Il volume analizza e commenta le lezioni inedite che Cosmo Guastella, docente di Filosofia teoretica nell’Università di Palermo, tenne tra il 1903 e il 1915. Il testo contribuisce a colmare un aspetto inedito per la ricostruzione dell’intera produzione de.

Seneca's Medea carries out a plan of revenge that follows a retaliation mechanism inspired both by fury and by an established principle of reciprocity. This principle follows the rules, described in Seneca's De ira, of revenge aroused by anger. Medea had earlier been guilty of crimes against her own family, in order to assist Jason; she now maintains that she has fallen victim to the very same offenses. Therefore she now resolves to perpetrate similar crimes upon the husband who has (...) decided to leave her. In retaliation for the loss of her father's kingdom, of her brother Absyrtus, and of her own virginity she now kills Creon and his daughter, as well as her own children. Medea can thus create a fictitious link between the parts of her identity that have been thrown into disarray by her separation from Jason. In fact, the crimes she commits as a wife, in order to get rid of Jason, are just the inexorable consequence of the crimes she had committed as a girl, in order to join him. The separation which thus comes about conforms to the rules of a normal Roman divorce: the wife leaves her husband's home as well as her children, but her dowry is returned to her. Towards the end of the tragedy, Medea goes so far as to say that she has retrieved the "dowry" of crimes she paid in order to become Jason's wife, since she has recovered her father's kingdom, her brother, and her virginity as well. This is no more than a wild illusion, but in considering its elaborate rhetorical form we gain an idea of the kind of balance which is the aim of Seneca's Medea as she accomplishes her revenge. (shrink)

, from Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy.

All’interno del dialogo _Della Dignità e Nobiltà delle Donne _(1622), Cristoforo Bronzini afferma con decisione che numerose donne nel corso della storia si sono distinte nell’ambito della scrittura, a dispetto di obsoleti pregiudizi: l’articolo si propone di indagare le modalità con le quali Bronzini declina il paradigma della differenza di genere, offrendo nello specifico una breve panoramica sulle scrittrici umanistico-rinascimentali che l’autore propone come massimi _exempla_ _virtutis_.

Cornelio Lanci si avvale di sei trattati degli _Esempi della virtù delle donne_ per testimoniare l’_humanitas_ _ante litteram_ di Zenobia, sovrana dell’impero d’Oriente ai tempi di Aureliano. L’articolo si propone di indagare le possibili fonti cui l’urbinate attinse per approntare le sue personali riscritture delle gloriose imprese della regina di Palmira.

The Standard View is that, other things equal, speakers’ judgments about the meanings of sentences of their language are correct. After all, we make the meanings, so how wrong can we be about them? The Standard View underlies the Elicitation Method, a typical method in semantic fieldwork, according to which we should work out the truth-conditions of a sentence by eliciting speakers’ judgments about its truth-value in different situations. I put pressure on the Standard View and therefore on the Elicitation (...) Method: for quite straightforward reasons, speakers can be radically mistaken about meanings. -/- Lewis gave a theory of convention in a game-theoretic framework. He showed how conventions could arise from repeated coordination games, and, as a special case, how meanings could arise from repeated signaling games. I put pressure on the Standard View by building on Lewis’s framework. I construct coordination games in which the players can be wrong about their conventions, and signaling games in which the players can be wrong about their messages’ meanings. The key idea is straightforward: knowing your own strategy and payoff needn’t determine what the others do, so leaves room for false beliefs about the convention and meanings. The examples are simple, explicit, new in kind, and based on an independently plausible meta-semantic story. (shrink)

Purpose: This study is aimed to preliminary investigate whether transcranial alternating current stimulation could affect explosive power considering genetic background in sport subjects.Methods: Seventeen healthy sports volunteers with at least 3 years of sports activities participated in the experiment. After 2 weeks of familiarization performed without any stimulation, each participant received either 50 Hz-tACS or sham-tACS. Before and after stimulation, subjects performed the following tests: the squat jump with the hands on the hips ; countermovement jump with the hands on (...) the hips ; countermovement jump with arm swing ; 15-s Bosco’s test; seated backward overhead medicine ball throw ; seated chest pass throw with a 3-kg rubber medicine ball; and hand-grip test. Additionally, saliva samples were collected from each participant. Genotyping analysis was carried out by polymerase chain reaction.Results: No significant differences were found in sport performance of subjects after 50 Hz-tACS. Additionally, we did not find any influence of genetic background on tACS-related effect on physical performance. These results suggest that tACS at gamma frequency is not able to induce an after-effect modulating sport performance. Further investigations with larger sample size are needed in order to understand the potential role of non-invasive brain stimulation techniques in motor performances.Conclusions: Gamma-tACS applied before the physical performance fails to improve explosive power in sport subjects. (shrink)

