The main theme of this article is the phenomenality. Jan Patočka’s asubjective phenomenology distinguishes itself by the description of the plan of phenomenality, where beings can appear and that is independent from everything which appears in it. Only by an universalization of the phenomenological epoché, it is possible to turn our eyes towards the phenomenality itself and to understand its independence. To put the theme of the world and the consciousness between brackets means to discover the structure of the phenomenality, (...) which is constituted by what appears, to which something appears and the way of appearance. The world is the transcendental field of appearance. Everything appears in the world. It is the whole, always given and opened to the human being. The subjectivity is a moment of phenomenality that presupposes the relation with the world. It has a role that makes it an “existence”. It is that to which something appears. Finally the way of appearance: the characters of the phenomenality are “objective mediators”. Mediators because they show the strings that build up the field of appearance, objective because wordly. What they show, even if in the darkness of the absence, is the relation with the world. (shrink)

Che ne è del pensiero quando si insegna in un’istituzione universitaria? A partire dall’esperienza di insegnamento e da alcuni scritti di Roland Barthes, in particolare _Lezione_, discorso inaugurale al Collège de France, il saggio si interroga sul seminario, definito come “un’istituzione tracciata sul modello utopico”, che ha accompagnato, dagli anni settanta in poi, la scrittura e i corsi del semiologo francese.

According to the principle known as “the principle of present-tense ascription immunity”, “It is impossible for anyone to have or entertain thoughts without being aware—immediately and self-evidently—that he is thinking that thought”. In other words, my thoughts are fundamentally experienced as mine, and I typically have this experience of mineness immediately, that is, without any inference based on evidence about who is the thinker of the thought. Thought insertion reveals instead that, under particular pathological conditions, people can be startlingly in (...) error about who is thinking a thought. How can this happen? In the attempt to specify how the capacity for self-ascription of a thought can.. (shrink)

The new discoveries of QM led to re-assessing, broadening the meanings of many physical concepts, and formulating a new logic that was no longer based on the classical principles of non-contradiction, identity, and causality. Heisenberg considered the classical logic and the conception of language expressed in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus inadequate for the understanding of the problems of language with which the physicists of the Copenhagen school had had to deal in order to define the foundations of Quantum Mechanics. On the (...) contrary, he saw in Wittgenstein’s posthumous Philosophical Investigations the key to solving those problems. One may formulate a proportion and state that the use of language described in the Tractatus fits the use of language in Classical Mechanics, as the use of language described in PI fits the use of language in QM. I interpret the reflections of the physicists of the Copenhagen school on the limits of language relative to QM by highlighting how the epistemological revolution of quantum physics shares a conception of language similar to that expressed by late Wittgenstein in PI. I also aim to explain why Heisenberg considered it inappropriate to subsume the propositions and concepts of QM under the rules of the propositional logic of Tractatus. I explain why the philosophy of language expounded in PI, which is based on language games and resemblance families, sheds a light on how and why QM has contributed to renewing existing concepts (such as space, trajectory, observer, etc.) and to formulate a new logic (quantum logic). (shrink)

In this paper, I propose a reflection on the motif of mana in the framework of the proto-history of Th. W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). The Melanesian concept will allow us readers to seek the philosophical potential of pain, and the memory of a living Nature, as elements proper to the captive part of enlightenment: The necessary counterpart of a dialectic that would ultimately lead us to treasure the will of the enlightened project and, therefore, the (...) hope for a transformative praxis. (shrink)

Since the second half of the last century, intellectual productions in relation to the question of modern technification have been increasing; technique and the forms of social alienation have been the object of study of thinkers from the most diverse disciplines. One of the first figures to undertake this enterprise was Martin Heidegger, from hermeneutic phenomenology, while one of the most recent theorizations in this regard comes from the phenomenological critical sociology of Hartmut Rosa. In this paper, we will start (...) from both of them to think about the problem of availability. (shrink)

