The New Economic Windows Series, derived from Massimo Salzano's ideas and work, incorporates material from textbooks, monographs and conference proceedings that deals with both the theoretical and applied aspects of various sub-disciplines ...

The article analyzes the relationship between absolute knowing and the process of recognition in self-consciousness. The theme is discussed in relation to Hegel's thesis of the scientific character of philosophical knowledge. The article shows how the dialectical relationship between judging consciousness and the consciousness that acts is essential to understand the status of absolute knowing. To support this thesis, the article examines Hegel's discussion on the forms of manifestation of spirit within the chapter “Spirit” and the Hegelian analysis of the (...) relationship between revealed religion and absolute knowing. Selfconsciousness embodies the concept of spirit because it is constituted by the movement of infinity and is therefore a self-differentiating whole. The structure of self-consciousness characterizes the specificity of the Phenomenology of Spirit: the convergence of a form of knowledge and a form of human subjectivity. Another central theme is action, in which the «horizontal» recognition of the selfconsciousnesses gives rise to the «vertical recognition» of spirit.The action itself is the bearer of the unity of essence and Dasein, universality and particularity, substantiality and singular subjectivity. (shrink)

The essays collected in this volume try to assess the reflection on the mind starting from the genius of Leonardo da Vinci up to the new frontiers of science and technology. Imagining the "future of the mind" also means asking about the features and limits of human nature, the mind-body relationship, the relationship between natural and artificial intelligence and the impact of technology on our relationship with the world.

La struttura a livelli modella il tutto e le sue parti con grande generalità. Lo dimostrano le argomentazioni teoriche (4.3), (4.4) e (4.5), e lo comprova la casistica che è stata aggiunta. Una tale struttura non presenta affatto i problemi a), b) e c) che sono tipici della struttura ad albero. Essa corregge inoltre deviazioni concettuali che sono diffuse nel settore informatico. L’immediatezza deviazioni concettuali che sono diffuse nel settore informatico. L’immediatezza visiva, infine, ne facilita la diffusione sul piano professionale (...) e tecnico.Per concludere, ritengo che la struttura a livelli possa fornire un contributo anche alle ricerche di ontologia e in particolare possa favorire i tentativi di unificazione condotti sia sul piano teorico, sia su quello applicativo [Uschold 1996]. Le difficoltà ed i limiti che la teoria degli insiemi oppone ad un formalismo generale (ad esempio quando riduce la casistica della relazione concetto di livello possiede una valenza estremamente ampia e ciò lo predispone per gli auspicati sviluppi ontologici. (shrink)

Il 6 Aprile del 1922 alla Sorbona di Parigi ebbe luogo un famosissimo dibattito circa la natura del tempo tra Bergson, Einstein e altri filosofi e scienziati che rappresenta tuttora una pietra miliare in questo campo. Generalmente gli studiosi concordano sul fatto che, nonostante Bergson avesse sicuramente frainteso molti importanti punti della teoria di Einstein, le sue idee meritano di essere considerate molto piů attentamente di quanto i fisici siano soliti fare. Tuttavia, fino ad oggi nessuno ha ancora chiarito bene (...) quali precisamente delle idee di Bergson dovrebbero essere considerate corrette, e, soprattutto, perché. Il presente saggio č un tentativo di rispondere a queste domande. (shrink)

ITA: Quello del “buon europeo” è in Nietzsche un tema significativo, che si presenta originariamente connesso alle riflessioni di Nietzsche sulla cultura europea, arricchendosi col tempo di una portata filosofica che si lega agli obiettivi del suo pensiero maturo. Scopo del presente articolo è di mostrare la genesi e l’evoluzione di tale concetto, a partire dalle sue prime occorrenze in Umano, troppo umano I fino al suo compiuto sviluppo negli scritti del 1885-87. Tale studio permetterà di evidenziare il particolare (...) valore che Nietzsche attribuisce ai “buoni europei”, in quanto promotori dello sviluppo spirituale conseguente alla compiuta liberazione della morale cristiana. ENG: The “good European” is a rich and important topic in Nietzsche. It is first related to Nietzsche’s early reflections on European culture, and during the 1880’s it gains philosophical value, being strictly connected with the purposes of Nietzsche’s mature thought. The aim of this paper is to track the genesis and development of the notion of “good European”, from Human, all too Human I to Nietzsche’s writings from the years 1885-1887. That investigation shall particularly show the meaning and value that Nietzsche attributes to the good Europeans; as for him, they are in fact the leaders of the spiritual development that follows the overcoming of Christian morality. (shrink)

