This article presents a longitudinal study during the Italian ‘short twentieth century’. Our focus is on the behaviour of the political field, the recruitment process of the ministerial elite and its impact on the stability of the political system. The main aim of the paper is to build a descriptive and explanatory model that sheds light on the fragility of the PS in Italy. There are two main findings: PF is formed through waves of new forces characterised by impermeable bonds. (...) The instability of the PS is largely due to a lack of inclusiveness in the PF. The National Solidarity governments showed that an inclusive PF which gathers loyal and disloyal forces even at a critical juncture phase is able to counterbalance the exogenous challenge. (shrink)

Almost a century after the emergence of right-wing dictatorships in twentieth-century Europe, a consensual regime paradigm has yet to be found. The debate always gets bogged down by ongoing attempts to find the definitive and complete definition of the two most common regime types: fascism or generic fascism, and totalitarianism/authoritarianism. This article claims that, although definitive nomenclatures are unlikely to be found, it is more useful to think of regimes as more or less approximating their ideal type than to posit (...) their typologies in abstract terms. It therefore analyzes a key aspect of three dictatorial regimes: the functioning of the consensus-building institutions in Nazi Germany, in Fascist Italy, and in Salazarist Portugal. Propaganda is central to an understanding of these regimes, because it constitutes their ideological footprint—revealing what it aims for (inputs) and its capacity to impose those goals or make them popular (output). The three regimes examined here were very different from each other, and these differences can help us verify the degree to which each of them attained the standard of the totalitarian ideal type. (shrink)

In recent previous work, the authors proposed a new approach extending the framework of statistical mechanics to reparametrization-invariant systems with no additional gauges. In this paper, the approach is generalized to systems defined by more than one Hamiltonian constraint. We show how well-known features as the Ehrenfest–Tolman effect and the Jüttner distribution for the relativistic gas can be consistently recovered from a covariant approach in the multi-fingered framework. Eventually, the crucial role played by the interaction in the definition of a (...) global notion of equilibrium is discussed. (shrink)

Accelerating environmental uncertainty and the need to cope with increasingly complex market and social demands, combine to create high value for the intuitive approach to decision-making at the strategic level. Research on intuition suffers from marked fragmentation, due to the existence of disciplinary silos based on diverse, apparently irreconcilable, ontological and epistemological assumptions. Not surprisingly, there is no integrated interdisciplinary framework suitable for a rich account of intuition, contemplating how affect and cognition intertwine in the intuitive process, and how intuition (...) scales up from the individual to collective decision-making. This study contributes to the construction of a broad conceptual framework, suitable for a multi-level account of intuition and for a fruitful dialogue with distant research areas. It critically discusses two mainstream conceptualizations of intuition which claim to be grounded in a cross-disciplinary consensus. Drawing on the complexity paradigm, it then proposes a conceptualization of intuition as emergence. Finally, it explores the theoretical and practical implications. (shrink)

To contribute to our understanding of the relationship between philosophical ideas and medical and healthcare models. A diachronic analysis is put in place in order to evaluate, from an innovative perspective, the influence over the centuries on medical and healthcare models of two philosophical concepts, particularly relevant for health: how Man perceives his identity and how he relates to Nature. Five epochs are identified—the Archaic Age, Classical Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Modern Age, the ‘Postmodern’ Era—which can be seen, à (...) la Foucault, as ‘fragments between philosophical fractures’. From a historical background perspective, up to the early 1900s progress in medical and healthcare models has moved on a par with the evolution of philosophical debate. Following the Second World War, the Health Service started a series of reforms, provoked by anti-positivistic philosophical transformations. The three main reforms carried out however failed and the medical establishment remained anchored to a mechanical, reductionist approach, perfectly in line with the bureaucratic stance of the administrators. In this context, future scenarios are delineated and an anthropo-ecological model is proposed to re-align philosophy, medicine and health care. (shrink)

Selected aneuploidies can be rapidly diagnosed by the analysis of fluorescent polymerase chain reaction (PCR) products of chromosome‐specific and highly polymorphic small tandem repeats (STRs). The quantitative STR patterns obtained from samples of normal individuals are markedly different from those seen when patients with aneuploidies involving chromosome X, or trisomies of chromosomes 21 and 18, are tested. For example, while samples from normal subjects – tested with a chromosome 21‐derived STR (D21S11) – show two fluorescent PCR peaks with similar activities (...) in a 1:1 ratio, the analysis of samples from patients with trisomy 21 reveals the presence of either three peaks (ratio 1:1:1), or two peaks with a ratio of 2:1. The use of an internal non‐polymorphic marker allows identification of trisomic samples with three copies of the same allele. This rapid approach (24 hours) is particularly valuable when applied to prenatal diagnosis of chromosomal abnormalities since it reduces the time of anxiety of the parents waiting for the results of the conventional cytogenetic tests, which require several weeks. (shrink)

