The 1830s and 1840s are the formative years of modern public health in Britain, when the poor law bureaucrat Edwin Chadwick conceived his vision of public health through public works and began the campaign for the construction of the kinds of water and sewerage works that ultimately became the standard components of urban infrastructure throughout the developed world. This book first explores that vision and campaign against the backdrop of the great "condition-of-England" questions of the period, of what rights and (...) expectations working people could justifiably have in regard to political participation, food, shelter and conditions of work. It examines the ways Chadwick's sanitarianism fit the political needs of the much-hated Poor Law Commission and of Whig and Tory governments, each seeking some antidote to revolutionary Charitism. It then reviews the Chadwickians' efforts to solve the host of problems they met in trying to implement the sanitary idea: of what responsibilities central and local units of government, and private contractors, were to have; of how townspeople could be persuaded to embark on untried public technologies; of where the new public health experts were to come from; and of how elegant technical designs were to be fitted to the unique social, political and geographic circumstances of individual towns. Rejecting the view that Chadwick's program was a simple response to an obvious urban problem Professor Hamlin argues that at the time a "public health" focusing narrowly on sanitary public works represented a retreat of public medicine from involvement with the great social issues of the Industrial Revolution. In exploring the views of medical men who were critical of Chadwick, Hamlin suggests the parameters of a public health that might have been, in which concern for health and well-being becomes the foundation of a public medicine that is a principal guarantor of social justice. This book offers modern public heatlh professionals elements of a forgotten professional heritage that might be useful in responding to the bewildering range of health problems we now confront. (shrink)

Historia y elección humana van de la mano. Nuestra época ha perdido la fe incondicionada en el 'progreso' y, a la vez, en una tabla de valores cierta e incontrovertible, que si bien no ha sido nunca universalmente compartida, en cambio sí -en alguna medida al menos- prevalente sobre las otras. Es el tiempo de la espera, que de ninguna manera es resignación y descompromiso.History and human choice go together. Our age has lost unconditioned faith both in 'progress' and, at (...) the same time, in a true and undeniable set of values which, though not universally acknowledged or shared, has nonetheless enjoyed a certain recognition. It's a time for hopefulness, let alone for resignation or non comprimising. (shrink)

The essay proposes an interpretation of the myth of the cave as a passage from a digital ontology to a non-digital ontology. This passage implies a reconsideration of Parmenidean and Pythagorean ontology, for which the discovery of incommensurable magnitudes is central. In particular, it allows an exteriority to a given system to be conceptualized, in which the possibility of an exit and then of freedom lies.

Charles-Louis de Secondat, barón de La Brède y de Montesquieu, es uno de los personajes intelectuales más significativos del "siglo de las Luces". Todavía hoy, a doscientos cincuenta años de su muerte, son de gran actualidad algunas de sus fundamentales teorías y formulaciones, como el principio de la división de poderes dentro de un Estado, la concepción de la existencia de un "espíritu" característico de cada pueblo, el rechazo de la tortura y la necesidad de conmensurar las penas a los (...) delitos. La relevancia, la complejidad y la riqueza de los temas afrontados por el filósofo francés hacen comprender claramente el motivo por el que autores ilustres se han visto influidos por su pensamiento, y esto sería motivo suficiente para recopilar todos sus escritos. (shrink)

Hegel’s conception of becoming can be said to arise from his intense confrontation with the debates of his time on continuous and mathematical infinite, in which also the thesis about time and movement of Aristotle’s Physics converge. According to Hegel, mathematical infinite already includes the true infinite, which is essentially relation. Basing his insights on the Newtonian rather than on the Leibnizian theory of differential calculus, Hegel draws the idea that the quantum exists only as a ratio; as such, however, (...) the quantum sublates itself into the quality. The continuous is for Hegel the concept of this unceasing sublating of the quantity into the quality : as some of Plato’s claims show in the Parmenides, the instant is the limit of this transition into the other. The Hegelian concept of Aufhebung is this operation of “passage to limit”. In it, the process of the quantitative increasing gives rise to a new figure, to something heterogeneous compared with the previous figure, as in the case of the polygon inscribed in a circle, whose sides are multiplied to infinity until it becomes the circle itself. So understood, the becoming – as well as its metaphysical presupposition, i.e.the true infinite – is an unceasing “passage into the other”: the continuous is not a succession of homogeneous entities, but the process of the unceasing differentiation of the real. In this paper, I argue that this conception of the becoming is the presupposition of the process of liberation that, according to Hegel, is immanent to the becoming itself: if the differentiation happens at every instant, the liberation is, correspondently, possible at every instant. (shrink)

