimensioni comprese nel PIAAAS, lasciandosi sfuggire l’occasione di usare i numerosi dati raccolti per effettuare un’analisi fenomenologica che potesse restituirci una descrizione della sintesi uomo-macchina. Per colmare questo iato, proponiamo l’utilizzo sinergico di due metodi di raccolta e analisi dati di origine fenomenologica. _Parole chiave_: Deep Brain Stimulation; Effetti collaterali; Sintesi uomo-macchina; Fenomenologia _Deep Brain Stimulation and the human-machine synthesis: A possible phenomenological perspective_ _Abstract_: Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) is a device included among the brain-computer interfaces and that qualifies as a promising medical solution to cope with the course of some neurodegenerative diseases such as Parikinson’s. Decades of clinical use of DBS have allowed us to understand its side effects and their impact on PIAAAS (_Personality, Identity, Agency, Authenticity, Autonomy and Self_). In this sense, to investigate psychological changes related to the use of DBS, quantitative methods, such as questionnaires focused on numerical assessments, and qualitative techniques, which are based on experiences by patients through interviews, have been used. This article aims to highlight how, regardless of the survey methods used, research has always been focused on the side effects of DBS and possible changes in the concepts included in the PIAAAS, missing the opportunity to use the numerous data collected to carry out a phenomenological analysis that could give us a description of the human-machine synthesis. To bridge this hiatus, we propose the synergistic use of two phenomenological methods of data collection and analysis. _Keywords_: Deep Brain Stimulation; Side Effects; Human-machine synthesis; Phenomenology. (shrink)