In _The School of Doubt_ Orazio Cappello presents a study of Cicero’s fragmentary philosophical treatise on sense-perception, the _Academica_, examining the dialogue’s literary, historiographical and theoretical texture.

In the framework of the issue of the observance of promises and agreements, Grotius discusses the question of whether Christians should be allowed to conclude treaties or alliances with those who were named infideles in the canonical and theological terminology. The question was ancient: since the early Middle Ages, alliances of Christians with infidels had been labeled as ‘impious’. Grotius’s solutions are based on the converging traditions of medieval canon law and theology: treaties and alliances with infidels are intrinsically lawful (...) according to natural and positive divine law, although they should be avoided in certain circumstances. Grotius’s concern, however, was not so much to affirm the theoretical lawfulness of the fedus cum infidelibus. The outcome of his argument consists in promoting the cohesion of Christians: he thinks that a joint action of the Christian nations is a moral and juridical obligation in the face of the aggressions caused by the enemies of Christendom. (shrink)

The fact that the notion of ‘practice’ has achieved an ever-increasing relevance in the most various fields of knowledge must not overshadow that it can be interpreted in so many different ways as to orient fairly different historiographical paradigms and philosophical conceptions. Starting with the two main issues of Hadot’s criticism of Foucault (the lack of a distinction between joy and pleasure and the fact that his account does not underscore that the individual Self is ultimately transcended by universal Reason), (...) I have tried to show how the two scholars’ philosophical and historiographical approaches entail a different notion of ‘practice’. According to Hadot, the performativity of a practice (or spiritual exercise) is intimately tied to a universal which transcends the individual self, whereas Foucault maintains that it does not require the appeal to any universal, being exclusively grounded on the modes of exertion of the practices which constitute the individual Self. According to this address, pleasure is a fundamental notion in order to historicize the different ways in which the ethical subject structures itself. (shrink)

The paper discusses the extent to which the availability of unprecedentedly rich data-sets and the need for new approaches – both epistemological and computational – is an emerging issue for Macroeconomics. By adopting an evolutionary approach, we describe the paradigm shifts experienced in the macroeconomic research field and emphasize that the types of data the macroeconomist has to deal with play an important role in the evolutionary process of the development of the discipline. After introducing the current debate over Big (...) Data in social sciences, the paper presents a detailed discussion of possible and existing interactions between Big Data and Computational Behavioral Macroeconomics. We argue that Big Data applied to economic questions can lead to new styles of thinking and research methods, namely to the development of a new research paradigm. (shrink)

RESUMENLa filosofía del último Schelling presenta elementos decisivos para una ontología de la libertad. Hay dos temas que en el último Schelling llevan precisamente al desarrollo de la ontología de la libertad, encabezada por Luigi Pareyson: el éxtasis de la razón, a la que dio una interpretación profunda el mismo Pareyson y la estructura de la libertad de Dios, en cuya configuración yo también he insistido. El éxtasis es la interrupción del desarrollo de la razón, que llega a sus límites (...) y está fundada desde el ser – en el ser que la precede, y que escapa de su poder. Desde aquí Schelling intenta elaborar una concepción compleja y no siempre lineal de la libertad de Dios, ya como libertad de la creación, ya –más originariamente– como libertad frente a su propio ser. En este intento Schelling no alcanza a liberarse completamente de la tradición metafísica del principio de necesidad. La ontología de la libertad se libera de éste considerando la libertad no sólo como inicio, sino tambien como elección entre ser y no ser. De esta manera, por un lado, lo originario escapa radicalmente a la necesidad y, por el otro lado, precisamente porque su ser es elegido en una alternativa, la suya no es una simple autoposicion, que sucumbe a la necesidad, sino la posición de algo otro de sí, el ser, respecto al cual puede ejercer su libre poder.PALABRAS CLAVEDIOS, LIBERTAD, ONTOLOGÍA, RAZÓN, EXTASISABSTRACTThe philosophy of the last Schelling presents decisive insights for an ontology of freedom. Particularly two themes of the last Schelling lead to the ontology of freedom proposed by Luigi Pareyson: the ecstasy of reason of which Pareyson himself gave a profound interpretation and the structure of God’s freedom on the configuration of which I insisted too. Ecstasy is the interruption of the development of reason, which comes to its limits and is founded by the being, which is beyond reason’s power. From here, Schelling tries to process a complex and not always linear conception of God’s freedom both as freedom of creation and, more originally, as freedom of his own being. In this attempt Schelling does not depart completely from the metaphysical tradition of the principle of necessity. The ontology of freedom thinks freedom not only as a beginning, but as a choice between being and not being. In this way, on the one hand the absolute origin escapes radically from the necessity and on the other hand, just because its being is chosen within an alternative, its position of the being is not a simple self-position, which would succumb to the necessity, but the position of something different from itself: the being with regard to which it can exercise its free power.KEY WORDSGOD, FREEDOM, ONTOLOGY, REASON, ECSTASY. (shrink)

A sound in a real space (e.g. a street or a room) is studied by acousticians as the relationship between an anechoic signal and the reverberant sound field. We define ‘anechoic signal’ a signal representing the pressure variation emitted by the sound source, while the ‘reverberant field’ is a field representing the sum of all the sound reflections of the environment in which the sound exists, delayed in time due to the positions of the sound source and the listener. The (...) auditory ability of detecting a sound and assigning it to a source depends both on the anechoic signal and the reverberant sound field. This relationship has been analysed in acoustic literature using the autocorrelation properties of the anechoic signals and objective metrics of the sound field, the last ones being the ‘room criteria’ described in ISO 3382. In this context, the ‘effective duration’ of the autocorrelation function (τe) has been proposed as key factor to ‘preferred’ values of several room criteria in relation to different kind of music signals. Relying on some similarities between the definition of ‘auditory objects’ and the sound detection in a reverberant space, this paper proposes the use of τe as a potential tool to study and catalogue auditory objects. (shrink)

