Indian poetics and aesthetics; comprises the part of his Abhinavabhāratī which comments on the sutra 'Vibhāvānubhāvavyabhicārisaṃyogādrasaniṣpattiḥ' from the larger work entitled Nāṭya Śāstra by Bharata; Sanskrit text in roman script with English translation.

Ontology, in its philosophical meaning, is the discipline investigating the structure of reality. Its findings can be relevant to knowledge organization, as well as models of knowledge can in turn offer relevant ontological suggestions. Several philosophers in time have pointed out that reality is structured into a series of integrative levels, like the physical, the biological, the mental, and the cultural one, and that each level plays as a base for the emergence of more complex ones. Among them, more detailed (...) theories of levels have been developed by Nicolai Hartmann and James K. Feibleman, and these have been considered as a source for structuring principles in bibliographic classification by both the Classification Research Group (CRG) and Ingetraut Dahlberg. CRG's analysis of levels and of their possible application to a new general classification scheme based on phenomena instead of disciplines, as it was formulated by Derek Austin in 1969, is examined in detail. Both benefits and open problems in applying integrative levels to bibliographic classification are pointed out. (shrink)

Faceted knowledge organization systems have sophisticated logical structures, making their representation as linked data a demanding task. The term facet is often used in ambiguous ways: while in thesauri facets only work as semantic categories, in classification schemes they also have syntactic functions. The need to convert the Integrative Levels Classification (ILC) into SKOS stimulated a more general analysis of the different kinds of syntactic facets, as can be represented in terms of RDF properties and their respective domain and range. (...) A nomenclature is proposed, distinguishing between common facets, which can be appended to any class, that is, have an unrestricted domain; and special facets, which are exclusive to some class, that is, have a restricted domain. In both cases, foci can be taken from any other class (unrestricted range: free facets), or only from subclasses of an existing class (parallel facets), or be defined specifically for the present class (bound facets). Examples are given of such cases in ILC and in the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC). (shrink)

Facets and general categories used in bibliographic classification have been based on a disciplinary organization of knowledge. However, facets and categories of phenomena independent from disciplines can be identified similarly. Phenomena can be classified according to a series of integrative levels (layers), which in turn can be grouped into the major strata of form, matter, life, mind, society and culture, agreeing with Nicolai Hartmann’s ontology. Unlike a layer, a stratum is not constituted of elements of the lower ones; rather, it (...) represents the formal pattern of the lower ones, like the horse hoof represents the shape of the steppe. Bibliographic categories can now be seen in the light of level theory: some categories are truly general, while others only appear at a given level, being the realization of a general category in the specific context of the level: these are the facets of that level. In the notation of the Integrative Level Classification project, categories and facets are represented by digits, and displayed in a Web interface with the help of colours. (shrink)

Emergence can be described as a relationship between entities at different levels of organization, that looks especially puzzling at the transitions between the major levels of matter, life, cognition and culture. Indeed, each major level is dependent on the lower one not just for its constituents, but in some more formal way. A passage by François Jacob suggests that all such evolutionary transitions are associated with the appearance of some form of memory–genetic, neural or linguistic respectively. This implies that they (...) have an informational nature. Based on this idea, we propose a general model of informational systems understood as combinations of modules taken from a limited inventory. Some informational systems are “semantic” models, that is reproduce features of their environment. Among these, some are also “informed”, that is have a pattern derived from a memory subsystem. The levels and components of informed systems can be listed to provide a general framework for knowledge organization, of relevance in both philosophical ontology and applied information services. (shrink)

Introduction to a special issue on facet analysis.

