It is well known how Leibniz turned his attention to a large number of domains in an attempt to demonstrate the universal interconnectedness of things. This essay aims to show the relationship between two areas of knowledge studied by Leibniz: gnoseology and biology. In particular, there is a close correspondence between the doctrine of innate ideas and that of the organism. The former are in fact understood as the constitutive elements of a layered mind and can be brought to consciousness (...) through reminiscence. In contrast to the Platonic tradition, innate ideas are not the trace of notions acquired in previous lives, but are the result of a metamorphosis of living organisms. This consideration leads precisely to the Leibniz’s conception of the organism, influenced by the contemporary microscopic observation of van Leeuwenhoek and Malpighi and by the discovery of ‘spermatic animals'. In this sense, the idea of a pre-formed organism, subject to growth and contraction, is analogous to the peculiar conception of memory as a constitutive pre-configuration of the mind. (shrink)

RESUMEN Largamente desatendida o malinterpretada, la noción de caos en la filosofía de Nietzsche es una pieza constitutiva de la particular concepción del ser que este autor habría dejado apenas esbozada. El artículo se propone elaborar este concepto en la obra nietzscheana, siguiendo algunas de las metáforas que lo iluminan. Desde allí se busca plantear los rasgos centrales de una ontologia del caos, de sesgo no metafísico, que, al afirmar el carácter acontecimental de la realidad, puede verse como precursora de (...) la ontología hermenéutica contemporánea. ABSTRACT The notion of chaos, which has long been neglected or misinterpreted, is a constitutive element of a peculiar conception of being that the philosopher only had time to outline. The objective of this article is to elaborate on this concept in Nietzschean philosophy, guided by some of the metaphors that shed light on it. This serves as the basis to set forth the main characteristics of a non-metaphysical ontology of chaos that asserts the eventful nature of reality and can thus be seen as a precursor of contemporary hermeneutic ontology. (shrink)

This article explores the use of model organisms in studying the cognitive phenomenon of decision-making. Drawing on the framework of biological control to develop a skeletal conception of decision-making, we show that two core features of decision-making mechanisms can be identified by studying model organisms, such as E. coli, jellyfish, C. elegans, lamprey, and so on. First, decision mechanisms are distributed and heterarchically structured. Second, they depend heavily on chemical information processing, such as that involving neuromodulators. We end by discussing (...) the implications for studying distinctively human decision-making. (shrink)

Palabras de agradecimiento al promotor del Congreso Internacional y a los participantes en él. Asimismo, a la persona que ha trabajado en la labor de transcripción de mis escritos y a otros colaboradores míos. También a quienes han tomado en cuenta mis ideas para elaborar sus tesis doctorales, y a otros colegas cuyos planteamientos filosóficos distan de los míos. Como la filosofía es una actividad interminable, queda abierta la sucesiva investigación en mis propuestas.

El Banquete de Platón escenifica una subversión lúdica de la paiderastía por parte de la philosophía a través de sucesivos discursos interconectados. Fedro y Agatón elogian a Érōs como un dios que preside las relaciones homoeróticas, ya sea en la guerra o en la paz. Pausanias y Erixímaco distinguen entre dos Érōtes, ansiosos por supervisar estas comunidades pederásticas e incluso la armonía cósmica. Pero Aristófanes subvierte su perspectiva al introducir al Andrógino, una combinación de hombre y mujer, el cual, siendo (...) expuesto por Sócrates-Diotima, dará finalmente a luz al Érōs-Daímōn. Solo él nos asegurará una verdadera comunidad humana al permitirnos una verdadera comunión con lo divino, como atestigua el elogio final de Alcibíades a Sócrates. (shrink)

