Neste artigo, faremos uma análise da noção socrática de technê, que se desdobra em dois sentidos: uma sabedoria instável, humana e crítica (uma sophia de Dédalo), e uma sabedoria estável, divina e ideal. Ambas seguem o critério racional, o que implica uma concepção da alma segundo a qual as motivações são estritamente racionais.

Between the 1960s and the 1970s, Marxism reached its maximum success in Italy, but that phase also corresponded to the crisis of the Italian Communist Party’s cultural hegemony, challenged by both the attacks coming from the New Left and innovative readings of Marx’s works. Marxist historicism, on which the Italian Communist Party had based its cultural policy after the the Second World War, consequently suffered heavy attacks. This article illuminates one of the responses to historicism’s decline, providing an account of (...) the book series La Scienza Nuova, issued by the publishing house Dedalo in Bari and edited by the communist intellectual Mario Spinella, who was able to remain loyal to his party demonstrating, at the same time, cultural autonomy. Also grounding on archival documents, the article posits that Spinella’s aim was to attract New Left readers by selecting books on topics and by authors that were in fashion in Italy and abroad, but incorporating them into a theoretical framework based on Marxist historicism, in order to preserve the latter in an evolving cultural environment. (shrink)

El mito platónico de Prometeo, con el robo del fuego a los dioses, simboliza el despegue del más apasionante reto de la Humanidad, la aventura del conocimiento. Dédalo con sus ingenios persiguió en vano la estela; y el rapto de Europa por Zeus, no en su vertiente ortodoxa, sino tal como lo representa Bayros, clausura un periplo en pos del bienestar que hoy se muestra tan esperanzador como amenazante. Cuando estamos a punto de realizar el imperativo de Francis Bacon (...) dominando el mundo natural, éste se resiste y rebela dejando al descubierto la fragilidad de la criatura humana. Piqueras como contrapunto esporádico es un testigo del pasado, un aldabonazo en la conciencia. El imperativo tecnológico resume este momento de inflexión en el que nos hallamos: un punto ¿de no retorno?, ante el que la conciencia moral zozobra y que puede marcar el sino de la humanidad doliente. Hasta aquí nos ha traído el apogeo de lo racional, hasta la crisis que todo lo impregna. Si esto es un cuento de Calleja, no acertamos a vislumbrar la moraleja. (shrink)

Plato's thought is as charming as the statues of Dedalus: it disappears into the meanders of the discourse, as soon as one proposes to establish with it a dominance relationship. The correct interpretation of Plato's thought demands the assumption of the Polis as the natural place from which it emerges, as the limitation which he proposes to surpass remounting to the Fysis and to the Being. In order to do it, it is important to catch its peculiar movement, starting from (...) the question about the being and visualizing the answer as the statement of its essence, i.e., of the eidos, and of its foundation, i.e., of Good as the proper name of Being. As it determines the being in its essence, the eidos is the measure of the whole adequacy, from the episteme to the Polis.O Pensamento de Platão tem o encanto das estátuas de Dédalo: esvai-se pelos meandros do discurso, tão logo se pretenda travar com ele uma relação de domínio. A sua correta interpretação exige que se assuma a Polis como o lugar natural no qual emerge, como a limitação que ele se propõe superar remontando à Fysis e ao Ser. Fazê-lo importa em captar o movimento que lhe é próprio, partindo da questão sobre o ente e visualizando a resposta como o enunciado de sua essência, isto é, do eidos, e de seu fundamento, isto é, do Bem como nome próprio do Ser. Determinando o ente em sua essência, o eidos é a medida de toda a adequação, da episteme à Polis. (shrink)

This essay examines a politically engaged research genre, which follows the biography of the author who founded two journals: one on mathematical models published in English (Quality and Quantity) and one on politically committed social and economic research published in Italian (Inchiesta). The research considered focuses on Italy in the 1950s, the research by Lazarsfeld in Vienna in the 1920s and in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, and post-1968 politically committed research in Italy. The analysis of such (...) politically committed types of research (all very different from one another in terms of the interpretative model of reality, the methods used and the relations with the tendering party and the people observed) allows one to understand how this kind of research can be performed with very different methods—all of which do, however, seek to modify reality on the grounds of the research results. The metaphor of the crystal and the flame presented by Italo Calvino in order to “classify facts and ideas and styles and feelings” can also be used to visualise the polarity (and the difficulty/impossibility of contact) that has always been present in sociology between two different tendencies: towards a discipline that offers the most abstract and objective interpretative model of reality possible with the use of mathematical models (the crystal), and, instead, towards a discipline in which an interpretative model of reality is central, one that produces a social change and in which the qualitative and quantitative methods utilised are at the service of this change (the flame). This polarity thus allows us to separate first and foremost all the politically committed research performed by others for different purposes (market research, research to verify some theoretical hypotheses, etc.) but the same polarity also lies within the politically committed research. We can, indeed, identify a type of politically committed research in an area that has, at one extreme, research tending towards the utmost “objectivity” and “scientific quality” of the results and where the co-ordinators try to have all the information on the subjects maintaining the greatest possible distance (the subjects must not know they are being observed); at the other extreme, there is a type of research in which the coordinator completely involves the subjects in the gathering of information that will serve to realise a piece of research whose political aims are explicitly shared. For the identification of a sufficiently articulated typology it has been important to consider five dimensions of politically committed research: (a) the characteristics of the research coordinator (his/her belonging to the type and the academic/non-academic professional status) and his/her interpretative model of reality (b) some general characteristics of the research (the tender and funding, the topic choice, the aims, the contributions to the sociological theory, the duration); (c) the research coordinator’s relations with the political actors (the intensity of the relations, the political use of the research); (d) the relations of the research co-ordinator with the research subjects; (e) the methodological choices (the basic strategies, the methods used, the use of mathematical procedures). The research that exemplifies this typology is all politically committed to the left and was realised in different times and contexts. I start by considering a kind of politically engaged research (co-research) that appeared in Italy in the 1950s; I then analyse two types of politically engaged research realised in Austria at the end of the 1920s and one in the United States in the 1950s; there then follow two kinds of research realised in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States and a further two kinds realised in Italy in the 1970s and early 1980s. In order to have other kinds of research please refer to the two Journals of which I am the editor: one is an English language journal of mathematical models (Quality and Quantity, International Journal of Methodology, founded in 1966 and published today by Kluwer of Amsterdam), and a politically engaged review (Inchiesta, founded in 1971 and still published today by Dedalo of Bari). (shrink)