Bocchi's Opera sopra l'imagine miracolosa della Santissima Nunziata di Fiorenza of 1592 is concerned with the miracle-working image in the Florentine Servite church of SS. Annunziata. The image theory expounded in this book is in part derived from Aristotle, but Bocchi nonetheless allows for the fresco's miraculous nature. He addresses questions relating to the artistic authorship and style of the image, widely believed not to have been completed by human hand, and thus arrives at a new understanding of the (...) fresco both within and outside the history of art as defined by Vasari's Lives. (shrink)

This book explores the various connections between Law and Opera, providing a comprehensive, multinational, and multidisciplinary resource on the subject. Further, it makes a valuable contribution to studies on law and the humanities. While, for example, the relationship between law and literature has been extensively researched, the relationship between Law and Opera remains largely overlooked. The book approaches the topic from three perspectives in three main sections: Law in Opera, Law on Opera, and Law around Opera.

This article discusses the foundation ceremony of the church of Sant’Ignazio di Loyola in Rome, the new chapel of the Collegio Romano. The ceremony was held in the Collegio’s existing smaller chapel, dedicated to the Annunziata, in 1626. The ceremony was led by the sponsor of the new church, Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi, the nephew of the late Pope Gregory XV and one of the greatest art collectors of his time. The extraordinary apparato of the foundation ceremony focussed on the (...) personifications of a wide range of artistic disciplines that exalted the patronage of Cardinal Ludovisi, as described in an anonymous contemporary pamphlet entitled Ragguaglio della solennita. It was an exercise in self-promotion and a failed attempt by Cardinal Ludovisi to regain some of the power he lost when Urban VIII succeeded his uncle as pope in 1623. The article will reconstruct the iconography of the apparato in relation to the texts on a set of commemorative medals, copies of which were deposited in the foundations and distributed among the attendees and reproductions of which were included in the apparato. (shrink)

An important shift is taking place in social cognition research, away from a focus on the individual mind and toward embodied and participatory aspects of social understanding. Empirical results already imply that social cognition is not reducible to the workings of individual cognitive mechanisms. To galvanize this interactive turn, we provide an operational definition of social interaction and distinguish the different explanatory roles – contextual, enabling and constitutive – it can play in social cognition. We show that interactive processes are (...) more than a context for social cognition: they can complement and even replace individual mechanisms. This new explanatory power of social interaction can push the field forward by expanding the possibilities of scientific explanation beyond the individual. (shrink)

Almost all people want their existence to continue all the time. In the past, this desire was getting satisfied with the faith of religions regarding the immortality of the spirit. In the modern era, the interest and faith in religion have diminished and consequently, the soul immortality has been looked upon with suspicion. Previously, death meant the transition to the other world; now death is interpreted as the end of a person's existence. Modern humans, who have doubts, fears, and anxieties (...) about the continuation of their existence after death, have difficulty in accepting the fact of death; they try to deny and fight it. However, the effort to remove death from life puts the fear and worry of death in the center of life, which leads to the confrontation with very different results than originally intended. The theme of this study is how modern individuals look at death, what ways they apply to get it out of their lives, by what tools they struggle against it and what the consequences of these efforts are. (shrink)

The phenomenological attitude allows us to grasp something that happens before the distinction between subject and object. The application to groups of human beings in a clinical and therapeutic context of the phenomenological setting allows us, in spite of its descriptive-contemplative aura, the extreme richness of potentialities, applicative and transformative, of one of the greatest intuitions of modern thought: the disappearance of the fracture between the subject, the others and the world-of-life, in the evidence of meaning that the mutual experience (...) of one's own presence or being-there opens up. The Mitsein doesn’t represent the only existential structure that makes the Dasein able to exist with others, but the relationship between the ‘originary temporality’ of the Dasein and the other as ‘you’. Dasein is that entity that is structurally “with” others. And it is in this relationship dynamic that unfolds the theme of the care. Care becomes for Heidegger the existential of the existentials, fundamental ontological structure, indicating the original opening of being. Being-with-in-loving could consist in the atmosphere, a kind of well-being which these flow-experiences, relatively rare in everyday life, are immersed in. (shrink)

Compendium of Advaita philosophy with two Sanskrit commentaries and Hindi translation.

As yet, there is no enactive account of social cognition. This paper extends the enactive concept of sense-making into the social domain. It takes as its departure point the process of interaction between individuals in a social encounter. It is a well-established finding that individuals can and generally do coordinate their movements and utterances in such situations. We argue that the interaction process can take on a form of autonomy. This allows us to reframe the problem of social cognition as (...) that of how meaning is generated and transformed in the interplay between the unfolding interaction process and the individuals engaged in it. The notion of sense-making in this realm becomes participatory sense-making. The onus of social understanding thus moves away from strictly the individual only. (shrink)