Plutarch’s Dialogue on Love (Erōtikos), certainly one of his most sublime and intriguing masterpieces, has for a long time puzzled many readers and commentators, concerning both its attitude towards Plato and its precise political and metaphysical scope. At a first level, some have argued that the main theme of the dialogue, from beginning to end, is the praise of conjugal love, and that Plutarch’s revolutionary conception of marriage departs from Plato’s one. At a second level, some have objected that the (...) main point is rather the central praise of the god of Love, which ensures the possibility for true human love, by rekindling the Thespian tradition of the Erōtideia. As regards politics and religion, Plutarch seems therefore to distance himself from Plato. Still, at a third level, many have noticed the great literary and philosophical debt of the Chaeronean towards his acknowledged model, for the dialogue is constantly borrowing from the Symposium and the Phaedrus. Whilst the reference to the latter is clearer, the influence of the former is much more problematic. All scholars have then struggled with the extraordinary absence in the text of the well‑known Erōs‑Daimōn, especially since Plutarch makes direct use of and explicit allusions to Diotima’s speech. How can we plainly explain such an enigmatic absence? And does it necessarily mean any departure from the essence of Platonic philosophy? We propose an entirely new reading of the Dialogue on Love based upon the general hypothesis that it dramatically and symbolically represents the birth through the text of the Erōs‑Daimōn. The whole dialogue reveals itself as being a staging of the locus classicus of Plato’s Symposium, the familial triad Plutarch‑Timoxena‑Autoboulos reflecting the philosophical triad Socrates‑Diotima‑Erōs‑Daimōn, which is further supported by the harmonization of the Egyptian triad Osiris‑Isis‑Horus with the Platonic triad Poros‑Penia‑Erōs in the Isis and Osiris. Thus, the birth of the philosophical love in the soul of the reader is finally happening. (shrink)

Organization figures centrally in the understanding of biological systems advanced by both new mechanists and proponents of the autonomy framework. The new mechanists focus on how components of mechanisms are organized to produce a phenomenon and emphasize productive continuity between these components. The autonomy framework focuses on how the components of a biological system are organized in such a way that they contribute to the maintenance of the organisms that produce them. In this paper we analyze and compare these two (...) accounts of organization and argue that understanding biological organisms as cohesively integrated systems benefits from insights from both. To bring together the two accounts, we focus on the notions of control and regulation as bridge concepts. We start from a characterization of biological mechanisms in terms of constraints and focus on a specific type of mechanism, control mechanisms, that operate on other mechanisms on the basis of measurements of variables in the system and its environment. Control mechanisms are characterized by their own set of constraints that enable them to sense conditions, convey signals, and effect changes on constraints in the controlled mechanism. They thereby allow living organisms to adapt to internal and external variations and to coordinate their parts in such a manner as to maintain viability. Because living organisms contain a vast number of control mechanisms, a central challenge is to understand how they are themselves organized. With the support of examples from both unicellular and multicellular systems we argue that control mechanisms are organized heterarchically, and we discuss how this type of control architecture can, without invoking top-down and centralized forms of organizations, succeed in coordinating internal activities of organisms. (shrink)

Living organisms act as integrated wholes to maintain themselves. Individual actions can each be explained by characterizing the mechanisms that perform the activity. But these alone do not explain how various activities are coordinated and performed versatilely. We argue that this depends on a specific type of mechanism, a control mechanism. We develop an account of control by examining several extensively studied control mechanisms operative in the bacterium E. coli. On our analysis, what distinguishes a control mechanism from other mechanisms (...) is that it relies on measuring one or more variables, which results in setting constraints in the control mechanism that determine its action on flexible constraints in other mechanisms. In the most basic arrangement, the measurement process directly determines the action of the control mechanism, but in more complex arrangements signals mediate between measurements and effectors. This opens the possibility of multiple responses to the same measurement and responses based on multiple measurements. It also allows crosstalk, resulting in networks of control mechanisms. Such networks integrate the behaviors of the organism but also present a challenge in tailoring responses to particular measurements. We discuss how integrated activity can still result in differential, versatile, responses. (shrink)

Bachelorarbeit aus dem Jahr 2009 im Fachbereich Philosophie - Theoretische (Erkenntnis, Wissenschaft, Logik, Sprache), Note: BA, Università degli Studi di Milano (Departement og Phliosophy), Veranstaltung: Phliosophy: Logic and Epistemology, Sprache: Italienisch.