Tarski asked whether the arithmetic identities taught in high school are complete for showing all arithmetic equations valid for the natural numbers. The answer to this question for the language of arithmetic expressions using a constant for the number one and the operations of product and exponentiation is affirmative, and the complete equational theory also characterises isomorphism in the typed lambda calculus, where the constant for one and the operations of product and exponentiation respectively correspond to the unit type and (...) the product and arrow type constructors. This paper studies isomorphisms in typed lambda calculi with empty and sum types from this viewpoint. Our main contribution is to show that a family of so-called Wilkie–Gurevič identities, that plays a pivotal role in the study of Tarski’s high school algebra problem, arises from type-theoretic isomorphisms. We thus close an open problem by establishing that the theory of type isomorphisms in the presence of product, arrow, and sum types is not finitely axiomatisable. Further, we observe that for type theories with arrow, empty and sum types the correspondence between isomorphism and arithmetic equality generally breaks down, but that it still holds in some particular cases including that of type isomorphism with the empty type and equality with zero. (shrink)

Cosmos est le premier volume d'une trilogie intitulée "Brève encyclopédie du monde". Il présente une philosophie de la nature. Il sera suivi de "Décadence", qui traitera de l'histoire, puis de "Sagesse", consacré à la question de l'éthique et du bonheur. "Trop de livres se proposent de faire l'économie du monde tout en prétendant nous le décrire. Cet oubli nihiliste du cosmos me semble plus peser que l'oubli de l'être. Les monothéismes ont voulu célébrer un livre qui prétendait dire la totalité (...) du monde. Pour ce faire ils ont écarté des livres qui disaient le monde autrement qu'eux. Une immense bibliothèque s'est installée entre les hommes et le cosmos, et la nature, et le réel". Tel est le point de départ de ce livre, dans lequel Michel Onfray nous propose de renouer avec une méditation philosophique en prise directe avec le cosmos. Contempler le monde, ressaisir les intuitions fondatrices du temps, de la vie, de la nature, comprendre ses mystères et les leçons qu'elle nous livre. Tel est l'ambition de ce livre très personnel, qui renoue avec l'idéal grec et païen d'une sagesse humaine en harmonie avec le monde. (shrink)

traduzione di n. de domenico del testo di f. brentano "sul nominalismo. contro guastella".

The knots of images in Aeschylus’ Septem with their exuberant and powerful vocabulary give the play the aura that prompted Gorgias and Aristophanes to proclaim it “full of Ares”. The ferocity of the ancient siege is brought to life in the destruction of the city the chorus imagines and in the duels at the seven gates that achieve epic proportions through the dueling speeches of Eteocles and his scout. The play’s transparent dependence on language for its emotive effect readily invites (...) close examination. Aeschylus’ Septem abounds with contemporary cosmological and mathematical ideas and images. The poet uses them consistently throughout the play, I suggest, to make of Thebes a seven-sided, shield-shaped cosmos, ruled over by the seven-month lord of sevens (heptamagetes), Apollo, and the completion of whose circumference seals the unified fate of Polynices and Eteocles. (shrink)

Johannes Müller von Königsberg (1436-1476), better known as Regiomontanus, is widely considered as the most influential astronomer and mathematician of 15th-century Europe. He was active as an astrologer and deemed astrology to be the queen of mathematical sciences. Despite this, Regiomontanus's astrological activity has yet to be fully explored. A brief examination of Regiomontanus's manuscripts shows that his astrological interests were accompanied by interests in the arts and in methods of prognostication. This article studies an unconventional astrological-chiromantical text, whose relevance (...) is threefold: a) it sheds new light on Regiomontanus's astrological interests; b) it enriches our knowledge of Regiomontanus's efforts to learn and understand Greek-Regiomontanus transcribed it into his own manuscript during his sojourn in Italy from 1460-1467; and c) it is the sole extant text in the Greek tradition that provides a system for prognostication from the study of a person's hand, the parts of which are considered as being under the domain of planets. The article provides an English translation of Regiomontanus's transcription, alongside a brief commentary, and studies the intellectual and historical context of that production through manuscript analysis. (shrink)