Does God have any relevant role in the new natural law theory of Germain Grisez and John Finnis? Finnis declared in Natural Law and Natural Rights that he wanted to offer “a theory of natural law without needing to advert to the question of God’s existence or nature or will.” Grisez claims that “man’s ultimate beatitudo cannot consist in the vision of God.” Indeed, there is no consistent role for God in their philosophical theory. In this article, the author shows (...) that their mistakes about God depend first on their metaphysical way of looking at nature, which is closer to thinkers like Hume and Kant than to Aristotle and Aquinas; and second on some strong misunderstandings in moral philosophy about the concept of ultimate end. He shows the unfortunate theological outcome their flawed metaphysics and morality have already produced. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 13.1 (Spring 2013): 35–45. (shrink)

Previous studies have highlighted that temporal source memory can be influenced by factors such as the individual’s age and the emotional valence of the event to be remembered. In this study, we investigated how the different points of view (POVs) from which an event is presented could interact with the relationship between age-related differences and emotional valence on temporal source memory. One hundred and forty-one younger adults (aged 18–30) and 90 older adults (aged 65–74) were presented with a series of (...) emotional videos shot from different POVs (first vs. third-person) in three sessions. In the fourth session, participants were asked to indicate in which session (1, 2, or 3) they viewed each video. The results indicated that the first-person POV amplified the effects of the emotional valence on temporal source memory. Only in this experimental condition, older adults “pushed away” negative stimuli by perceiving them as more distant in time, and “kept closer” positive stimuli by perceiving them as more recent. In comparison, younger adults “kept closer” positive stimuli. These findings add to the existing literature on the positivity effect on temporal source memory and highlighted the importance of considering the POV in relation to the emotional valence. (shrink)

How far do cultures affect the future of the planet? Can the debate on the environment and global warming be influenced by the cultures of East and West understanding each other better? In this consistently provocative dialogue, two of the most influential thinkers of recent times propose that only a 'human revolution' - a shift in the hearts and minds of individuals - can stimulate a revolution in humanity's relationship with the planet. Such a planetary revolution first requires a transformation (...) of moral and political leadership, and an orientation towards the future rather than a preoccupation with the short-termist policies of the present. Responding to humanity's ills from the Buddhist perspective, and with all the accumulated wisdom of the eastern philosophical tradition, Daisaku Ikeda calls for politicians to take as their mainstays a respect for the dignity of life and an eloquence to inspire in people a sense of community and courage. Correspondingly, renowned western economist and scholar of education Ricardo Diez-Hochleitner stresses the importance of proper educational planning and development in addressing the challenges posed by poverty, inequality and climate change. While acknowledging the scale of the task that lies ahead, both men offer an inspiring and hopeful vision for the future. (shrink)

Philosophy and conception of Divine authority in legal terms.

In recent works, Časlav Brukner and Jacques Pienaar have raised interesting objections to the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics. We answer these objections in detail and show that, far from questioning the viability of the interpretation, they sharpen and clarify it.

Normative notions are central to Husserl’s account of intentionality: intending an object is a normative achievement, essentially admitting of fulfillment or disappointment. So is teleology: intentional conscious life is inseparable from a horizontal orientation toward “ideas in the Kantian sense.” How are they related? Is teleology essential for intentionality as a normative achievement? Or, in Husserl’s way of putting it, do relative truths “demand” ideal truths? This article explores some reasons for agreeing with Husserl that this is indeed the case. (...) In Sec. 2, I will identify a “normative turn” in Husserl’s account of the basic structure of perceptual intentionality and spell out the teleological character of this normative account. This sense of teleology is a minimal one. A more robust teleology, in the sense of an orientation toward infinite ideality, is then justified in Sec. 3 by virtue of its function in the constitution of genuine objectivity. In Sec. 4, I will turn to the noetic, especially the ego-oriented side of Husserl’s analysis, in order to clarify the normative force of infinite telos. All in all, I will argue that the normative and the teleological sides of the story are inextricably intertwined in Husserl’s account of intentional conscious life. (shrink)

There is an eminent tradition of thought that sees in the phenomenon of time something contradictory. This tradition has been recently revived by some contemporary proponents of dialethism – the view that there are true contradictions. In this paper, I will contribute to this line of thinking by tracing the first steps of a dialethic account of time-consciousness. In particular, I will argue that the experiential flow of time can be accounted for in the framework of an intentionalist approach to (...) temporal perception if we conceive of time-consciousness as a quasi-multiplicity, i.e., a multiplicity of non-self-identical parts, hence the embrace of dialethism. Section 1 introduces dialethism, discusses Priest's dialethic theory of motion and time, and motivates the project of a dialethic account of time-consciousness. Section 2 introduces the intentionalist approach to time-consciousness and distinguishes pure intentionalism from sense-data intentionalism; both subscribes to a certain Principle of Simultaneous Awareness but interprets it differently. In Sect. 3, I offer an in-depth analysis of this principle and identify its core as the requirement of self-unification, i.e., the requirement that time-consciousness unifies itself in flowing without any higher-order act of unification. Section 4 then argues that pure intentionalism can satisfy this requirement by embracing dialethism. I conclude by noting how the dialethic account of time-consciousness incorporates a central extensionalist insight within an intentionalist outlook. (shrink)