This article explores the link between religion and politics, religious liberty and the rights of religious minorities, by focusing on the constitutions which Italian states adopted and discarded from 1796 to 1849. It concerns questions about the ‘national character’ and the rights and duties of the citizen, and argues that – far from being ‘an outlet’ for material discontent – questions of religious identity and pluralism were integral to the Risorgimento definition of liberty. In this context, the author explores also (...) the Mazzinian vision of a democratic republic inspired by an acephalous and non-hierarchical civil religion, similar to the Unitarian Transcendentalism practiced by some of his New York admirers – a far cry from the ‘religions of politics’ inspired by Saint Simon and Auguste Comte. (shrink)

How has the concept of democracy been understood, manifested, reimagined and represented through the ages? In a work that spans 2,500 years these fundamental questions are addressed by 66 experts, each contributing their overview of a theme applied to a period in history. With the help of a broad range of case material they illustrate the physical, social and cultural contexts of democracy in Western culture from antiquity to the present. Individual volume editors ensure the cohesion of the whole, and (...) to make it as easy as possible to use, chapter themes are identical across each of the volumes. Superbly illustrated, the full six-volume set combines to present the most comprehensive and authoritative survey available on democracy throughout history. The six volumes cover: 1 - Antiquity (500 BCE-565 CE); 2 - Medieval Age (565-1450); 3 - Renaissance (1450-1650); 4 - Age of Enlightenment (1650-1800); 5 - Age of Empire (1800-1920); 6 Modern Age (1920-present) The ten themes are: Sovereignty; Liberty and the Rule of Law; The 'Common Good'; Economic and Social Democracy; Religion and the Principles of Political Obligation; Citizenship and Gender; Ethnicity, Race and Nationalism; Democratic Crises, Revolutions and Civil Resistance; International Relations; Beyond the Polis. The page extent for the pack is approximately 2016pp. Each volume opens with Notes on Contributors and an Introduction and concludes with Notes, Bibliography, and an Index. The Cultural Histories Series A Cultural History of Democracy is part of The Cultural Histories Series. Titles are available both as printed hardcover sets for libraries needing just one subject or preferring a one-off purchase and tangible reference for their shelves, or as part of a fully-searchable digital library available to institutions by annual subscription or on perpetual access (see www.bloomsburyculturalhistory.com). (shrink)

Giuseppe Mazzini - Italian patriot, humanist, and republican - was one of the most celebrated and revered political activists and thinkers of the 19th century. This volume is the first to show how his thought and image were received and transformed across Europe, the Americas, and India.

The recent 2014 Nobel Prize in chemistry honored an era of discoveries and technical advancements in the field of super‐resolution microscopy. However, the applications of diffraction‐unlimited imaging in biology have a long road ahead and persistently engage scientists with new challenges. Some of the bottlenecks that restrain the dissemination of super‐resolution techniques are tangible, and include the limited performance of affinity probes and the yet not capillary diffusion of imaging setups. Likewise, super‐resolution microscopy has introduced new paradigms in the design (...) of projects that require imaging with nanometer‐resolution and in the interpretation of biological images. Besides structural or morphological characterization, super‐resolution imaging is quickly expanding towards interaction mapping, multiple target detection and live imaging. Here we review the recent progress of biologists employing super‐resolution imaging, some pitfalls, implications and new trends, with the purpose of animating the field and spurring future developments. (shrink)

This article explores the political thought of a leading Italian intellectual after his conversion from Jacobinism to liberalism. It shows the extent to which Foscolo was abreast of the then contemporary debate on constitutional government and nation-building. Moreover, it illustrates how he combined liberal with civic humanist and republican ideas, as well as idealism and Realpolitik in his perception of the problems faced by small nations struggling to be free in an era of international ideological conflict.