Patrizia Lombardo | : Stendhal et Musil sont les deux écrivains par excellence qui se sont interrogés sur le type de connaissance qui vient de la littérature. Avant Musil et comme Musil, Stendhal répond à cette question fondamentale en montrant que le roman offre une connaissance des émotions humaines et de leur lien avec les valeurs. Il s’agit à la fois de valeurs éthiques — les situations morales dans lesquelles se trouvent les personnages — et des valeurs esthétiques et (...) proprement littéraires — le tragique, le comique, le tragi-comique, le sublime, etc. Surtout, le roman n’est pas simple représentation du réel, mais aussi du possible. L’analyse de quelques phrases hypothétiques, conjectures et expériences de pensée dans Le Rouge et le Noir, confirme la thèse que la littérature propose une connaissance du possible à travers le travail de l’imagination. | : Stendhal and Musil are deeply concerned with the question of theknowledge value of literature. Like Musil and before him, Stendhalanswered this question by showing the potential of the novel :this literary form presents human emotions and their connection tovalues. The characters deal with various situations, therefore conveyethical values, while aesthetic values —such as the comic, thetragic, the tragic-comic, the sublime- emerge from the way in whichhuman actions and emotions are represented. All these values arebrought about by the style of Stendhal, which is both form and content,both ethical and aesthetic. The analysis of some hypotheticalsentences, conjectures and thought experiments in The Red and the Blackconfirms the thesis later endorsed by Musil, that literature allows forthe knowledge of the possible, thanks to the exercise of theimagination. (shrink)

Patrizia Pedrini | : In this paper, I argue that paradigmatic-state accounts of self-deception suffer from a problem of restrictedness that does not do justice to the complexities of the phenomenon. In particular, I argue that the very search for a paradigmatic state of self-deception greatly overlooks the dynamic dimension of the self-deceptive process, which allows the inclusion of more mental states than paradigmatic-state accounts consider. I will discuss the inadequacy of any such accounts, and I will argue that (...) we should replace them with a dynamic view of self-deception that is more liberal regarding the mental states in which self-deceivers may find themselves. | : Dans cet article, je soutiens que les explications de l’auto-illusion en termes d’un état « paradigmatique » souffrent d’un problème de limitation qui ne rend pas justice à la complexité du phénomène. Plus précisément, j’avance que la recherche même d’un état paradigmatique néglige tout à fait la dimension dynamique du processus d’auto-illusion, de sorte à inclure davantage d’états mentaux que ne le font les explications en termes d’un état paradigmatique. Après avoir démontré l’insuffisance de ces dernières, je proposerai que nous devrions les remplacer par une conception dynamique de l’auto-illusion qui serait plus flexible quant aux états mentaux potentiellement vécus par des personnes sous l’emprise de l’auto-illusion. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2015 Heft: 206 Seiten: 89-108.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) applied to the legal domain is gaining ground. AI is argued to be particularly helpful with labour-intensive activities and repetitive tasks. Amongst the various AI solutions, ChatGPT has gathered momentum and its acclaimed advantages are, amongst others, document generation and contract review. This paper wishes to assess the effectiveness of two chatbots in contract drafting. To this aim, ChatGPT (by OpenAI) and Gemini (by Google) are prompted to write two supply contracts each, the first one written in (...) English according to the laws of England and Wales, and the other one still written in English, but according to the laws of the Republic of Italy. The paper finds that each contract pair generated by the AI solutions is identical, thus disregarding legal-system specificities and language conventions. Therefore, the drafts present a number of fallacies, either because they are incomplete, or because they include clauses that are redundant or inapplicable in a given legal system. The paper claims that human intervention and supervision are necessary to tackle the shortcomings generated by AI, at least as far as contract generation is concerned and with regard to the two chatbots addressed. (shrink)

This article addresses the questions “why do we still have to read Kant today?”, “what kind of responses can he give us in the era of global terrorism?”. In other terms, today, “What does it mean to orient oneself in thinking?”. Because his concept of renewed religious laity, distant from both fanatic fundamentalism and indifferent secularism, becomes the compass we can only rely on and authentically trust in the relationship with the other. Issues identified on reading the interesting kantian work, (...) studied during the last academic year and discussed in the meeting of the 17th March 2017 between Liceo Classico “La Farina” and DICAM of the University in Messina, in the context of the project Tradition and Contemporaneity, set by the Italian Philosophical Society (SFI). (shrink)

Abstract: L’articolo si propone di individuare i caratteri costitutivi della cura attraverso un’analisi simbolica della parabola del buon Samaritano, nella quale il rapporto con l’altro presuppone la nostalgia del totalmente Altro. Key words: simbolo, liberazione, responsabilità, agape, attraversare, coscienza.

È la morte la cartina al tornasole che rivela l’atteggiamento esistenziale che si concretizza nel rapporto con l’altro. Dal modo in cui la si valuta, e, conseguentemente, dal modo in cui si vive, dipende il grado di autenticità della propria esistenza. Per argomentare la suddetta tesi ricorreremo al racconto di Tolstòj La morte di Ivàn Il’íc.