This article investigates the nineteenth-century notions of expression and mimicry in natural science. It will focus especially on Aby Warburg's concept of Pathosformel. My archival research at the Warburg Institute in London showed that Warburg was interested in Paolo Mantegazza’s theories about mimicry and expression. A prominent physician and anthropologist, Mantegazza developed the views that Charles Darwin expressed in his work The expression of the emotions in man and animals. In this paper I will explore how mimicry can perform (...) an expressive and a physical function at the same time: gestural forms reflect a primitive disposition of the relation between man and world and represent the deepest layer of communication. I will show how the body can be considered as a metaphor of this early bond. (shrink)

Recent crises in Europe and beyond have renewed a longstanding debate on the status and treatment of refugees. Hannah Arendt famously questioned the limits of universalistic human rights discourse based on the widespread phenomena of statelessness and displacement that emerged during and after World War II. In this paper, we analyze recent patterns of inclusion and exclusion of refugees in Italy through the lens of Arendtian narrative and theorizing. We consider three cases of interaction between families, schools, and other public (...) institutions in light of the shifting normative framework before and during the war in Ukraine. Two major insights emerge from this analysis. From a pedagogical point of view, the most promising educational practices with refugees are those centered on enabling their agency and corresponding experiences of "natality". From an ethical-political perspective, these practices highlight a latent tension between the universalistic scope of human rights enshrined in the human rights declarations and their structural dependence on the particular norms and procedures enacted by nation states. The understanding and teaching of human rights within our political communities is inseparable from the practices that engage with refugees. In this sense, our practices of inclusion and exclusion affect the understanding of national borders as a barrier or threshold with other political communities, but also the interpretation of our own ethical-political principles. (shrink)

We assess Aristotle's doctrine of the four causes in relation to current research on the development of organisms. Our goals are four-fold: first, to present and critically challenge what has become an orthodox interpretation of Aristotle among biologists; second, to present and defend a more adequate account of organismal development; third, to elaborate and justify a novel account of Aristotle's natural teleology, one at odds with the orthodox interpretation; and fourth, to illustrate how our reading of Aristotle, if right, permits (...) a more fruitful encounter between Aristotle and modern biology than that imagined by Aristotle's latter-day biological interpreters. (shrink)

The aim of my paper will be to provide a commentary on the introduction to the French edition of Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985) by Bernard Williams (1929–2003) and to show the Nietzschean legacy that is made explicit there. In this introduction, called “L'éthique, question de style?” and published in 1990, Williams reflects on some of the problems of style that his book poses to French readers, to whom he feels his work is less familiar. Furthermore, Williams recalls (...) some moments of the Royaumont colloquium (which he attended in 1958) and dwells on some peculiarities that distinguish him from analytic philosophy, “French” philosophy, Wittgenstein and Heidegger. Finally, the text closes with a description of the image of the philosopher to whom Williams feels closest—that of Nietzsche—and illustrates the reasons that distance him from other models of philosophical writing. (shrink)

The literature on indicative conditionals contains two appealing views. The first is the selectional view: on this view, conditionals operate by selecting a single possibility, which is used to evaluate the consequent. The second is the informational view: on this view, conditionals don’t express propositions, but rather impose constraints on information states of speakers. Both views are supported by strong arguments, but they are incompatible on their standard formulations. Hence it appears that we have to choose between mutually exclusive options. (...) But the options are not exclusive. This paper develops a theory of the semantics and assertability of conditionals that is both selectional and informational. The theory vindicates the signature inferences of both selectional and informational theories, including so-called Conditionals Excluded Middle and principles about the interplay between conditionals and ‘might’. It also predicts some interesting and puzzling facts about the assertion of conditionals. (shrink)

Bold and pioneering, this book makes a detailed historical and systematic case that Descartes's theory of knowledge is an elegant and powerful combination of a priori, naturalistic, and dialectical elements meriting serious consideration by both contemporary analytic philosophers and postmodern thinkers. In the course of making this case Thomas Vinci develops a broad reinterpretation of Cartesian thought that unlocks novel solutions to many of the most vexed questions in Cartesian scholarship.

