En dépit de ce que le titre semble en première lecture suggérer, le livre d’Aurélien Robert (= A. R.), Épicure aux Enfers, est moins la reconstruction d’une damnation, que l’histoire d’un dédoublement : le constat initial procède de la scission entre la dimension historique d’Épicure, sa pensée -essentiellement eudémonique- et l’image injustifiée d’athée et hédoniste qui a connu un large succès au Moyen Âge et a, pendant longtemps, effacé son profil historique pour se substituer à lui. Le liv...

L’essai de rapprocher le monde de Dante dans sa complexité de la spiritualité et des constructions théologiques de Denys l’Aréopagite n’a pas encore produit un résultat unanime. Malgré une proximité de thèmes, la richesse des formes du monde dantesque, sa sensibilité aux événements historiques et la figure de Béatrice semblent, au moins en partie, résister à l’intensité silencieuse de la théologie dionysienne. L’article met en évidence le caractère décisif de la question de l’obscurité dans la tentative d’établir un rapport entre (...) la perspective dantesque et celle de Denys. À partir de la sémantisation variée du rapport entre la lumière et les ténèbres à l’œuvre chez Dante, on cherche à établir la persistance d’une inspiration dionysienne – avec une attention particulière à l’articulation entre la vision de Dieu, l’obscurité et le mouvement du désir –, telle qu’elle émerge du Chant XXXIII du Paradis. (shrink)

Under [Formula: see text]-amalgamation, we obtain the canonical hyperdefinable group from the group configuration.

This paper reflects on the continued potency of veillance theories to traverse beyond the taxonomies of surveillance inside liberal democracies. It provides a commentary on the ability of sousveillance to destabilise and disrupt suer/violence by shifting its focus from the centre to the periphery, where Big Data surveillance is tantamount to sur/violence. In these peripheral political spaces, surveillance is not framed by concerns over privacy, democracy and civil society; rather, it is a matter of life and death, a technique of (...) both biopolitical and thanatopolitical power. I argue that the universalist, and universalizing, debates over surveillance cannot be mapped through the anxieties of privileged middle classes as they would neither transcend nor make possible alternative ways of tackling the intersection of surveillance and violence so long as they are couched in the liberal concerns for democracy. I call this phenomenon “liberal luxury,” whereby debates over surveillance have over-emphasised liberal proclivities at the expense of disengaging those peripheral populations most severely affected by sur/violence. (shrink)

this book concerns the debates on the functions of "imagination" (phantasia, imaginatio) in the arousal of passions in the Aristotelian and post-Aristotelian traditions till the XVIIth Century. The simple fact that often a mental representation is followed by pleasure or sorrow and that these emotions can cause actions, became progressively part of a wider theory of animal and human behaviour. In the case of human behaviour, the "force of imagination" became a kind of general justification of all kind of anomic (...) and irregular behaviour and beliefs, including true paranormal conditions of the body. The book recapitulates the main evolution of this way of seeing passions - from Aristotle to Avicenna and his Latin followers - till the age of the authors who see the inner work of "imagination" as a constant danger for human reason, and imagination itself as faculty to control with care for its propension to be the "advocate" of the "inferior part of the soul", such as Gianfrancesco Pico, Juan Luis Vivés, Pierre Charron, Blaise Pascal and a large part of the French Augustinian Moral Philosophers. (shrink)

To believe that every single scientist ought to be individually engaged in ethical thinking in order for science to be responsible at a collective level may be too demanding, if not plainly unrealistic. In fact, ethical labor is typically distributed across different kinds of scientists within the scientific community. Based on the empirical data collected within the Horizon 2020 ‘RRI-Practice’ project, we propose a classification of the members of the scientific community depending on their engagement in this collective activity. Our (...) classification offers, on the one hand, a model of how the ethical aspects of science are taken into consideration by scientists and, on the other, some indications on how to institutionalize ethics in science. (shrink)

The present paper is divided in two parts . In the first part we will propose Meinong’s theory of time outlined in 1899 interpreted in such a way that the subtlety of his argumentation is emphasised. In the second, we will discuss different solutions for the celebrated McTaggart’s paradox, reaching the conclusion that a theory of time suggested by the reflections of the Austrian Philosopher seems to be the most adequate perspective for tackling this problem.

The paper lists several editions of Euclid’s Elements in the Early Modern Age, giving for each of them the axioms and postulates employed to ground elementary mathematics.