This essay raises the question of the character and status of imagination in ancient Greek philosophy. It is often said that neither Plato nor Aristotle conceived of imagination in genuinely productive terms. The point, however, is not approaching ancient thought while thinking with Kant, as if we were looking for proto-Kantian insights in antiquity. Ancient thought is not a series of ‘tentative steps’ destined to reach a full-blown articulation in modernity, let alone an anticipation of the first critique. On the (...) contrary, it is essential to acknowledge the discontinuities that make the ancient discourse remote and, in many respects, opaque, hidden from us. On the ground of such assumptions, the essay addresses the understanding of imagination (eikasia, phantasia) in the Greek context, focusing in particular on Plato’s Timaeus. First, we consider how imagination, precisely in its creative aspect, operates at the very heart of philosophical argumentation. Plato’s emphatic awareness of this disallows the rhetoric of philosophy as the discipline of truth (of apodictic necessity, objectivity, and neutrality). In fact, it calls for a profound re-thinking of the relation between creativity and the philosophical turn to the ‘things themselves.’ Timaeus imagines the cosmos as a theatrical device: the place of seeing and being seen, of contemplation and the originary emergence of images. This evokes an understanding of imagination outside the order of subjectivity and its faculties, i.e., a meditation on the impersonal character of production and the force of images (of symbols) arising without being constituted by ‘me.’. (shrink)

Roger Crisp presents a comprehensive study of Henry Sidgwick's The Methods of Ethics, a landmark work first published in 1874. Crisp argues that Sidgwick is largely right about many central issues in moral philosophy: the metaphysics and epistemology of ethics, consequentialism, hedonism about well-being, and the weight to be given to self-interest. He holds that Sidgwick's long discussion of 'common-sense' morality is probably the best discussion of deontology we have. And yet The Methods of Ethics can be hard to understand, (...) and this is perhaps one reason why, though it is a philosophical goldmine, few have ventured deeply into it. What does Sidgwick mean by a 'method'? Why does he discuss only three methods? What are his arguments for hedonism and for utilitarianism? How can we make sense of the idea of moral intuition? What is the role of virtue in Sidgwick's ethics? Crisp addresses these and many other questions, offering a fresh view of Sidgwick's text which will assist any moral philosopher to gain more from it. (shrink)

Le sentiment du sublime est une expérience de la nature qui nous fait prendre conscience de la place paradoxale que nous occupons dans le cosmos et provoque par ce biais un plaisir ambivalent. Selon la théorie classique, kantienne, cette expérience proviendrait d’une sorte de combat de catch mental, dont on perdrait les premiers rounds en laissant la nature déborder nos sens, mais que l’on finirait par remporter grâce à la puissance de notre raison et de notre liberté. On n’aurait d’expérience (...) de sublime, toujours selon cette théorie, que face à des objets naturels dignes d’être (mentalement) combattus, des choses immenses ou terriblement puissantes comme le ciel étoilé, les montagnes ou les ouragans. Je prétends dans cet article que la théorie classique dépend d’une conception de la nature que nous ne pouvons pas trouver crédible aujourd’hui (une conception, très sommairement, agonistique et anthropocentrée) et qui la discrédite. Corrélativement, elle se trompe quant à l’objet du sublime, qui peut être une chose relativement petite comme un arbre ou même, peut-être, une brindille oscillant dans le vent. Je propose une théorie alternative du sublime qui repose sur une forme de décentrement empathique dans la nature, fût-elle indifférente et sauvage, plutôt que sur un combat mental contre elle. (shrink)

This thought-provoking classic investigates how the Renaissance spirit fundamentally questioned and undermined medieval thought. Of value to students of literature, political theory, history of religious and Reformation thought, and the history of science.

I shall defend Augustine’s holistic aesthetic response to the problem of evil by considering the variety of ways in which our vision of the cosmos is limited and how this is similar to the kinds of limitations on viewing a work of art that would make negative criticism unreasonable. At the same time, I identify an interesting asymmetry: we may be justified in making positive, but not negative, judgments about the creator’s skill on the basis of a mere partial perception.

Contemporary theories of consciousness are based on widely different concepts of its nature, most or all of which probably embody aspects of the truth about it. Starting with a concept of consciousness indicated by the phrase “the feeling of what happens” (the title of a book by Antonio Damásio), we attempt to build a framework capable of supporting and resolving divergent views. We picture consciousness in terms of Reality experiencing itself from the perspective of cognitive agents. Each conscious experience is (...) regarded as composed of momentary feeling events that are combined by recognition and evaluation into extended conscious episodes that bind cognitive contents with a wide range of apparent durations (0.1 secs to 2 or more secs, for us humans, depending on circumstances and context). Three necessary conditions for the existence of consciousness are identified: a) a ground of Reality, envisaged as an universal field of potentiality encompassing all possible manifestations, whether material or 'mental'; b) a transitional zone, leading to; c) a manifest world with its fundamental divisions into material, 'informational' and quale-endowed aspects. We explore ideas about the nature of these necessary conditions, how they may relate to one another and whether our suggestions have empirical implications. (shrink)

