Gathers the pre-Sand Country Almanac writings of Aldo Leopold, showing that he was not born an ecologist, but evolved over time through experimentation and thought.

Wider diversity in board member characteristics has been advocated as a means of improving organizational performance by providing boards with new insights and perspectives. With data from 240 YMCA organizations, a board diversity index was constructed and compared to multiple measures of board member diversity. Results revealed higher levels of social performance and fundraising results when board members had greater occupational diversity. Gender diversity compared favorably to the organization's level of social performance but a negative association surfaced for level of (...) funds raised. The diversity in board member age groupings was linked to higher levels of donations. (shrink)

This paper investigates how Merleau-Ponty and Simondon conceived the theory of information and, in particular, assessed its validity as an instrument of analysis in multiple fields of knowledge. Specifically, the comparison will analyze the relationship between organism and environment, which is central both to Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of nature and to Simondon’s theory of individuation. For both authors, the analysis of processes of interaction between organism and environment is characterized by the search for a type of causality that distinguishes itself from (...) mechanism, which reduces these interactions to a sum of independent parts occasionally tied by a causally determined relation. However, while Merleau-Ponty views the categories introduced by the theory of information as a mere reconstruction of the mechanistic perspective, Simondon revises these categories to overcome mechanism and move towards the construction of a model of experience based on relation. (shrink)

The quantum Zeno effect is often studied and understood in term of nonunitary evolutions, involving projections à la von Neumann (measurements). We propose a dynamical explanation of this effect, which involves only unitary operators. The limit of infinitely frequent measurements is critically discussed: it is unphysical, yet interesting and peculiar.

The relation between Garin and Cassirer is still an insufficiently investigated topic, here proposed also in light of their personal connections and documents. This relation represents an important episode in the Nachwirkung of Cassirer in Italy. Garin was deeply influenced by Cassirer’s historical research and philosophical thought, in the shaping of his own research fields and in the methodological debates about the history of philosophy.

Ethics and robotics in the fourth industrial revolution The current industrial revolution, characterised by a pervasive spread of technologies and robotic systems, also brings with it an economic, social, cultural and anthropological revolution. Work spaces will be reshaped over time, giving rise to new challenges for human‒machine interaction. Robotics is hereby inserted in a working context in which robotic systems and cooperation with humans call into question the principles of human responsibility, distributive justice and dignity of work. In particular, the (...) responsibilities for using a robotic system in a surgical context will be discussed, along with possible problems of medium- or long-term technological unemployment to be tackled on the basis of shared concepts of distributive justice. Finally, the multiple dimensions of human dignity in the working context are dealt with in terms of dignity of work, dignity at work and dignity in human‒machine interaction. (shrink)

The links between the philosophies of Montaigne and Bruno are explored here for the first time, in this speculative comparison that focuses as much on rhetoric and ethics as on ontology and anthropology.

À partir du thème élaboré par Hobbes de la nécessité d'un passage de la multitude au peuple pour fonder l' État absolu, Giorgio Agamben se demande si l'on peut penser la puissance humaine à partir de la seule « gloire » de Dieu, c'est-à-dire de l'affirmation absolue de son impuissance. L'originalité d' Agamben est de faire de cette notion théologique un paradigme politique dérivé des notions juridiques d'Homo sacer et de sacratio. Starting from the theme elaborated by Hobbes of the (...) necessity of a passage from the multitudes to a people to permit the foundation of an Absolute state, Giorgio Agamben wonders whether one may establish human power from the starting point of God's "glory" alone, i.e. the absolute affirmation of His powerlessness. Agamben 's originality rests in turning such a theological notion into a political paradigm derived from the legal notions of both Homo sacer and sacratio. (shrink)

Giordano Bruno's philosophical feat consists in the definition of a transformational force proper to human nature, which underlines its radical integration in the infinite cosmos.