Recent studies suggest that a non‐isotopic in situ hybridisation (NISH) approach can be successfully employed to investigate the carrier status of female relatives in families of selected patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) or Hunter syndrome, whose diseases are due to a specific X chromosome deletion.Whilst the majority of metaphase spreads from normal females show specific hybridisation signals on both X chromosomes when tested with either dystrophin or Hunter gene‐derived probes, only one X chromosome in each metaphase spread will show (...) the relevant hybridisation complex in female carriers of deletions involving the dystrophin or Hunter gene.Thus, the NISH method can be a valuable diagnostic tool for the detection of the carrier status of female relatives of patients with X chromosome deletions. (shrink)

Using the conceptual lenses offered by the ideational and cultural path taken in the health care arena, this article attempts to explain the trajectory of recent major health care reforms in Italy and the reasons for their failure, as well as providing some directions for successful intervention. A diachronic analysis of the relatively under-investigated phenomenon of health care reforms in Italy is carried out, drawing on a systematic review of the Italian and international literature combined with the research work carried (...) out by the Author. For all the three major health reforms examined, a significant gap between the authoritative policy choices taken and the overall implementation, in terms of process and system changes, can be observed, determining a growing distance between the theoretical efficiency and the practical effectiveness of the Italian National Health Service (NHS) as well as its detachment from the social system. The main obstacle to effective reform seems to be the cultural hegemony of the administrative-managerial and the biomedical paradigms, which, by reinforcing one another, yielded infertile ground for renewing in a post-modern sense the Italian NHS. The various Reforms have not been conceived to break such a positivistic monopoly in that they did not promote cultural or educational intervention. In this context, intervention that acts at a cultural level, such as reforming university education for physicians and managers or devising immigration policies to attract adequately acculturated people to the Italian NHS, seems to be the most promising. (shrink)

In the 1960s Goffredo Parise made use of a series of interesting similes in order to describe men and women of his time. The similarity between human being and animal makes room for comparisons with objects, that would mean the end of the traditional physiognomy. Can this rhetorical choice be considered a lucid and visionary anticipation of post-humanism?

Goffredo Coppola, the Italian editor of this papyrus, supposed that τὸν ὄρχιν = τοὺς ὄρχεις; but he was puzzled when no likely erotic word seemed available to finish the line. He suggested φαλ[ῆς, from φαλός = λευκός to be followed by some metaphorical word for penis such as κέρκου. Romagnoli noted that it made no sense to have the testicle dependent on the penis, and argued that Hipponax here intended ὄρχις to refer metaphorically to the glans penis; therefore, he (...) emended to καί μοι τὸν ὄρχιν τῆς φαλ[ῆς ἐκλέψασα ; but his feminine form τῆς φαλ[ῆς is unlikely given the masculine form τοῦ φάλεω in Hipponax fr. 21 W. Medeiros suggested ὄρχις, sing. = ὄσχη ‘scrotum’; West actually exalted the role of the testicle by emending to τῆς φαλ[άκρης ἕλκουσα ‘pulling my testicle by the bald spot’; but it is not obvious why hitting the testicles merits such attention in a narrative fixed on the failure to attain an erection. (shrink)

Dopo un'introduzione che delinea lo status questionis relativo alla discussione sul diritto di proprietà nel sec. XIII, l'articolo si divide in tre parti: nella prima si discute la relazione tra gli ideali della fede cristiana e la proprietà comune, con particolare riguardo per l'origine dei diritti di proprietà; la seconda tratta gli argomenti che concernono il diritto alla proprietà privata, mentre la terza approfondisce il tema della proprietà condivisa. I testi sui quali viene condotta l'indagine sono il Tractatus brevis de (...) periculis novissimorum temporum di Guglielmo di Saint-Amour, il Contra adversarium perfectionis di Gerardo di Abbeville e le questioni quodlibetali di Enrico di Gand e di Goffredo di Fontaines, scritte a Parigi dal 1280 al 1290. Si mette in risalto l'uso della concezione aristotelica della proprietà contro l'ideale di assoluta povertà promosso da parte degli ambienti francescani. (shrink)