This sequel to the highly acclaimed Cosmos and Anthropos demonstrates the impact on social, ethical, and theological doctrines of the twentieth-century scientific revolution, particularly the Anthropic Principle. Harris reviews the main arguments put forward in the Western philosophical tradition for the existence of God, as well as the critique of those arguments, and shows that the conflict between religion and science since the seventeenth century has resulted more from the implications of the Copernican-Newtonian scientific paradigm than from any insuperable divergence (...) of dogma or ultimate aim. (shrink)

The essay aims to illuminate the current crisis, as it has been diagnosed by important currents of contemporary European thought, from the baroque remarkably the Hispanic perspective. The author argues that one of the fundamental figures of the Baroque is what he calls an infinite aporethic difference. According to this, Baroque understands the world as a set of differences that bind aporethically tending to infinity. This figure is, at the same time, shown as a critical operator with regard to reality, (...) which has lost its pre-modern configuration as Cosmos. The author also holds that in its present projection, the figure of the infinite aporethic difference takes the form of a new normativity, namely, that of the Chaosmos, which is particularly visible in post-structuralism and in the Ibero-American Neo-baroque. By its virtue, it is possible to distinguish two ways of coping with the current crisis. The chaosmotic one would be characteristic of a compromised strong trans-modernity, which contrasts with the evasive weak postmodernity. This problem is finally investigated from the point of view of the subtle baroque heroism and its shadow in the present. (shrink)

The cosmos is filled with evil that seemingly has no redeeming value. Granted, some evils do lead to greater goods, sometimes goods that could not exist without the evils. Thus, the exercise of courage is a good that requires either an actual evil to stand firm in the face of or the illusion of an evil—and an illusion is a kind of evil, too. But many evils appear to serve no such purpose. Philosophers call an evil that a supremely good (...) God would have insufficient reason to permit to exist a gratuitous evil. A particularly powerful form of the argument from evil against the existence of the God of Western monotheism is, thus, that there.. (shrink)

One of the key concepts in the Heng Xian is the concept of creation, as expressed through a process of spontaneous arising and spontaneous generation. This article analyzes the mechanics of spontaneous creation in terms of the cosmogony that is prominent in the text. I also show how psychomorphic descriptions of the cosmos—associated with the process of cosmogenesis—provide an explanation for change and movement in the cosmos as well as a template for idealized human action in the world. Lastly, I (...) suggest a possible cultural context in which such descriptions of creation became prominent in the late Warring States period. (shrink)

Richard Tarnas’s The Passion of the Western Mind —acclaimed by leading voices in philosophy, religion, psychology, and history—sets the stage for this major work, thirty years in the making, that dramatically reframes our understanding of the universe in the light of extraordinary new evidence. Cosmos and Psyche is the first book by a widely respected scholar to demonstrate the existence of a consistent correspondence between planetary movements and the unfolding drama of human history. A vast and impressive body of evidence (...) illuminates patterns of meaning and precise correlations between the universe and the world of human endeavor. With meticulous detail, Richard Tarnas takes us on a journey that begins with the ancient Greeks and culminates in our own era and its transformative potential, putting into perspective these chaotic, tumultuous times—from the sixties to September 11, 2001—and pointing the way towards the future. In terms of planetary cycles, our present moment in history is most comparable to the period five hundred years ago—that era of “extraordinary turbulence and creativity,” the High Renaissance. Not since Copernicus conceived the heliocentric theory has the human community faced such a profound realignment of the way we think. Readers of every persuasion will be impressed by the vast canvas here, the wealth of research and analysis, and the profound conclusions that may be drawn—conclusions that reunite religion and science, and restore a transcendent dimension to the universe. (shrink)

This is an impressive and important book about perception in Plato’s Timaeus, but most of its readers will probably be researchers who are interested in much broader questions about the dialogue. There is nothing deficient or lacking about this treatment of perception, but this book should be put alongside Thomas Johansen’s Plato’s Natural Philosophy and Sarah Broadie’s Nature and Divinity in the sense that this is, for all intents and purposes, a monograph about the whole Timaeus, even though it is (...) pitched as being focused on perception. There are only a few topics missing, such as the nature of the cosmic receptacle and psychic diseases. Virtually everything else, including the status of Timaeus’ so-called likely story, the generation of the lower gods, and the nature of bone, is discussed at length. (shrink)