Luigi Pareyson’s concept of formativity is one of his most relevant and original concepts. In this paper I will give a short exposition of this concept in Pareyson’s Estetica and try to show how it can account, better as other object-, subject-, target- oriented theories, even of some features of contemporary art. The very relevant innovation that we can find in this concept is the shift from a concept of art as poiesis—as it is in Aristotle, namely, as a production (...) of an object—to the concept of art as praxis, that is, as an activity which involves the entire doing of the artist. As a doing that invents the form of doing, formativity appears as a kind of schematism that operates, not only without concept, as it is in Kant’s Critique of Judgement, but even without object. The thesis here suggested is that formativity can be understood as a transcendentalism of invention. (shrink)

Il libro ripercorre alcune fra le tappe fondamentali del pensiero di Gian Vincenzo Gravina, inquadrandole all' interno dei generi letterari maggiormente praticati dall' autore calabrese e facendo emergere la sua capacità di padroneggiare vari aspetti della cultura del suo tempo. Il panorama intellettuale, politico e sociale del periodo compreso fra la fine del Seicento e i primi anni del Settecento, con la sua complessità, traspare dai dialoghi e dai trattati del pensatore, per il quale si fa strada l' esigenza di (...) tornare a quei valori della tradizione classica che coincidono con il bisogno di recuperare le virtù tipiche della letteratura antica per promuovere un rinnovamento culturale, politico e civile della società. (shrink)

Infinità e dialettica dell'Infinito-finito sono i due temi su cui si concentra il conflitto filosofico che vede impegnati nella veste di protagonisti assoluti il Bruno, il Vico e lo Hegel, accompagnati dallo Spaventa che ne interpreta le focali istanze prodotte dal pensiero che tutto muove e promuove sia nello scorrere della vita dell'Universo sia di quella degli uomini, divenendo a tal punto consapevole del loro destino futuro. Esso si costruisce passando pure per il discorso, ovvero per la filologia che riconosce, (...) tuttavia, e sempre, il ruolo peculiare del pensiero che non è solo quello proprio, ma anche quello degli altri col quale puntigliosamente si confronta, per aspirare, in realtà, a conoscere la verità esaustivamente in tutte le forme da esso preconizzate. (shrink)

In the present article, the role of Gestalt concepts in clarifying the issues of perception is evaluated. Grounded in anti-atomism, Gestalt assumed organizing forces intrinsic to perception. Insofar these were identified with singularity preference, Gestalt is criticized for having failed to distinguish between perception and thought.

In the Interpretation of Dreams Freud asks how and if the dream, which is made of images, can express its connective structure, and in particular the negation. This can be made only by interpretation. This question represents the thread to examine the problem of the critical import of figurative arts, by comparing Adorno’s and Heidegger’s theories. According to Adorno, the artwork is mimesis: the capability to express negativity coincides with its autonegation, with its disappearing. For Heidegger, on the contrary, the (...) artwork is first of all a work, and interpretation is the reconstruction of its genesis, or better, the understanding of it as temporal. In the last part of the text the problem of the relationship between negation and image is tackled discussing Magritte’s painting «Ceci n’est pas une pipe»: the structure of this painting makes it a rebus, the deciphering of which carries a conceptual and interpretative work. Only this interpretation can account for the negation that it, as image, could otherwise not express. (shrink)