Neste estudo, a história mundial, tal como concebida por Hegel, é analisada a partir dos §§ 330-360 da Filosofia do Direito. Em seguida, procura-se coordenar estes parágrafos com as teses de Kant sobre a guerra e a paz. Finalmente, as abordagens de Kant e de Hegel são retomadas à luz do estudo de Hobsbawm sobre o cenário político internacional nos séculos 20 e 21. PALAVRAS-CHAVE – Hegel. Filosofia do direito. História mundial. ABSTRACT In this study, the history of the world (...) as conceived by Hegel is investigated on the basis of §§ 330-360 of his Philosophy of Law. Hegel’s theory is afterwards linked to Kant’s theses concerning the pax perpetua. Finally, Kant’s and Hegel’s approaches on war and peace shall be assessed by comparing them to Hobsbawm’s views on the political international scene of the 20th. and 21st. Centuries. KEY WORDS – Hegel. Philosophy of law. World history. (shrink)

The new mechanists and the autonomy approach both aim to account for how biological phenomena are explained. One identifies appeals to how components of a mechanism are organized so that their activities produce a phenomenon. The other directs attention towards the whole organism and focuses on how it achieves self-maintenance. This paper discusses challenges each confronts and how each could benefit from collaboration with the other: the new mechanistic framework can gain by taking into account what happens outside individual mechanisms, (...) while the autonomy approach can ground itself in biological research into how the actual components constituting an autonomous system interact and contribute in different ways to realize and maintain the system. To press the case that these two traditions should be constructively integrated we describe how three recent developments in the autonomy tradition together provide a bridge between the two traditions: (1) a framework of work and constraints, (2) a conception of function grounded in the organization of an autonomous system, and (3) a focus on control. (shrink)

En este artículo se analizan los cambios en la postura del filósofo Michael Ruse en relación con el problema de la naturaleza y legitimidad de la teleología en la Biología. A tal fin, se comparan los análisis de Ruse sobre este tema en su libro Filosofía de la Biología de 1973 con aquellos posteriores a 1989. Los cambios en la perspectiva de Ruse sobre este tema se relacionan con las corrientes dominantes en Filosofía de la Ciencia en las distintas épocas (...) analizadas. Los últimos análisis se centran en entender la teleología como ligada a la metáfora del diseño, por lo que se presta especial atención al rol de dicha metáfora en la Biología. Finalmente, se discute el valor de los análisis de Ruse para Biólogos y profesores de Biología. (shrink)

Although we fundamentally agree with Schilbach et al., we argue here that there is still some residual utility for non-interactive scenarios in social neuroscience. They may be useful to quantify individual differences in prosocial inclination that are not influenced by concerns about reputation or social pressure.

Di cosa siamo veramente responsabili? Qual è il margine di libertà delle nostre azioni, anche di quelle che crediamo dipendano esclusivamente dalla nostra volontà? Fino a che punto la società capitalistica globalizzata “svia” i caratteri fondamentali della nostra natura umana? Quanto c’è di innato e di culturale in questa “natura”? La violenza e la guerra sono naturali?

In this article, we would like to discuss some aspects of a theoretical framework for Artificial Life, focusing on the problem of an explicit definition of living systems useful for an effective artificial construction of them. The limits of a descriptive approach will be critically discussed, and a constructive (synthetic) approach will be proposed on the basis of the autopoietic theory of Maturana and Varela. -/- .

In this pathbreaking study, Micaela di Leonardo reveals the face of power within the mask of cultural difference. From the 1893 World's Fair to Body Shop advertisements, di Leonardo focuses on the intimate and shifting relations between popular portrayals of exotic Others and the practice of anthropology. In so doing, she casts new light on gender, race, and the public sphere in America's past and present. "An impressive work of scholarship that is mordantly witty, passionately argued, and takes (...) no prisoners."--Lesley Gill, News Politics "[Micaela] di Leonardo eloquently argues for the importance of empirical, interdisciplinary social science in addressing the tragedy that is urban America at the end of the century."--Jonathan Spencer, Times Literary Supplement "In her quirky new contribution to the American culture brawl, feminist anthropologist Micaela di Leonardo explains how anthropologists, 'technicians of the sacred,' have distorted American popular debate and social life."--Rachel Mattson, Voice Literary Supplement "At the end of di Leonardo's analyses one is struck by her rare combination of rigor and passion. Simply, [she] is a marvelous iconoclast."--Matthew T. McGuire, Boston Book Review. (shrink)