Summary This article examines the complex nature of post-war Italian political thought, stressing the importance of Italy's unusual institutional and historical political arrangements, but also the vibrancy of its political ideologies in this period. In the past it has often been argued that the dysfunctional nature of post-war Italian democracy with its rapidly changing governments, and widespread corruption—which nonetheless coexisted with the one party, the Christian Democrats, being constantly in power—led to the atrophying of political theory in general, and political (...) ideologies in particular. But this picture is strongly disputed here—on the contrary it is argued that Christian Democratic, Left and liberal political ideologies were all complex and interesting. Thus if Christian democracy should ultimately be seen as an ‘ideology of transition’ which existed to help Catholicism adapt to the parameters of modern mass democracy, and which lacked a thinker of the calibre of Jacques Maritain, it nevertheless contained within it important debates on the role of the state, between such interesting thinkers as Giuseppe Dossetti and Alcide De Gasperi. And if anything, political thinking on the Left in the post-war period was even more complex, with visceral debates within the (large) Communist Party (PCI) over whether to work within the law—between such thinkers as Palmiro Togliatti and the Il Manifesto group. Equally on the more revolutionary Left, there were important debates about how quickly capitalism could be made to collapse through revolutionary action between thinkers such as Raniero Panzieri and his more radical disciples, Mario Tronti and Antonio Negri, while later, due to the general failure of these revolutionary efforts, post-modern thinkers such as Gianni Vattimo sought to abandon grand metaphysical narratives, whilst retaining a commitment to Left of centre political commitments. Finally, although not part of a widespread mass movement, the liberal thought of Norberto Bobbio was also highly interesting and sophisticated—borrowing from Hobbes and Kelsen, he sought to advocate a modest form of liberal democracy which allowed for civilised forms of conflict, and the protection of minorities, and which rejected the contention of Marxists that civil rights could not be distinguished from economic ones. Overall, if normative aspirations in post-war Italian politics were often frustrated in practice, this was certainly not due to any lack of theoretical vibrancy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Retrieving Contuition in Saint BonaventureJunius Johnson (bio)Introduction: A Baffling ConceptThe word "contuition" is one that has an immediate effect on the reader who first encounters it in the pages of Bonaventure: it is evocative, teasing the reader with the promise of a rich and fresh, new way of thinking about knowledge. Thus, Raniero Sciamannini speaks of: "…that mysterious act of knowledge that, with a singular term, Saint Bonaventure (...) has called contuition and that has always excited such great perplexity among the interpreters. Is it a generic or specific term? An apprehension of things or of God? Abstract or intuitive? Mediate or immediate? Natural or supernatural?"1Contuitio is built on the verb tueor. And here it is clear that there is something common between "contuition" and its semantic relative "intuition," which is built on the same verb: both are forms of seeing. Since "intuition" is a more common word and concept, it will provide a good place to begin.Intuition, as most of the commentators see it, is an immediate gaze. It need not, however, be a comprehensive gaze. One may gaze immediately in apprehension as well.2 Apprehension is that gaze whereby one sees an object but one does not see all of the object. Apprehension is true, but incomplete. It is not necessarily veiled, or dark, though it may be these things. Rather, apprehension describes any instance in which the subject is incapable of seeing all of the object, whether this be from an impediment on the part of the object or the subject. Thus, in the case of my knowledge of a tree, which says more than I can hear and whose nature I only imperfectly grasp, my knowledge is apprehension because I see in a glass (under a veil) and darkly. And in the case of the knowledge the blessed have of God, it is also apprehension because God so greatly exceeds their capacity that they cannot exhaustively know God. [End Page 5]In one way of looking at it, all of our knowledge is only ever apprehensive: we never so exhaustively know a thing that we cannot come to know more about it (and this may be thought to be true eschatologically as well); this is one way of expressing the wonder and mystery of each particular thing. Underlying this understanding is a strong view of comprehension, one that holds that comprehensive knowing is the determinate and final knowledge of any thing. This is, however, not the sense that Bonaventure is working with. He will allow that we comprehend a tree, and thus apprehension is reserved for only those situations where some impediment or excess intervenes. In fact, in actual use, Bonaventure will tend to deploy apprehension in cases of excess, not impediment.Both intuitio and contuitio are often deployed to handle apprehensive knowledge, that is, real knowledge that nevertheless falls short of mastery, either because the knower does not attain to the whole of the thing, or because the knower is not capable of grasping the whole of the thing.That puts intuition and contuition in a similar field, but it does not yet really say what contuition is. It turns out to be quite difficult to get a straight answer about just what Bonaventure means by the term. Studies are not numerous: only about a dozen. Generally when the term is referenced outside of these studies, there is a tacit assumption that we already know what contuition means, or it is given a one sentence summary that clearly indicates that a deeper discussion is to be desired. For example, Leonard J. Bowman writes:The act of knowledge that achieves this apprehension of the Word through the creature, or the creature in the Word, involves a contuition. Contuition, within Bonaventure's symbolic theology, is a grasp of a perceived thing in relation to its causes, especially to its exemplary cause, the Word.3It is not so much that this is an untrue account (although it is limited, for it is unable to account for all of the uses of contuition in Bonaventure); rather, the problem is that it is a thin account. Bowman does not offer an argument for the... (shrink)

Aureli advances a fresh, spirited and combative account of the idea of ‘autonomy’, connecting Italian architectural debates from the 1960s with the politics of class-autonomy that was being developed and advanced by workerist theorists such as Raniero Panzieri, Mario Tronti and Toni Negri. Aureli’s account focuses on Aldo Rossi’s architectural ideas and the project of the No-Stop City proposed by the young avant-garde group Archizoom. The Project of Autonomy is not simply envisaged as an historical exploration of the 1960s; (...) primarily, it is conceived as an intervention in current architectural theory, drawing on the author’s interest in Tronti’s politics to challenge the contemporary popularity of a broadly post-Negrian ‘autonomism’. This review questions aspects of Aureli’s reading of Rossi and Manfredo Tafuri. Furthermore, although Aureli’s discussion of Red Vienna opens up onto vital questions of strategies for social change, which remain pertinent to contemporary arguments over ‘enclaves’ or ‘zones’ of resistance, his antagonism towards Tafuri prevents his argument from either exploring or advancing the debate which he has initiated. (shrink)

Questo volume raccoglie per la prima volta gli scritti filosofici e politici di Gianni Vattimo, presentati da Gaetano Chiurazzi con una introduzione di Antonio Gnoli, e ripercorre la traiettoria del suo pensiero, dalle riflessioni sui grandi maestri del Novecento alle nuove prospettive dell'ermeneutica filosofica e del pensiero debole--Front flap of jacket.

Presents the Sanskrit text, together with an English translation by Gnoli, of the tenth century treatises by Abhinavagupta. The text, called the most recent "creative stimulus" to the study of aesthetics in India, is in the form of a commentary on the fourth- or fifth-century work attributed to Bharata, concerned with instructions for the production of drama. As the translator's introduction states, this early manuscript has been a unique source in the development of Indian aesthetic thought.--E. T.