Luca Ciancio discusses Luigi Luzzatti’s article starting from a reflection about the ubiquity of the biological metaphors used by him in order to reason on the method of constitutional science. Luzzatti bases on the classic distinction between historic "organic" constitutions, i.e. the British one, which is a true and spontaneous incarnation of the "national character", and abstract "mechanic" constitutions, artificially imposed by reason and therefore instable. In the late positivistic era the same recourse to a metaphorical evolutionistic repertoire, like (...) the one of the embryologic dynamic of the constitutions, on the one defines hand Luzzatti’s intent as a subscription to historicism and organicism, which is typical of his epoch, and on the other hand the free recourse to biology allows him to discuss cognitive strategies that are useful to constitutional science and freed from a dogmatic notion of scientificity. Through Luzzatti's text, though, Ciancio underlines the meaning and the function of an evolutionistic paradigm which defined in a rigid and ideological way the historic investigation and which Luzzatti uses to recall an idea of order, restoration and continuity. (shrink)

The first issue this essay examines is the articulation of the cinema of the body, the feminine gestus, and the ‘political cinema’, which begins with the philosophical shout, ‘Give me a body, then!’ and ends with the ‘Third World Cinema’ as a cinema of memory. How is this Deleuzian concept in tension with the one proposed here of ‘missing body’? The second issue concerns the importance of the body for theory and practice within feminist film theory and queer theory. The (...) question of the body is introduced in-between these two lines in the context of a series of Latin American documentaries. The final problem is then how to see and show a body that is missing, like an outside of the body image, and of a certain regime of the visible and the audible that tends to be fixed in topics by the production of technologies of memory. (shrink)

Orazio Irrera – On a l’habitude un peu hâtive de dire que lorsque Foucault critique l’idéologie, il s’adresse surtout à la conception althussérienne de l’idéologie. Mais en suivant votre argumentation, il semble plutôt que Foucault et Althusser ont tenté tous les deux d’échapper à une conception représentationnelle et seulement négative de l’idéologie. Pour cette raison, à votre avis, serait-il utile de distinguer parmi les critiques de Foucault entre celles qui sont adr...

L’une des questions majeures qui traverse le livre de Pierre Macherey, Le sujet des normes, est sans aucun doute celle de l’idéologie, dont il propose une refonte visant à rematérialiser ce concept ainsi que l’ensemble des pratiques auxquelles il renvoie. Cette refonte débouche sur ce que P. Macherey désigne finalement par le terme d’« infra-idéologie ». Loin de céder au refrain longtemps répété qu’à l’époque des démocraties néo-libérales avec leur pragmatisme et leurs technicismes, on assist..

Questo articolo cerca di esplorare il rapporto tra parrēsia ed exemplum negli ultimi Corsi al Collège de France di Michel Foucault. A partire da L’ermeneutica del soggetto , viene analizzato il campo semantico e pratico relativo alla direzione di coscienza stoica ed epicurea, in cui Foucault oppone la parrēsia all’adulazione e alla retorica per collocarla invece all’interno di un’importante serie di concetti: la paradosis (la trasmissione dei discorsi di verità), il kairos (il momento giusto, la circostanza opportuna) e l’exemplum definito (...) come «il cuore della parrēsia » poiché esso assicura l’ adæquatio tra il soggetto di enunciazione e il soggetto di comportamento che si conforma alla verità espressa dal primo. Successivamente, viene posta l’attenzione sul legame tra parrēsia ed exemplum nell’ultimo Corso, Il coraggio della verità , per mettere in evidenza un’importante riconfigurazione all’interno della parrēsia cinica, in cui l’esempio appare come una categoria etica basata sulla permanenza e sull’identità a sé. Pertanto, esso si rivela inadeguato per questo regime aleturgico della parrēsia cinica, che invece consiste in un atteggiamento etico sperimentale, una mise à l’épreuve cui sottomettere la vita per arrivare a una trasformazione politica del mondo attraverso una continua e scandalosa provocazione degli altri, in grado di mettere in discussione la percezione di norme culturali e di abitudini consolidate. (shrink)

Explores a Foucaultian understanding of the subject in relation to truth and power.

This introduction to the special issue ‘Foucault Before the Collège de France’ surveys Foucault’s work in the first part of his career. While there is a familiar chronology to the books he published in the 1960s – from History of Madness to The Archaeology of Knowledge – the story can be developed in relation to his articles, his translations, his early publications and manuscripts, and his teaching. Looking at the programme of posthumous publication of many of his courses and unfinished (...) manuscripts, this introduction discusses key themes, and introduces the papers of the special issue which analyse these texts in detail. It concludes with some general thoughts about what these hitherto neglected or hidden sources tell us about the work of Foucault. Although it adds some cautions about their use, we believe the texts and lectures analysed in this issue and others from the period before the Collège de France add valuable insights into our understanding of Foucault’s intellectual development, his interests and plans, and his enduring influence on a variety of fields in the humanities and social sciences. (shrink)