Roland Barthes’s work has confronted contemporary culture with the question of what happens when an object turns into language. This question allowed Barthes to “construct” well known cultural objects — from novels to music, from images to classical rhetoric, from love to theatre — in an unthought way, and to create new, even more unknown ones — from contemporary myth to fashion, from Japan to food culture. In this paper, Barthes’s cultural criticism is considered alongside with the issues raised by (...) Cultural Studies. More specifically, Barthes’s constant reflection on the myth undoubtedly entitles us to connect his cultural criticism to the work that, in those same years, was being produced by the English forge of Cultural Studies, namely the so-called “Birmingham school”. Even today, Barthes’s work makes it possible for semiotics to be, to use his expressions, both “the science of every imagined universe”, and a mathesis singularis, rather than universalis, that is to say a systematic way to approach the singularity of the objects of knowledge. On the basis of this “transcendental reduction”, we can therefore wish for a “second birth” and a transvaluation of linguistics and of semiotics, both to be applied through varied and disseminated forms ofintellectual activism. (shrink)

Nell’illustrare la specificità dell’approccio mitico-simbolico o ‘mitologico’ nell’analisi dei fenomeni politici il saggio evidenzia l’esigenza di un rinnovamento critico della concezione antropologica, che non limitandosi all’analisi della “finitudine”, della “condizionatezza” e “nullità”,dialetticamente comprenda il ricorso alla tematica della libertà intesa come liberazione e del connesso ineludibile problema di educarla.

This volume answers questions that lead to a clearer picture of third-person self- knowledge, the self-interpretation it embeds, and its narrative structure. Bringing together current research on third-person self-knowledge and self-interpretation, the book focuses on third-person self-knowledge, and the role that narrative and interpretation play in acquiring it. It regards the third-personal epistemic approach to oneself as a problem worthy of investigation in its own right, and makes clear the relation between third-person self-knowledge, self-interpretation, and narrative capacities. In recent years, (...) the idea that each person is in a privileged position to acquire knowledge about her own mental states has come under attack. A growing body of empirical research has cast doubt upon the existence of what philosophers call ‘first person self-knowledge’, i.e., knowledge about our mental states that is often thought to be immediate, transparent, and authoritative. This line of thought has led some philosophers to claim that what seems to be ‘first-person self-knowledge’ is really just ‘third-person self-knowledge,’ i.e., knowledge about our mental states that is inferential, opaque, and fallible. This book discusses challenges for first-person knowledge and explores the true nature of third-person knowledge. (shrink)

Latinism is a form of _legalese_ often resorted to in many legal documents, such as contracts, statutes, and court decisions. Exponents of plain language have long encouraged the use of plain terminology in legal texts and the replacement of archaic terms (among which are Latin expressions) with more modern or common ones. This paper aims at exploring to what extent the UK Supreme Court used Law Latin in its decisions from 2012 to 2023. At the same time, it wishes to (...) unveil whether (some of) the plain English equivalents suggested in the literature took their place. For these purposes, six Latin formulae are focused on (i.e., _a fortiori_, _ab initio_,_ de jure_,_ inter alia_,_ mens rea_,_ mutatis mutandis_, and _sui generis_). By consulting the BAILII interface and the UK Case Law National Archives, this paper investigates whether such expressions (and their plain English equivalents) are mentioned in the Court judgments. The findings highlight an infrequent use of Latinisms in the Court decisions, with the exception of _inter alia_. Plain English equivalents, however, are not applied consistently, and they do not seem to have progressively and systematically replaced their more archaic counterparts. Plain expressions appear in the Court decisions, but either not thoroughly, or with lexical/syntactical discrepancies and differences in meanings or usages which would not qualify them as full “replacements”. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Heft: Ahead of print.

Issues relating to the migration of entire populations and to religious and political integralism have thrown the paradigm of ‘inclusion’ into crisis by challenging the already fragile equilibrium. This necessitates a push for deeper answers, not merely those imposed by a passing need. Balbo’s current reflections allow us to re-think the dilemma of our relationship with the ‘other’ through the paradigm of the ‘dialectic integration’, which by referring to the ‘sublation’ or experiential ‘going through’ seems to promote integral human development (...) in a more efficient way. Thanks to this, ‘differences are unified without destroying each other’, and thus, are mutually enriched in being: each one can improve creatively, not against, but with, for, through, and thanks to the ‘other’. (shrink)