Heinrich Behmann (1891-1970) obtained his Habilitation under David Hilbert in Göttingen in 1921 with a thesis on the decision problem. In his thesis, he solved - independently of Löwenheim and Skolem's earlier work - the decision problem for monadic second-order logic in a framework that combined elements of the algebra of logic and the newer axiomatic approach to logic then being developed in Göttingen. In a talk given in 1921, he outlined this solution, but also presented important programmatic remarks on (...) the significance of the decision problem and of decision procedures more generally. The text of this talk as well as a partial English translation are included. (shrink)

This paper investigates the link between informational consequence and credence. I first suggest a natural constraint, namely that informational consequence should preserve certainty: on any rational credence distribution, when the premises of an informational inferences have credence 1, the conclusion also has credence 1. Then I show that the certainty‐preserving constraint leads to triviality. In particular, the following three claims are incompatible: (i) informational consequence is extensionally distinct from classical consequence; (ii) informational inferences preserve certainty; (iii) credences obey (a subset (...) of) classical Bayesian constraints. The proof is straightforward, but the theoretical implications are substantial. Informational theorists need to either give up the idea that credence applies to epistemic discourse, or develop a nonclassical theory of credence and credal update. Moreover, the result also suggests that there is a connection between informational consequence and triviality results, including classical triviality results like Lewis's. (shrink)

This article begins by examining the status of “difference” in representations of perspectivist cosmologies, which are themselves often represented as radically different to Euro-American cosmologi...

Natural language conditionals seem to be subject to three logical requirements: they invalidate Antecedent Strengthening, they validate so-called Simplification of Disjunctive Antecedents, and they allow for the replacement of logically equivalent clauses in antecedent position. Unfortunately, these requirements are jointly inconsistent. Conservative solutions to the puzzle drop Simplification, treating it as a pragmatic inference. I show that pragmatic accounts of Simplification fail, and develop a truthmaker semantics for conditionals that captures all the relevant data. Differently from existing truthmaker semantics, my (...) semantics extends, rather than replaces, standard possible worlds semantics. The main innovation is the notion of a truthmaker in play: this notion is cognitive, rather than metaphysical, and can be defined in a purely syntactic way. (shrink)

That words express a conceptual content is uncontroversial. This does not entail that their content should break down neatly into a grammatical part, relevant for language and to be analyzed in linguistic terms, and a conceptual part, relevant for cognition and to be analyzed in psychological terms. Various types of empirical evidence are reviewed, showing that the conceptual content of words cannot be isolated from their linguistic properties, because it is affected and shaped by them. The view of words as (...) labels or containers for a non-linguistic conceptual content stems from a naive disregard of the complex and structured nature of lexical knowledge. On the contrary, knowledge of language is shown not just to organize and categorize conceptual content in a way not reducible to non-linguistic cognition, but also to affect its scope, as the range of verbalized concepts is both limited by abstract templates and expanded by productive word formation. This suggests that lexical knowledge is a distinctively linguistic dimension of conceptualization, and that words do not so much label or package concepts, as provide an inner form for conceptual knowledge. (shrink)

Although developmental dyslexia (DD) is frequently associate to a phonological deficit, the underlying neurobiological cause remain undetermined. One prominent hypothesis suggests a specific deficit in magnocellular-dorsal (M-D) pathway. Here we investigated the visual M-D and parvocellular-ventral (P-V) pathway in dyslexic and in chronological age and IQ-matched normally reading children by measuring dynamic (frequency doubling illusion) and static stimuli sensibility, respectively. A specific deficit in M-D task was found. Importantly, the M-D deficit was selectively shown in poor phonological decoders. M-D deficit (...) appears to be frequent because 75% of poor pseudo-word readers were at least 1 SD below the mean of the controls. Finally, a replication study by using a new group of poor phonological decoders and reading level controls suggests a possible role of M-D deficit in DD. These results showed that a M-D deficit might impair the sub-lexical mechanisms that are critical for reading development. The possible link between these findings and the oscillatory “temporal sampling” framework is discussed. (shrink)