Cet ouvrage interroge le sens de la relation entre lien magique et métamorphose en essayant de dégager des perspectives philosophiques et politiques spécifiques à la Renaissance et à l'âge classique. La pensée de Giordano Bruno demeure dans cette optique une référence essentielle. Le philosophe nolain n'a de cesse de réfléchir sur le sens de cette relation, puisque c'est à travers elle qu'il construit aussi bien l'art de la mémoire que la pratique magique comme art du lien. Des thèmes comme celui (...) de la fureur héroïque, de la différence entre l'homme et l'animal, de l'action magique ne sont compréhensibles qu'à partir de la relation constitutive entre le lien et la métamorphose. C'est par conséquent en étudiant les "liens de la métamorphose" que l'on peut faire apparaître la constitution d'un spectre de savoirs (magie, philosophie, politique) traversant l'histoire européenne de la Renaissance et de l'âge classique. Cela permet également d'insister sur le rapport que ces savoirs entretiennent avec les pratiques sociales. La philosophie et la magie, loin d'apparaître comme des savoirs abstraits et purement nominaux, s'affirment en réalité comme des discours performatifs légitimant la constitution des liens civils et sociaux. Il s'agit en définitive ici de reconstituer à nouveaux frais des séquences historiques et philosophiques qui tracent les relations entre une sphère des savoirs et une pratique de l'institution du social, dans une perspective comprenant aussi bien des auteurs de la Renaissance (Machiavel, Giordano Bruno) que de l'âge classique et baroque (Hobbes, Graciân)."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

O artigo aborda o ensino e a aprendizagem de filosofia a partir da noção de criação de conceitos, conforme o entendimento de Deleuze. Para isso, discute o que significa criar conceitos em filosofia, associando essa concepção a uma nova imagem do pensamento que entende a criação de conceitos como o dizer do acontecimento, o sentido incorporal produzido pelo efeito do encontro dos corpos. Depois estabelece os vínculos entre o sentido e o acontecimento com uma nova imagem sobre ensinar e aprender (...) filosofia e conclui com a figura do teatro para compreender esses vínculos. (shrink)

This is a title on the foundations of defeasible logic, which explores the formal properties of everyday reasoning patterns whereby people jump to conclusions, reserving the right to retract them in the light of further information. Although technical in nature the book contains sections that outline basic issues by means of intuitive and simple examples. This book is primarily targeted at philosophers interested in the foundations of defeasible logic, logicians, and specialists in artificial intelligence and theoretical computer science.

In this paper we investigate whether, and how, corporate management strategically uses disclosure to manage the perceptions of different organizational audiences. In particular, we examine the interactions between the FIAT Group and three of its key organizational audiences—the local press, the international press, and the financial analysts, which are characterized by different levels of salience for the company. We focus on both how management reacts to the optimism level existing within each audience and how the narrative disclosure tone adopted by (...) FIAT influences the ex-post optimism in the local and international press or in the financial analyst community. We investigate the disclosure of the FIAT Group over a 6-year period , during which 70 price-sensitive press releases were published. On the basis of 1,887 news articles published in Italian newspapers and 411 analyst reports, we report evidence of different strategic patterns in the interaction processes between FIAT and its audiences. Our findings also indicate some differences in the way FIAT is affected by, and in turn, affects the sentiment of each audience, thus highlighting that the salience of the stakeholder is an important driver of the adoption of impression management techniques. Taken together, our findings point to issues related to setting the “tone at the top” and potential ethical matters. (shrink)

Leopold first discusses the conservation of natural resources in the southwestern United States in economic tenns, stressing, in particular, erosion and aridity. He then concludes his analysis with a discussion of the moral issues involved, developing his general position within the context of P. D. Ouspenky’s early philosophy of organism.

Analiso duas versões que nos chegaram do sonho de Marco Aurélio antes de ser indicado como sucessor de Antonino Pio, sonho no qual Marco tem ombros de marfim. Examino o sonho metaforicamente e passo a um sumário da vida de Marco, de sua infância ao império, terminando por compreender o sonho como uma prescrição onírica sobre qual atitude seria favorável a Marco no comando de Roma, bem como uma antecipação sobre sua capacidade de suportar grandes desafios durante o seu governo.

Accused to be leading a plot against the Spanish government in Calabria in 1599, supposedly supported by a Turkish fleet, Campanella was almost labeled as a renegade. On the contrary, while in jail, he deepened his prophetic interpretation of the history, and of the future of the world, offered theological and political confutation of Islam, and began shaping a wider idea of the role of this religion in the ‘apocalyptic’ times. Not focusing on the Turkish menace only, he tries to (...) integrate some of the Muslim kingdoms in his appeal to the universal recognition of the Christian revelation as ‘natural reason’. In his main work about this topic, Quod reminiscentur, completed in 1618, but published only in the 20th Century, Campanella presents different strategies of conversion of Islamic peoples, depending on the various historical features of Islam, and adapted to the diverse societies involved. Giovanni Botero’s Relationi universali was a very important source of Campanella’s historical and geographic information about Islam, but the philosopher developed an original prophetic and political vision of Church, conversion and apocalypse, alternative to that dominating in the Counter Reformation. (shrink)

Leopold first discusses the conservation of natural resources in the southwestern United States in economic tenns, stressing, in particular, erosion and aridity. He then concludes his analysis with a discussion of the moral issues involved, developing his general position within the context of P. D. Ouspenky’s early philosophy of organism.