The conjunction fallacy has been a key topic in debates on the rationality of human reasoning and its limitations. Despite extensive inquiry, however, the attempt of providing a satisfactory account of the phenomenon has proven challenging. Here, we elaborate the suggestion (first discussed by Sides et al., 2001) that in standard conjunction problems the fallacious probability judgments experimentally observed are typically guided by sound assessments of confirmation relations, meant in terms of contemporary Bayesian confirmation theory. Our main formal result is (...) a confirmation-theoretic account of the conjuntion fallacy which is proven robust (i.e., not depending on various alternative ways of measuring degrees of confirmation). The proposed analysis is shown distinct from contentions that the conjunction effect is in fact not a fallacy and is compared with major competing explanations of the phenomenon, including earlier references to a confirmation-theoretic account. (shrink)

En este libro, que aparece en Italia en 1987, publicado muchas veces y muy comentado también en el extranjero, Vincenzo Ferrari analiza las funciones sociales del derecho en una perspectiva relativista, subjetivista y conflictualista, opuesta a la del funcionalismo sociológico. De tal manera, el derecho se revela como un medio de acción social dirigido a lograr los proyectos de seres humanos empeñados en relaciones variables de cooperación y de lucha. Así, se muestra cómo las normas jurídicas pueden orientar las (...) actitudes y desorientarlas; solucionar los conflictos y agravarlos o fomentarlos; legitimar cualquier forma de poder con argumentos tan válidos como ficticios. Solo al nivel de los ideales se redescubre el valor del derecho, su potencialidad libertadora y su naturaleza igualitaria. (shrink)

L'Ora e l'attimo narra--attraverso il confronto di Vico con Platone e Kant, Hegel e Nietzsche, Gadamer e, infine, Benjamin - la storia discontinua di un passaggio epocale nella concezione del mondo storico: il passaggio dal primato dell'orizzonte universale eterno, l''Ora', in cui si inquadrano le diverse età della storia, al primato dell'attimo, in cui sono parimenti possibili sia l'inizio di una 'nuova Ora' che la fine della storia dell'uomo ad opera dell'uomo. In Vico questo 'passaggio,' variamente contrastato e sofferto, ma (...) alla fine vincente, assume la figura del transito dalla 'mathesis universalis' della storia alla visione morale del mondo umano--Back cover. (shrink)

This article aims at sketching a philosophical theory of sound based on the perspective of sound designers: unique agents blurring the boundaries between engineering, music, acoustics and sound-based art. After having introduced the general framing in Section 1, focusing on a short history of the theory and practice of sound design, in Section 2 we propose a reading of sound as monad. We derive such intuition from the technology of digital sampling of audio signals, based on the decomposition of complex (...) sound waves in a number of elementary sinusoidal waves. Thus, in Section 3, we attempt at grounding the resulting “sound-atom” on Leibniz’s notion of monad, intended both as a “simple substance without parts” and as a “nucleus of forces in statu possibilitatis.” The insight is resumed and further discussed in Section 4, where we draw our conclusions by demonstrating the fitness of such framing with regards to the standpoint of sound design, while accounting for the work of sound artists Carsten Nicolai and Ryoji Ikeda. (shrink)

Designing a pension system is both a complex endeavor and a long lasting legacy. Complexity stems from the many trade-offs that conceiving a pension system entail and from how these initial decisions affect the social and economic behavioral responses of workers and retirees. Policy-makers planning a pension system have to evaluate its internal economic consistency, but also these feedbacks. Economic and demographic models that allow a quantitative evaluation of these costs and benefits are required. More than ever at the initial (...) stage of design, since pension systems are persistent. Yet, pension systems are not monolith, but living entities that change over time. Some of these modifications are produced by individuals’ reactions to incentives built in the system, and need to be foreseen during the initial planning. Other changes are induced by reform measures and constitute the policy responses to unpredicted exogenous shocks – such as population aging. Re-designing the pension system to cope with new demands, while being limited by existing constraints, is a difficult task. Recent reforms of the Italian pension system are discussed in detail to highlight the policy trade-offs and the economic motivations behind the decision of the reform policies. (shrink)

Researchers agree on ascribing the De incarnatione Christi contra Apollinarium and the De salutari epiphania contra Apollinarium to two different authors, who probably shared the same theological education. The latter not only uses a mature theological style but shows a better knowledge of Apollinarius of Laodicea and his disciples’ writings. Even though the two authors try to demonstrate the presence of a perfect humanity in Christ, against Apollinarian thought, we can find some important differences in their works concerning the topic (...) of the impeccabilitas of Christ and the relationship between sin and freedom. They explain in a different way the theory of salvation according to Apollinarius: while according to the author of De incarnatione Christi contra Apollinarium the man can save himself through the imitation of Christ, for the other writer salvation has been accomplished only because Christ is devoid of any trace of sin. (shrink)

Is the ubiquity of contemporary popular music akin to a deliberate aggression to the hearing, making the listening experience devoid of any sense? If so, is there any strategy to morph this supposed confusion into meaningful stimuli? Relying on epistemology, we attempt at promoting the act of listening as a proper way of world-making and refer to Mark Reybrouck, Bruno Nettl, Steven Brown and Joseph Jordania—among others—to gather appropriate heuristic tools. In the last part of the essay, we advance the (...) concept of timbral quotation as an additional means to grasp meaningful cues in the timbrical richness of contemporary popular compositions. We shall sustain the particular fitness of this tool especially with regard to nowadays’ Western popular music, more and more timbre-centered rather than harmony-centered. (shrink)