This article analyses the Fair Trade sector as a “mixed-form market,” i.e., a market in which different types of players (in this case, nonprofit, co-operative and for-profit organizations) coexist and compete. The purposes of this article are (1) to understand the factors that have led Fair Trade to become a mixed-form market and (2) to propose some trails to understand the market dynamics that result from the interactions between the different types of players. We start by defining briefly Fair Trade, (...) its different dimensions (including the “fair” quality of the products) and its organizational landscape, focusing on the distinction between the pioneer “Alternative Trading Organizations” and the second-mover companies. Then, we recall the theoretical emergence factors for each type of organization (nonprofit, co-operative and for-profit) and apply these emergence factors to the context of Fair Trade. This analysis allows us to capture the specificities of each type of operator with regard to Fair Trade and, thus, to have a better understanding of the dynamics in the sector. Such dynamics includes competition, but also conflict and partnership. Our analysis includes elements on ethical imitation, consumers’ behaviors, effects on welfare and the role of the government. (shrink)

Living systems employ several mechanisms and behaviors to achieve robustness and maintain themselves under changing internal and external conditions. Regulation stands out from them as a specific form of higher-order control, exerted over the basic regime responsible for the production and maintenance of the organism, and provides the system with the capacity to act on its own constitutive dynamics. It consists in the capability to selectively shift between different available regimes of self-production and self-maintenance in response to specific signals and (...) perturbations, due to the action of a dedicated subsystem which is operationally distinct from the regulated ones. The role of regulation, however, is not exhausted by its contribution to maintain a living system’s viability. While enhancing robustness, regulatory mechanisms play a fundamental role in the realization of an autonomous biological organization. Specifically, they are at the basis of the remarkable integration of biological systems, insofar as they coordinate and modulate the activity of distinct functional subsystems. Moreover, by implementing complex and hierarchically organized control architectures, they allow for an increase in structural and organizational complexity while minimizing fragility. Finally, they endow living systems, from their most basic unicellular instances, with the capability to control their own internal dynamics to adaptively respond to specific features of their interaction with the environment, thus providing the basis for the emergence of minimal forms of cognition. (shrink)

En tiempos de olvido, el texto evoca la memoria de sufrimiento de las víctimas. En tiempos de derrota, el texto invoca la utopía de un futuro digno de nuestra humana condición. En tiempos de indolencia, el texto convoca el compromiso con la construcción plural de la democracia.

The last few years have seen an explosion of medieval images in digital form, chiefly as a result of photo-library and manuscript digitisation projects. An entire corpus of images, even selected solely by scene or iconography, becomes an unwieldy object of study by traditional art-historical means. This is even more the case for medieval images, where authorship and dating are often cloudy and unclear, and the image itself is in many cases the first resource for scholarly inquiry.We take the digital (...) image – in particular, the digital image of the body – as our object of study in a wide-ranging computationally-augmented reading of an image-corpus; ours is made up of thousands of depictions of the ‘Annunciation’ and ‘Baptism’, selected not only for their primacy in Christian art but for their dialogical interaction. Our corpus of 6,564 ‘Annunciations’ and 883 ‘Baptisms’, whilst not necessarily representative in density, includes a wide range of stylistic, theological and historical tendencies.We computationally extract not only body images but poses, gestures and interactions. Such a range of gestures allows for a morphological treatment of bodily motifs, whose multi-dimensional, quantitative nature allows us to complicate and problematise iconographic taxonomies, populating the spaces between categories. Finally, our gestural manifolds provide a morphological pointer to dissecting the microtemporalities of the scenes, and their relative dynamics and inconsistencies. (shrink)