If the laws of nature are as the Humean believes, it is an unexplained cosmic coincidence that the actual Humean mosaic is as extremely regular as it is. This is a strong and well-known objection to the Humean account of laws. Yet, as reasonable as this objection may seem, it is nowadays sometimes dismissed. The reason: its unjustified implicit assignment of equiprobability to each possible Humean mosaic; that is, its assumption of the principle of indifference, which has been attacked on (...) many grounds ever since it was first proposed. In place of equiprobability, recent formal models represent the doxastic state of total ignorance as suspension of judgment. In this paper I revisit the cosmic coincidence objection to Humean laws by assessing which doxastic state we should endorse. By focusing on specific features of our scenario I conclude that suspending judgment results in an unnecessarily weak doxastic state. First, I point out that recent literature in epistemology has provided independent justifications of the principle of indifference. Second, given that the argument is framed within a Humean metaphysics, it turns out that we are warranted to appeal to these justifications and assign a uniform and additive credence distribution among Humean mosaics. This leads us to conclude that, contrary to widespread opinion, we should not dismiss the cosmic coincidence objection to the Humean account of laws. (shrink)

Apresentaremos a concepção estoica sobre o medo para, a seguir, vermos seus desdobramentos na filosofia de Epicteto, mostrando que um dos fármacos estoicos contra o medo consiste em reavaliar as coisas indiferentes (que Epicteto reúne sob o título de coisas que não estão sob nosso encargo (ouk eph'hemin) de modo a lidar com elas não com medo (phobos), mas com cuidado (eulabeia), que, como uma espécie de eupatheia (boa emoção) é a contrapartida racional do medo.

With the aid of a non-standard (but still first-order) cardinality quantifier and an extra-logical operator representing numerical abstraction, this paper presents a formalization of first-order arithmetic, in which numbers are abstracta of the equinumerosity relation, their properties derived from those of the cardinality quantifier and the abstraction operator.

Il dibattito sul ruolo e le implicazioni del teorema di Gödel per l'intelligenza artificiale ha recentemente ricevuto nuovo impeto grazie a due importanti volumi pubblicati da Roger Penrose, The Emperor's New Mind [1989] e Shadows of the Mind [1994]. Naturalmente, Penrose non è il primo né l'ultimo a usare il teorema di Gödel allo scopo di trarne conseguenze per i fondamenti dell'intelligenza artificiale. Tuttavia il recente dibattito suscitato dai due libri di Penrose è significativo sia per ampiezza sia per profondità. (...) In queste pagine si vuole dare una rassegna di tale dibattito, cominciando dai suoi precursori negli anni '60 (fra cui Lucas, Putnam, e Chihara), per passare poi alle complesse argomentazioni proposte da Penrose e le reazioni di una serie di commentatori (ad esempio Dennett, Feferman, McDermott, Davis). (shrink)

We consider R-torsionfree modules over group rings RG, where R is a Dedekind domain and G is a finite group. In the first part of the paper [4] we compared the theory T of all R-torsionfree RG-modules and the theory T0 of RG-lattices , and we realized that they are almost always different. Now we compare their behaviour with respect to decidability, when RG-lattices are of finite, or wild representation type.

In this paper we investigate the class of MV-algebras equipped with two quantifiers which commute as a natural generalization of diagonal-free two-dimensional cylindric algebras. In the 40s, Tarski first introduced cylindric algebras in order to provide an algebraic apparatus for the study of classical predicate calculus. The diagonal–free two-dimensional cylindric algebras are special cylindric algebras. The treatment here of MV-algebras is done in terms of implication and negation. This allows us to simplify some results due to Di Nola and Grigolia (...) :125–139, 2004) related to the characterization of a quantifier in terms of some special sub-algebra associated to it. On the other hand, we present a topological duality for this class of algebras and we apply it to characterize the congruences of one algebra via certain closed sets. Finally, we study the subvariety of this class generated by a chain of length n + 1. We prove that the subvariety is semisimple and we characterize their simple algebras. Using a special functional algebra, we determine all the simple finite algebras of this subvariety. (shrink)