A contribution to the liberalism-republicanism debate from a political historian's point of view, this essay focuses on Britain in the mid-Victorian period—arguably the golden age of modern liberalism. The first part argues that the writings and political ideas of the leading liberal thinkers were imbued with ‘neo-roman’ values, including participatory citizenship, civic virtue and concern for the common good. The second part discusses the dissemination of ‘neo-roman’ ideas among the rank and file of the Liberal party, focusing on popular celebrations (...) of the right to bear arms. The essay concludes that, despite the methodological claims of some scholars, the liberalism-republicanism debate has tended to ignore the context within which ideas and traditions were developed by their leading interpreters. Moreover, it argues that if we really are interested in the context of political thought we must go beyond traditional concerns with the ‘canonical’ texts and look at its social environment. (shrink)

Die Untersuchungen betreffen die Rezeption von kantischem Denken in der Hispanidad. Es handelt sich um Akten eines Kongresses, der 1983 an der Universitat zu Koln stattfand. Die verschiedenen Reaktionen (positive wie auch kritische) auf das kantische Denken von Autoren wie M. Nieto Serrano, J.M. Rey y Heredia, K.C.F. Krause, J. Sanz del Rio, J. Zubiri und R. Torretti werden thematisiert.".

This article aims to investigate the nature and role of linguistic “images” in Husserl’s philosophy. At first, I will explain the idea of rigorous language emerging in relevant pages of Ideas I as well as the challenges that linguistic “images” pose to it. I will then examine the nature of linguistic “images,” relying on the reflections collected in Husserliana XXIII to show their nature of intuitive-imaginative syntheses. Finally, I will focus on the role that such “images” play in phenomenologizing. Taking (...) decisive cues from Fink and Adorno, I will show the figurative essence of Husserl’s operative concepts and the productivity of “conceptual constellations” in phenomenology. The main contention of this article is that the rigor of phenomenological language essentially relies on a peculiar imaginative experience. (shrink)

1. Le fe por la palabra -- 2. Topía y Utopía -- 3. Luz en la caverna.

We present a general approach to quantified modal logics that can simulate most other approaches. The language is based on operators indexed by terms which allow to express de re modalities and to control the interaction of modalities with the first-order machinery and with non-rigid designators. The semantics is based on a primitive counterpart relation holding between n-tuples of objects inhabiting possible worlds. This allows an object to be represented by one, many, or no object in an accessible world. Moreover (...) by taking as primitive a relation between n-tuples we avoid some shortcoming of standard individual counterparts. Finally, we use cut-free labelled sequent calculi to give a proof-theoretic characterisation of the quantified extensions of each first-order definable propositional modal logic. In this way we show how to complete many axiomatically incomplete quantified modal logics. (shrink)

Recoge las bases y peculiaridades de las concepciones pedagógicas de Manuel Bartolomé Cossío, sus ideas acerca de la enseñanza y las innovaciones introducidas en el sistema educativo.

Norms conferring public or private powers, i.e., the competence to issue other norms, play a very important rôle in law. But there is no agreement among legal philosophers about the nature of such norms. There are two main groups of theories, those that regard them as a kind of norms of conduct (either commands or permissions) and those that regard them as non-reducible to other types of norms. I try to show that reductionist theories are not quite acceptable; neither the (...) command-variety (Kelsen, Alf Ross inOn Law and Justice), nor the permission-variety (von Wright, Kanger, Lindahl) provide a satisfactory account of competence norms.Among the authors who maintain that competence norms are different from (and hence not reducible to) norms of conduct are Hart, Ross inDirectives and Norms, and Searle. Ross and Searle distinguish between regulative and constitutive rules as two radically different kinds of rules and classify competence norms among constitutive rules. This distinction runs parallel to von Wright's distinction between rules that are prescriptions and determinative rules. While the first regulate actions (by commanding, prohibiting, or permitting them), determinative rules define certain concepts. To view competence norms as (partial) definitions of certain legal concepts (like those of legislator, judge, etc.) seems to open interesting perspectives and to shed light on at least one aspect of these elusive norms. (shrink)

Partial proceedings of the 17th World Congress, International Association for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy, Bologna, 1995.

Appearing in English for the first time, Schelling’s 1842 lectures develop the idea that many philosophical concepts are born of religious-mythological notions.