Contemporary international migration is directly related to the construction of the nation-state. The variations in this migration are multiple, depending on the type of mobility, the territories and the characteristics of the people who practice it. One kind of migration that has been particularly important at the end of the twentieth century and so far in the twenty-first century is that of minors who migrate without being accompanied by their parents. The legal definitions, bureaucratic practices and rights of these minors-turned-migrants (...) vary across European states and in the international literature. This paper aims to analyse the terminology used colloquially in the media and academically to refer to this group of people. In the early days of the phenomenon, the acronym MENA (unaccompanied migrant minors) has been the most common in Spain. It was intended to be a “neutral” term used in the legal sphere and migration studies. Still, in recent times, MENA has become more than a descriptive category. It has become a way of criminalising a group of young people who are in national territory and come from another country (usually an African country and, especially, a Maghreb country). However, not everything is determined by the circumstances surrounding us or our lives as social beings. Social pressure, with its narrative, cannot mean leaving aside history, legal culture, and learning. We need a new language to talk about this group of people. Currently, the negative connotation hides the most human aspect of this condition; the term “MENA” is a banner to mystify a fundamental fact: we are talking about children and adolescents who, not being able to count on the protection of an adult or family member, are condemned to social exclusion. This article approaches the migrant child as a critical figure who embodies the paradox of humanitarian reasoning, which is also a legal and political paradox, encapsulating the tension between structural rejection and the individual capacity of the human subject. By focusing on the theoretically productive role of minors without parental guardianship as subjects of ethnographic examination, this paper aims to understand better how current anthropological knowledge redefines the concepts of childhood, adulthood, and migration. The first part of this paper focuses on examining the terminologies used at the European and international levels, with their respective social implications. The second part focuses on the Spanish case, with the different impacts the term produces at the local level. The third and final part focuses on the terminology of refugee children and opens the discussion on scapegoating in Spain. (shrink)

Today, after the family, the school is the first institution in which children experience the implementation of social rules and the behaviors that follow from them. It is useful, therefore, to insert paths that favor the consolidation of a system made up of rules, inspired by the principles of transparency, fairness and solidarity, which can be the first and most effective lesson of democratic legality. In this perspective, teaching activities can appropriately refer to the programmatic contents of the disciplines which, (...) not only with regard specifically to civic education and law, but also with regard to other cultural areas, are bearers of explicit information and formative experiences. Particular attention is paid today to the planning of “Percorsi per le Competenze Trasversali e l’Orientamento” [Paths for Soft Skills and Guidance] (PCTO), which will also have an implicit educational value, that consisting in showing, through field experiences, the convergence of multiple cultural interests towards the purpose of education to legality. (shrink)

In this review, we will focus on the role played by transcription factors of the E2F/DP family in controlling the expression of genes that carry out important cell‐cycle control functions, thereby ensuring ordered progression through the mammalian cell division cycle. The emerging picture is that cell‐cycle progression depends on the execution of a regulatory cascade of gene expression, driven by E2F/DP transcription factors, which are in turn regulated by the products of some of these genes. That E2F factors are potent (...) regulators of cell‐cycle checkpoints in mammalian cells is supported by experiments demonstrating that ectopic expression of individual E2F family members is sufficient to modulate cell proliferation and apoptosis. It is also clear that deregulation of E2F activity will result in the loss of particular checkpoint controls, thereby predisposing cells to malignant conversion. BioEssays 21:221–230. 1999. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. -/- . (shrink)

I thank Dr. Matthew Parrott and Dr. V.Y. Allison-Bolger very much for their valuable comments on my paper. They have given me the chance to reflect further on the account of thought insertion I propose, and I respond to them with enthusiasm. I also thank the Editor of this journal for arranging this discussion and for giving me the opportunity to reply. Both Dr. Parrott and Dr. Allison-Bolger are concerned about whether my account is fundamentally tenable. They suggest that I (...) make two incompatible claims in the paper: I deny that a schizophrenic thinker suffering from thought insertion has the appropriate dispositions to enter the cause/reason-giving practice for the thought that she... (shrink)

In this study, we investigate the processing of object-denoting emoji in sentences using eye tracking. We hypothesize that (a) such emoji are more difficult to process when used as word replacement; and (b) their processing is subject to ambiguity constraints similarly to what happens with words. We conduct two experiments in which participants have to read sentences in which an emoji either follows or replaces a word. Control stimuli not containing emoji are also tested. In the second experiment, the emoji (...) are presented in two different disambiguating contexts. First fixation duration, total visit duration, and total revisit duration are modeled in the various conditions using linear mixed models. Both our hypotheses are supported. We observe longer total visit time for non-redundant emoji, and higher values for all three measures for ambiguous emoji. We conclude that lexical access may be more difficult for emoji especially when they are used as word replacements and their meaning is not immediately clear. Furthermore, we also conclude that non-redundant emoji are more difficult to integrate in the processing of the sentence than the equivalent words, or emoji used in a redundant way. In turn, our results indicate that emoji may not always be as immediate and easy to process for readers in spite of their popularity. (shrink)