In this paper we criticize the “Ashbyan interpretation” (Froese & Stewart, 2010) of autopoietic theory by showing that Ashby’s framework and the autopoietic one are based on distinct, often incompatible, assumptions and that they aim at addressing different issues. We also suggest that in order to better understand autopoiesis and its implications, a different and wider set of theoretical contributions, developed previously or at the time autopoiesis was formulated, needs to be taken into consideration: among the others, the works of (...) Rosen, Weiss and Piaget. By analyzing the concepts of organization and closure, the idea of components, and the role of materiality in the theory proposed by Maturana and Varela, we advocate the view that autopoiesis necessarily entails self-production and intrinsic instability and can be realized only in domains characterized by the same transformative and processual properties exhibited by the molecular domain. From this theoretical standpoint it can be demonstrated that autopoietic theory neither commits to a sharp dualism between organization and structure nor to a reflexive view of downward causation, thus avoiding the respective strong criticisms. (shrink)

O presente artigo toma como base o conceito da Sociedade do Cansaço de Byung Chul Han para tratar das novas síndromes do século XXI. A abordagem buscará problematizar as novas tecnologias e relaciona-las com o diagnóstico de Zigmunt Bauman sobre nossos tempos, de modo a analisar as variáveis técnicas introduzidas pelas novas tecnologias a partir da popularização da internet. O objetivo deste trabalho é demonstrar que os avanços conquistados pela indústria tecnológica e suas técnicas aplicadas ao uso de seus produtos, (...) produziu uma sociedade mais conectada, porém, mais individualizada, onde as relações se tornaram frágeis e novas síndromes passaram a acometer este novo mundo. Deste modo entenderemos os mecanismos de controle e os efeitos desta cultura massificada, onde as fronteiras se estreitaram, as diferenças se achataram e os vínculos e autonomia se perderam. (shrink)

Editorial - Dossiê: Biodiversidade, Política e Religião - (Dossier: Biodiversity, Politics and Religion) Biodiversidade, política e religião (Biodiversity, politics, religion) - DOI: 10.5752/P.2175-5841.2010v8n17p7.

In this chapter, I shall analyze the reception, development, and the resulting practical / political implications of antispeciesist moral philosophy and animal ethics in the Italian philosophical tradition since the translation of Animal Liberation by Peter Singer. I shall begin by recalling the successful reception of Singer’s contribution and later of Tom Regan’s, as well as the establishment of the journal Etica & Animali directed by Paola Cavalieri and the formation of animal welfare organizations. I will then retrace the transformation (...) of activism following what has been called—with a term that I deem to be improper – “political antispeciesism”, articulated on the basis of arguments that combine, in a single set, claims for animal rights and human rights. Finally, I shall go on to a reconstruction of the contemporary debate, which revolves around the opposition between “weak antispeciesism”—intended to establish the autonomy of antispeciesism from the struggles for human rights—and the aforementioned political antispeciesism. What will emerge from my reconstruction is a different conception of the ideology of dominion over animals, and therefore of speciesism, compared to the ethical model that has come to establish itself as prevailing in Italy. (shrink)

Nuestro punto de partida es el planteamiento de Merleau-Ponty de una ontología de lo sensible concebida como endo o intra-ontología. La exigencia de pensar al ser desde dentro del ser, hecha por esta ontología, implica reconocer la existencia de un vínculo originario – sensible – entre el sujeto y el mundo. Este vínculo es entendido como el ‘punto de cruce’ – de quiasmo – que defi ne nuestra existencia como ser en el mundo. Ser en el mundo es ser en (...) el espacio como espacio vivido, espacio de experiencia. El aporte de Merleau-Ponty está en concebir una espacialidad originaria, no determinada solamente por nuestra existencia corporal, sino como parte constitutiva del mundo, del ser. El propósito de este trabajo es, en este contexto, mostrar que en la concepción ontológica de la experiencia sensible como experiencia de quiasmo – de reversibilidad – el espacio vivido se revela como un espacio habitado corporalmente. Este planteamiento lo desarrollamos en dos apartados generales: 1. Intra o endo-ontología y 2. El cuerpo como expresión o el habitar corporalmente en el espacio. (shrink)