This paper investigates what happens when we merge two different lines of theorizing about counterfactuals. One is the comparative closeness view, which was developed by Stalnaker and Lewis in the framework of possible worlds semantics. The second is the interventionist view, which is part of the causal models framework developed in statistics and computer science. Common lore and existing literature have it that the two views can be easily fit together, aside from a few details. I argue that, on the (...) contrary, transplanting causal-models-inspired ideas in a possible worlds framework yields a new semantics. The difference is grounded in different algorithms for handling inconsistent information, hence it touches on issues that are at the very heart of a semantics for contrary-to-fact conditionals. Roughly, Stalnaker/Lewis semantics requires us to evaluate the consequent of a counterfactual at all closest antecedent-verifying possibilities. Causal-models-based semantics also does this, but in addition uses the information contained in the antecedent, together with background causal information, to shift what worlds count as closest. This makes systematically different predictions and generates a new logic. The upshot is that we have a new semantics to study, and a substantial theoretical choice to make. (shrink)

According to the orthodox account developed by Kaplan, indexicals like I, you, and now invariably refer to elements of the context of speech. This essay argues that the orthodoxy is wrong. I, you, and the like are shifted by certain modal operators and hence can fail to refer to elements of the context, for example, I can fail to refer to the speaker. More precisely, indexicals are syntactically akin to logical variables. They can be free, in which case they work, (...) roughly, on the Kaplan model. But they can also be bound: this happens, in a systematic fashion, when they are in the scope of epistemic modals or attitude verbs. The new view has two interesting philosophical consequences. First, it vindicates a broadly Fregean perspective on referential expressions, essentially refuting the idea that indexicals are rigid designators. Second, it suggests a new picture of the interaction between context and linguistic meaning: compositional semantics does not need to look at the context and hence has no need for a context parameter. (shrink)

Is it the task of legal semiotics or the legal philosophers to define legal semiotics? For the philosopher of law, the question recalls the distinction between philosophers’ philosophy of law and legal scholars’ philosophy of law. The thesis that the paper argues is that a semiotic legal perspective can also be sought from the analysis of anthropological knowledge on the origin of the social bond and society, implying a social and institutional theory of the mind. In the first paragraph, the (...) search for a different kind of rationality emerges from a semiotician, Jürgen Trabant, who analyses semiotically the thought of a rhetorician and philosopher of law, Giambattista Vico. In the second paragraph, the anthropological notion of social bond emerges from the debate on the relationship between the idea of the gift and that of exchange. In the third paragraph, the analysis of the legal notion of thirdness recognizes the central role of myth and fiction in the configuration of the civil world and sign, returning to Vico’s critical view of the philosophy of language as an institution of society. (shrink)

This volume emphasizes the diversity and fruitfulness of early modern mechanism as a program, as a concept, as a model. Mechanistic study of the living body but also of the mind and mental processes are examined in careful historical focus, dealing with figures ranging from the first-rank (Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Cudworth, Gassendi, Locke, Leibniz, Kant) to less well-known individuals (Scaliger, Martini) or prominent natural philosophers who have been neglected in recent years (Willis, Steno, etc.). The volume moves from early modern (...) medicine and physiology to late Enlightenment and even early 19th-century psychology, always maintaining a conceptual focus. It is a contribution to a newly active field in the history and philosophy of early modern life science. It is of interest to scholars studying the history of medicine and the development of mechanistic theories. (shrink)

At the same time, the book is a contribution to recent philosophical debates, in particular on the prospects for a successful nominalist reconstruction of .

Neuroeconomics, neuromarketing, neuroaesthetics, and neurotheology are just a few of the novel disciplines that have been inspired by a combination of ancient knowledge along with recent discoveries about how the human brain works.This fascinating and thought provoking new book critically questions our love affair with brain imaging.

Negli anni che intercorrono fra la prima e l'ultima stesura della Scienza nuova vedono la luce in Europa le opere di Montesquieu e di Voltaire, di Lamettrie e di Hume, di Tindal e di Berkeley, di Morelly e di D'Alembert, Nell'Europa del suo tempo Vico fu senza dubbio un pensatore 'isolato'. Tale isolamento è stato di volta in volta interpretato come arretratezza e come capacità di divinazione - le pagine della Scienza nuova sono State interpretate come l'espressione tipica di una (...) rinnovata visione cristiana della storia o come un'anticipata polemica antilluministica e un precorrimento dei temi della cultura romantica e della filosofia di Hegel. 'Da un angoletto morto della storia', lavorando sui testi del secolo precedente, Vico affrontava comunque alcuni grandi problemi che resteranno al centro della cultura romantica, di quella positivistica, delle discussioni sullo storicismo. (shrink)