In the context of bounded arithmetic we consider some general replacement schemes and construct models for them. A new proof of a conservation result between and is derived.

This paper reports a psychological study of human categorization that looked at the procedures used by expert scientists when dealing with puzzling items. Five professional botanists were asked to specify a category from a set of positive and negative instances. The target category in the study was defined by a feature that was unusual, hence situations of uncertainty and puzzlement were generated. Subjects were asked to think aloud while solving the tasks, and their verbal reports were analyzed. A number of (...) problem solving strategies were identified, and subsequently integrated in a model of knowledge‐guided inductive categorization. Our model proposes that expert knowledge influences the subjects' reasoning in more complex ways than suggested by earlier investigations of scientific reasoning. As in previous studies, domain knowledge influenced our subjects' hypothesis generation and testing; but, additionally, it played a central role when subjects revised their hypotheses. (shrink)

In 1911 the Wilson cloud chamber opened new possibilities for physics pedagogy. The instrument, which visualized particles’ tracks as trails of condensed vapour, was adopted by physicists to pursue frontier research on the Compton effect, the positron and the transmutation of atomic nuclei. But as the present paper will show, Wilson's instrument did not just open up new research opportunities, but the possibility of developing a different kind of teaching. Equipped with a powerful visualization tool, some physicists–teachers employed Wilson's instrument (...) to introduce their students to a wide range of phenomena and concepts, ranging from the behaviour of clouds to Einstein's photon, the wave–particle duality and the understanding of the nucleus. This paper uses the notes, books and prototypes of these pioneering physicists–teachers to compose a pedagogical history of the Wilson cloud chamber, documenting an episode of immense ingenuity, creativity and scientific imagination. (shrink)

This article moves from the observation that one of the key characteristics of contemporary Italian fiction is a preoccupation with ethics and more specifically with the issues raised by the “ethical turn” in contemporary philosophy and theory. Current literary criticism, it is argued, has been slow to respond to the ethical dimension of these narratives whose innovative and important cultural contribution has yet to be fully appreciated. It is therefore necessary to develop a keener sensitivity to the ethical discourses developed (...) in these literary texts, but this can only be achieved by first confronting some fundamental questions about the relationship between ethics and literature today. The answers to these questions make it possible to elaborate an initial conceptual framework that can re-orient reading and enable the critic to respond adequately to the ethical issues raised in and by the narrative. Accordingly, in this article the author proposes to explore from a theoretical perspective the relationship between ethics and literature in the context of the historical and philosophical predicaments of contemporary society. The discussion is divided into two parts: the first is devoted to an exploration of contemporary ethical thinking, and the second on the contribution that literature can make to that thinking. In the first part, the author proposes an approach to ethics based on the virtue tradition which, since Aristotle, has defined ethics as the search for "the good life." This tradition, however, is transformed through an engagement with the work of Gilles Deleuze and Immanuel Levinas. From Deleuze the author draws the idea that the good life is one devoted to pursuing human plenitude through the multiplication of connections and intensities. From Levinas, on the other hand, emerges a powerfully haunting description of an ethical life marked by absolute responsibility for and obligation to the other. These two seemingly opposed views are not construed as irreconcilable and contradictory but rather as vectors which keep opposing tensions in check and ultimately define a necessary negotiation between the desire for human plenitude and the acknowledgement of responsibility for other human and non human life. Ultimately my argument is that such tensions establish the ethical terrain in which contemporary narratives seek to intervene. In the second part of the article, the nature and possibilities of such an intervention are explored through six theses which provocatively articulate the relationship between literature and ethics. The cornerstone thesis is that literature is an encounter. Each subsequent thesis endeavours to develop this initial assertion and explore its consequences. The theses are accompanied by a gloss which unfolds its meaning and significance: the answers that the given thesis provides but also the questions that it raises. Together, the theses provide a heuristic framework for a literary criticism sensitive to ethical issues and therefore capable of grappling with the important cultural work carried out in fictions that have struggled to receive the recognition they deserve. (shrink)