Key n-grams are useful in the analysis of legal discourse as they help bring recurrent key expressions to the fore and understand the patterning of legal language. This paper aims to generate, analyse and compare the key n-grams of two legal corpora: a corpus of European directives on distance consumer contracts and a UK national legislation corpus on the same subject-matter. The corpora are considered, alternatively, as both focus and reference corpora. In this way, keyness, i.e., the terminology that makes (...) each corpus unique, is revealed from both corpora. The paper findings mostly bring to the fore five different patterns: differences in the key n-grams due to institutional or country-related factors; legalese influences; typical n-grams of Eurolect; dichotomy in the terminology used (albeit applying the same legal principles), and polysemy (i.e., similar words with different applications in various genres). This analysis confirms the usefulness and insightfulness of key n-grams in understanding the impact of disciplinary conventions in legal language. (shrink)

Are citizens responsible for their own bad epistemic conduct? What grounds do we have for such accountability practice? And what if citizens lack education and knowledge on how evidence should be considered and thus acted upon? Does ignorance of this kind excuse them, or are there still normative margins for legitimately holding them accountable? In this paper, I wish to chart the legitimate options that we have for our practice of moral accountability in the epistemic domain, in particular the one (...) which pertains to the institutional role of citizens. In order to fulfil the task, I will resort to an analysis of what it takes to meet the standards of an institutional role, what capacities are required, and what duties we incur. The analysis will show that a certain number of capacities are required in order to perform within an institutional role, and that role-occupants are not exempt from a duty of care regarding the state of their own capacities. This is a duty which pertains to most institutional roles, and citizens qua institutional role-occupants are no exception. Institutions have a role to play; they should educate citizens not only by offering suitable chances to acquire specific capacities and knowledge of evidence treatment, but also, conjunctively and constitutively, by helping them to enhance the conscience and care pertaining to the role. This can be effectively done by more clearly defining the standards of epistemic conduct imperative to the institutional role of citizens, as well as illustrating its moral significance in-depth. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the semiotic foundations of sociolinguistics. Starting from the definition of “sociolinguistics” given by the philosopher Adam Schaff, the paper examines in particular the notion of “critical sociolinguistics” as theorized by the Italian semiotician Ferruccio Rossi-Landi. The basis of the social dimension of language are to be found in what Rossi-Landi calls “social reproduction” which regards both verbal and non-verbal signs. Saussure’s notionof langue can be considered in this way, with reference not only to his Course of (...) General Linguistics, but also to his Harvard Manuscripts.The paper goes on trying also to understand Roland Barthes’s provocative definition of semiology as a part of linguistics (and not vice-versa) as well asdeveloping the notion of communication-production in this perspective. Some articles of Roman Jakobson of the sixties allow us to reflect in a manner which wenow call “socio-semiotic” on the processes of transformation of the “organic” signs into signs of a new type, which articulate the relationship between organicand instrumental. In this sense, socio-linguistics is intended as being sociosemiotics, without prejudice to the fact that the reference area must be human,since semiotics also has the prerogative of referring to the world of non-human vital signs.Socio-linguistics as socio-semiotics assumes the role of a “frontier” science, in the dual sense that it is not only on the border between science of language andthe anthropological and social sciences, but also that it can be constructed in a movement of continual “crossing frontiers” and of “contamination” betweenlanguages and disciplinary environments. (shrink)

This article analyses the relationship of human faces with trauma and death, in particular focalizing on the use of snap shot and ID kinds of photos in site of memory, memorials an public art.

Il saggio indaga il rapporto fra impresa e società fra ottocento e novecento così come si esprime nelle società per azioni e nelle imprese cooperative. Nella seconda metà dell’Ottocento i codici di commercio europei introducono la deregolamentazione delle public company e codificano per la prima volta l’impresa cooperativa. Entrambe le novità rappresentano una riposta ai problemi centrali di quella fase dello sviluppo industriale: il finanziamento delle iniziative economiche, la questione sociale e la governance dell’impresa. Si delineano così due forme di (...) impresa, la public company e l’impresa cooperativa, che per tutto il Novecento alimenteranno il dibattito sul rapporto fra società e impresa e contribuiranno alla crescita delle economie occidentali. (shrink)

Starting from the concept and definition of littera in the Grammar treatises of the Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, the contribution analyzes common graphic elements which were used by the scribes to create initials, ornamental patterns and the layout of the manuscript page. These elements and their functions were partly described in encyclopaedic works, e. g. of Isidor of Sevilla and Martianus Capella in the chapters about Geometry. Not only were these features well known through the study of (...) the Artes, they also represented useful tools for the invention and production of medieval diagrams. (shrink)